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The piece was probably intended to be recited by a company of trained performers, many of whom, at least for the lesser parts, were probably children. The musical notes of part of the songs have been preserved; and some of the details are so descriptive that they suggested to M. Fauriel the notion that the words had been accompanied throughout by dramatic action.
"The Northmen," says M. Fauriel, "descended from the north to the south by a sort of natural gradation or ladder. The Scheldt was the first river by the mouth of which they penetrated inland; the Seine was the second; the Loire the third.
Guizot, Cousin, Ampere, Fauriel, Mignet, Lamartine, all the great men of the middle century had talked there; not, in general, the poets and the artists, but the politicians, the historians, and the savants.
"There would be nothing untruthlike," says that scrupulous authority, M. Fauriel, "in putting the whole number of combatants at three hundred thousand; and there is nothing to show that either of the two armies was much less numerous than the other."
"The Northmen," says Fauriel, "descended from the north to the south by a sort of natural gradation or ladder. The Scheldt was the first river by the mouth of which they penetrated inland; the Seine was the second; the Loire the third.
The King of the Franks treated his powerful vassal well; and Duke Lupus swore to him afresh, "or for the first time," says M. Fauriel, "submission and fidelity; but the event soon proved that it was not without umbrage or without all the feelings of a true son of Waifre that he saw the Franks and the son of Pépin so close to him." The aggressive campaign was an easy and a brilliant one.
One such version, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he detected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a unique manuscript, in the national library of Paris; and there were reasons which made him divine for it a still more ancient ancestry, traces in it of an Arabian origin, as in a leaf lost out of some early Arabian Nights.* The little book loses none of its interest through the criticism which finds in it only a traditional subject, handed on by one people to another; for after passing thus from hand to hand, its outline is still clear, its surface untarnished; and, like many other stories, books, literary and artistic conceptions of the middle age, it has come to have in this way a sort of personal history, almost as full of risk and adventure as that of its own heroes.
"They arrived under his guidance," says Fauriel, "they laid siege to it, took it and plundered it, not halfwise, not hastily, as folks who feared to be surprised, but leisurely, with all security, by virtue of a treaty of alliance with one of the kings of the country.
"There was an important point," says M. Fauriel, "in respect of which the position of Charles Martel's sons turned out to be pretty nearly the same as that of their father: it was touching the necessity of assigning to warriors a portion of the ecclesiastical revenues.
"There was an important point," says M. Fauriel, "in respect of which the position of Charles Martel's sons turned out to be pretty nearly the same as that of their father: it was touching the necessity of assigning warriors a portion of the ecclesiastical revenues.
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