Aucassin and Nicolette

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Translated by Francis William Bourdillon
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Title: Aucassin and Nicolette
translated from the Old French
Author: Anonymous
Release Date: October 28, 2007 [eBook #23227]
Language: English
Character set encoding: ISO-646-US (US-ASCII)
***START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE***
Transcribed from the 1908 Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. edition
by David Price, email [email protected]
AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE
TRANSLATED FROM THE OLD FRENCH
BY
FRANCIS WILLIAM BOURDILLON
LONDON
KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD.
DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W.
1908

_All rights reserved_
INTRODUCTION
The story of Love, that simple theme with variations _ad libitum_, _ad
infinitum_, is never old, never stale, never out-of-date. And as we
sometimes seek rest from the brilliant audacities and complex passions
of Wagner or Tschaikowsky in the tender simplicity of some ancient
English air, so we occasionally turn with relief from the wit and insight
and subtlety of our modern novelists to the old uncomplicated tales of
faerie or romance, and find them after all more moving, more tender,
even more real, than all the laboured realism of these photographic
days. And here before us is of all pretty love-stories perhaps the
prettiest. Idyllic as Daphnis and Chloe, romantic as Romeo and Juliet,
tender as Undine, remote as Cupid and Psyche, yet with perpetual
touches of actual life, and words that raise pictures; and lightened all
through with a dainty playfulness, as if Ariel himself had hovered near
all the time of its writing, and Puck now and again shot a whisper of
suggestion.
Yet it is only of late years that the charm of this story has been truly
appreciated. Composed probably in Northern France, about the close of
the twelfth century,--the time of our own Angevin kings and the most
brilliant period of Old-French literature,--it has survived only in a
single manuscript of later date, where it is found hidden among a
number of tales in verse less pleasing in subject and far less delightful
in form. There it had lain unknown till discovered by M. de
Sainte-Palaye, and printed by him in modernised French in 1752, one
hundred and fifty years ago. There is no space here to follow its
fortunes since. Even after this revival it was not till more than one
hundred years later that it began to attain to any wide recognition. And
in England this recognition has been mainly due to Mr Pater's
delightful essay in his early work "Studies in the History of the
Renaissance." Since the publication of this book in 1873, the story of
Aucassin and Nicolette has had an ever-growing train of admirers both
in England and America, and various translations have appeared on
both sides of the Atlantic. It has also been translated into several other

European languages, besides versions in modern French.
The story, so far as the simple old-world plot is concerned, is very
probably not the original invention of whoever gave it this particular
form, any more than were the plots of Shakespeare's plays of his own
devising. It seems likely that in origin it is Arabian or Moorish, and its
birthplace not Provence but Spain. Possibly it sprung, as so much of the
best poetry and story has sprung, from the touching of two races, and
the part friction part fusion of two religions, in this case of the Moor
and the Christian. There was in 1019 a Moorish king of Cordova
named Alcazin. Turn this name into French and we have Aucassin. And
to reverse the roles of Christian and heathen is a very usual device for a
story-teller transplanting a story from another country to his own.
Though the scene is nominally laid in Provence there are a good many
signs of a Spanish origin in the places mentioned. By Carthage is meant,
not the city of Dido, but Carthagena; and thus the husband devised for
Nicolette is "one of the greatest kings in all Spain." Valence again
might originally have been not the Valence on the Rhone, but Valence
le grand, or Valentia. And it is curious to observe that Beaucaire is
closely connected with Tarascon--a bridge across the Rhone unites
them--and that this latter name nearly resembles Tarragona, a place
which in other French romances is actually called Terrascoigne. The
shipwreck which in the story takes place, impossibly, at Beaucaire,
may have originally happened, quite naturally, at Tarragona. Even the
nonsensename, Torelore, might easily have had its rise in Torello.
Again, though it