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Updated: May 19, 2025
Although the situation is frequently developed with resource and invention on the part of the individual poet, the general type is rigidly fixed. The narrator, who is a minstrel and usually a knight, while riding along meets a shepherd-girl, to whom he pays his court with varying success. This is the simple framework on which the majority are composed.
In Berry and in Anjou, when a young girl marries, her family, or that of the husband, must give her a purse, in which they place, according to their means, twelve pieces, or twelve dozen pieces, or twelve hundred pieces of gold. The poorest shepherd-girl never marries without her dozen, be it only a dozen coppers.
When the thunders of universal France, as even yet may happen, shall proclaim the grandeur of the poor shepherd-girl that gave up all for her country thy ear, young shepherd-girl, will have been deaf for five centuries.
What is to be thought of the poor shepherd-girl from the hills and forests of Lorraine, that like the Hebrew shepherd-boy from the hills and forests of Judea rose suddenly out of the quiet, out of the safety, out of the religious inspiration, rooted in deep pastoral solitudes, to a station in the van of armies, and to the more perilous station at the right hand of kings?
The description in Teverino of Madeleine, the bird-charmer, kneeling at prayer in the rude mountain chapel, or outside on the rocks, exercising her natural magic over her feathered friends; in Jeanne, of the shepherd-girl discovered asleep on the Druidical stones; the noon-day rest of the rustic fishing-party in Valentine Benedict seated on the felled ash-tree that bridges the stream, Athenaïs gathering field-flowers on the banks, Louise flinging leaves into the current, Valentine reclining dreamily among the tall river-reeds, are a few examples taken at random, which it would be easy to multiply ad infinitum.
The Prologue is perhaps a trifle too long, but serves admirably to give the tragic keynote, by picturing the shepherd-girl of Dom Remi leading a life apart from that of her family, given to strange brooding, and at last receiving the sign from Heaven, which she prophetically feels to be the call of death.
Who taught the shepherd-girl to do these marvels she who could not read, and had had no opportunity to study the complex arts of war? I do not know any way to solve such a baffling riddle as that, there being no precedent for it, nothing in history to compare it with and examine it by.
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