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Updated: June 3, 2025
Of this spirit Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most famous expression: it is the answer Aucassin gives when he is threatened with the pains of hell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affection and the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble company of aged priests, "clinging day and night to the chapel altars," barefoot or in patched sandals.
"Star that I from far behold That the moon draws to her fold, Nicolette with thee doth dwell, My sweet love with locks of gold," sings Aucassin. "And when Nicolette heard Aucassin, right so came she unto him, and passed within the lodge, and cast her arms about his neck and kissed and embraced him: "Fair sweet friend, welcome be thou!" "And thou, fair sweet love, be thou welcome!"
Then said the Count of Beaucaire to his son Aucassin that he should go to battle and win his spurs and be dubbed a knight. Aucassin replied that he had no wish to be a knight, unless his father would give him Nicolette "ma douce mie" to wife. The count is indignant.
Ever since the days of Aucassin, indeed, who praised hell as the place whither were bound the men of fashion and the good scholars and the courteous fair ladies, youth has taken a strange, heretical delight in hell and damnation. Mr. Kipling offered new meats to the old taste. Gentlemen-rankers, out on the spree, Damned from here to eternity, began to wear halos in the undergraduate imagination.
There the story should end, in a dream of a summer's night. But the old minstrel did not end it so, or some one has continued his work with a heavier hand. Aucassin rides, he cares not whither, if he has but his love with him. And they come to a fantastic land of burlesque, such as Pantagruel's crew touched at many a time.
*Recently, Aucassin and Nicolette has been edited and translated into English, with much graceful scholarship, by Mr. F. W. Bourdillon. More recently still we have had a translation a poet's translation from the ingenious and versatile pen of Mr. Andrew Lang.
She pressed herself against one of the pillars, wrapped herself closely in her mantle, and putting her face to a chink of the tower, which was old and ruined, she heard Aucassin crying bitterly within, and when she had listened awhile she began to speak."
The forest, also, more bleak and austere, where the four outlawed sons of Aymon live upon roots and wild animals, where they build their castle by the Meuse. Further, and most lovely of all, the forest in which Nicolette makes herself a hut of branches, bracken, and flowers, through which the stars peep down on her whiteness as she dreams of her Lord Aucassin.
Then she came where Aucassin was lamenting in his cell, and she whispered to him how she was fleeing for her life. And he answered that without her he must die; and then this foolish pair, in the very mouth of peril, must needs begin a war of words as to which loved the other best! "Nay, fair sweet friend," saith Aucassin, "it may not be that thou lovest me more than I love thee.
In this Dante is but the central expression and type of experiences known well enough to the initiated, in that passionate age. Aucassin represents this ideal intensity of passion Aucassin, li biax, li blons, Li gentix, li amorous;
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