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Updated: June 4, 2025
says the French Roman: and in the old fabliaux also, the scene of Aucassin and Nicolette is laid in this place. These are, I believe, but a small portion of the claims which Beaucaire possesses to chivalrous celebrity, and its very name is in a manner connected with knights and ladies, tourneys and pageants. There is something in its appearance also which does not belie these associations, although it was crowded with farmers and market people at the time of our arrival: and those too of the vulgar bettermost sort, which is the most hopelessly unchivalrous. The castle stands detached from the town, on as bold and perpendicular a cliff as any romance writer could wish, and overlooking one of the broadest and most rapid reaches of the Rhone; an extensive green meadow planted with trees, and large enough for a tournament on the most extensive scale, or another Champ du Drap d'Or, divides the steep side of this rock from the river; and on the land side it is backed by another cliff garnished with as many windmills as Don Quixote himself could have desired. We crossed the Rhone on a bridge of boats to a long narrow island, from whence the view on both sides is striking. Beaucaire, with the accompaniments I have just described, and Tarascon, flanked by the large ancient castle of the counts of Provence, front each other on the opposite banks of the Rhone, which rushes and thunders on both sides of the isle, making the cables by which the floating bridge is lashed, creak most fearfully every moment. From this point I made a drawing of Tarascon in defiance of a violent wind, which forced me to place my paper on the lee side of a stranded boat, and to sketch in the attitude of a plasterer white-washing a ceiling. Another bridge of boats conducted us to Tarascon; where we walked out while the horses were baiting, the whole inn being in the same confusion from market people as Beaucaire itself, and not seeming of the most comfortable description. Being driven by a heavy scud of rain into a shoemaker's shop, we found a civil and intelligent guide in his son, from whom, however, we could not ascertain that there was any thing worthy of notice in this populous place, except the castle. We passed the Maison de Charité, in front of which is a new cross lately erected by the Mission, on the scale of that at Avignon, and profusely gilt and ornamented. The same agency also has lately re-established an Ursuline convent of fifty-two nuns in this place. The cathedral is old and mean, and apparently under no very strict regulations, for an old woman was selling cakes in the aisle close to one of the chapels. We went into a vault beneath to see a marble statue of St. Martha, which has merit in itself, and by the light of a single wax candle, had a striking effect: the great admiration, however, in which it is held here may chiefly arise from an opinion of its miraculous powers. "Elle devenoit invisible pendant la Revolution," whispered our young Crispin. "Oui, elle étoit cachée, voil
The Zeta Alpha Masque of 1913, a charming dramatization in verse of an old Hindu legend by Elizabeth McClellan of the class of 1913, was one of the notable events of Commencement time, a pageant of poetic beauty and oriental dignity; and in 1915 Florence Wilkinson Evans's adaptation of the lovely old poem "Aucassin and Nicolette", was given for the second time.
Aucassin in a rage releases the Count of Vallence, and the Count of Beaucaire imprisons his son in a tower of the castle. One moonlight night, when her nurse is asleep, Nicolette ties the bedclothes together and lets herself down out of the window, escapes from the town, and goes under the castle, where she hears Aucassin lamenting in his prison. She speaks to him and he replies.
I find in it not a little of the strange, primeval quality that makes me think of "Aucassin and Nicolette." For it is not so much a novel as an historical idyl, not to be read without a persisting suffusion of sympathy and never to be remembered without a recurring tenderness. Remembered, did I say? It is unforgettable.
Meanwhile, Nicolette had slipped from the window of her prison chamber, and let herself down into the garden, where she heard the song of the nightingales.
As yet, this could not be decided. A grave symptom was that they had caused a swoon, and that people do not always recover from such swoons. Moreover, the wounded man had been exhausted by hemorrhage. From the waist down, the barricade had protected the lower part of the body from injury. Basque and Nicolette tore up linen and prepared bandages; Nicolette sewed them, Basque rolled them.
But at first they took Nicolette for a fee, such a beauty shone so brightly from her, and lit up all the forest. Aucassin they banter; and indeed the free talk of the peasants to their lord's son in that feudal age sounds curiously, and may well make us reconsider our notions of early feudalism.
What is poetical, if not the "Song of Roland," the only true national epic since Homer? What is frank, natural verse, if not that of the old Pastourelles? Where is there naivete of narrative and unconscious charm, if not in Aucassin et Nicolette?
At the head of each scrap of verse comes the rubric "Now is to be sung," and the prose passages are headed, "Now is to be said." Aucassin was the son of the Count of Beaucaire. He was fair of face, with light curled hair and grey eyes. Now there was a viscount in the town who had bought of the Saracens a little maid, and he taught her the Christian faith, and had her baptised and called Nicolette.
Aucassin et Nicolette, which was probably written in Northern France towards the end of the twelfth century, is above all the descendant of the stories in the Acta Sanctorum and elsewhere. It embodied their spirit and carried it forward, uniting their delicate feeling for chastity and purity with the ideal of monogamic love.
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