The Project Gutenberg eBook, Aucassin and Nicolette, by Anonymous,
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 ccx074@pglaf.org

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infinitum_, is never old, never stale, never out-of-date.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