Tierce. And going in alone to the children to weep over them, he found
them at play in the bed; only, in the place of the sword-cuts about
their throats was as it were a thread of crimson. And he took them in
his arms and carried them to his wife and said, Rejoice greatly, for thy
children whom I had slain by the commandment of the angel are alive, and
by their blood is Amis healed."

There, as I said, is the strength of the old French story. For the
Renaissance has not only the sweetness which it derives from the
classical world, but also that curious strength of which there are great
resources in the true middle age. And as I have illustrated the early
strength of the Renaissance by the story of Amis and Amile, a story
which comes from the North, in which even a certain racy Teutonic
flavour is perceptible, so I shall illustrate that other element of its
early sweetness, a languid excess of sweetness even, by another story
printed in the same volume of the Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, and of
about the same date, a story which comes, characteristically, from the
South, and connects itself with the literature of Provence.

The central love-poetry of Provence, the poetry of the Tenson and the
Aubade, of Bernard de Ventadour and Pierre Vidal, is poetry for the few,
for the elect and peculiar people of the kingdom of sentiment. But below
this intenser poetry there was probably a wide range of literature, less
serious and elevated, reaching, by lightness of form and comparative
homeliness of interest, an audience which the concentrated passion of
those higher lyrics left untouched. This literature has long since
perished, or lives only in later French or Italian versions. One such
version, the only representative of its species, M. Fauriel thought he
detected in the story of Aucassin and Nicolette, written in the French
of the latter half of the thirteenth century, and preserved in a unique