cording to all accounts, William was very
successful in this gallant undertaking. It was the troubadour's
business, openly avowed, to "deceive the ladies," and among a people so
susceptible as those of Provence many must have been the domestic
tragedies brought on by these erotic knights-errant.

When love making, or the writing of love songs, becomes a profession one
need not be surprised to find that there is a great deal of pure
conventionality. The love of beauty is not supreme in all hearts, even
in those of poets, and so the love poetry of the troubadours is as
artificial, as overstrained and oversweetened as a panegyric of an
Elizabethan poet upon that very questionable beauty of the "vestal
throned in the west." What was the actual standard of beauty among the
ladies of Provence is hard to determine, for they are all much the same
in the songs of the troubadours. The lady has skin whiter than milk,
purer than the driven snow, of tint more delicate than the pearl. Upon
her cheeks the roses vie with the lilies, the delicate color mounting at
the sound of her praises and melting away in danger or distress. A
wealth of flaxen hair, of silky texture, crowns her head, and a pair of
soft blue eyes gaze languishingly upon the lover; and when they close,
the sun is gone from the face of nature, so dark does the world seem to
him. But when she walks abroad in smiling beauty, the very birds stop
their own love making to chant of her loveliness, and the flowers turn
to look at her. With all this delicacy of physical beauty goes a
constitution as delicate, for she faints at the news of disaster or
danger to her troubadour. When the monkish chroniclers are so very cold
in their descriptions of personal charms, we are left to the poets. It
may be, then, that, in troubadour eyes at least, Eleanor herself was of
the type we have described.

It was from a society formed of such elements, and from the very home of
music and poetry, that the young Queen of France came to Paris, at that
time no doubt a very dismal place, inhabited by people who, however
superior as Christians, must have seemed to her uncultured barbarians.
The details of her life during the first ten or fifteen years after her
marriage are obscure, and certainly of little historic interest. We can
feel sure only that her union with Louis VII. must have been distinctly
and increasingly irksome to both parties. With the best will in the
world, historians can say no m