[45] succeeded in bringing him to Tripoli, to an inn, as one dead.  And it was told to the countess, and she came to him, to his bed, and took him in her arms; and he knew that she was the countess, and recovering his senses, he praised God and gave thanks that his life had been sustained until he had seen her; and then he died in the lady’s arms.  And she gave him honourable burial in the house of the Temple, and then, on that day, she took the veil for the grief that she had for him and for his death.”  Jaufre’s poems contain many references to a “distant love” which he will never see, “for his destiny is to love without being loved.”  Those critics who accept the truth of the story regard Melisanda, daughter of Raimon I., Count of Tripoli, as the heroine; but the biography must be used with great caution as a historical source, and the mention of the house of the order of Templars in which Jaufre is said to have been buried raises a difficulty; it was erected in 1118, and in the year 1200 the County of Tripoli was merged in that of Antioch; of the Rudels of Blaya, historically known to us, there is none who falls reasonably within these dates.  The probability is that the constant references in Jaufre’s poems to an unknown distant love, and the fact of his crusading expedition to the Holy Land, formed in conjunction the nucleus of the [46] legend which grew round his name, and which is known to all readers of Carducci, Uhland and Heine.

Contemporary with Jaufre Rudel was Bernard de Ventadour, one of the greatest names in Provencal poetry.  According to the biography, which betrays its untrustworthiness by contradicting the facts of history, Bernard was the son of the furnace stoker at the castle of Ventadour, under the Viscount Ebles II., himself a troubadour and a patron of troubadours.  It was from the viscount that Bernard received instruction in the troubadours’ art, and to his patron’s interest in his talents he doubtless owed the opportunities which he enjoyed of learning to read and write, and of making acquaintance with such Latin authors as were currently read, or with the anthologies and books of “sentences” then used for instruction in Latin.  He soon outstripped his patron, to whose wife, Agnes de Montlucon, his early poems were addressed.  His relations with the lady and with his patron were disturbed by the lauzengiers, the slanderers, the envious, and the backbiters of whom troubadours constantly complain, and he was obliged to leave Ventadour.  He went to the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the granddaughter of the first troubadour, Guillaume IX. of Poitiers, who by tradition and temperament was a patroness of troubadours, many of whom sang her praises.  She had [47] been divorced from Louis VII. of France in 1152, and married Henry, Duke of Normandy, afterwards King of England in the same year.  There Bernard may have remained until 1154, in which year Eleanor went to England as Queen.  Whether Bernard followed