of spirit.  But that affrights him [87] not:  capons and game, good wine and the dainties of the earth console him and cheer his heart.  Then he prays to God and says ’I am poor and in misery.’  Were God to answer him He would say, ‘thou liest!’” To illustrate the degeneracy of the age, Peire relates a fable, perhaps the only instance of this literary form among the troubadours, upon the theme that if all the world were mad, the one sane man would be in a lunatic asylum:  “there was a certain town, I know not where, upon which a rain fell of such a nature that all the inhabitants upon whom it fell, lost their reason.  All lost their reason except one, who escaped because he was asleep in his house when the rain came.  When he awoke, he rose:  the rain had ceased, and he went out among the people who were all committing follies.  One was clothed, another naked, another was spitting at the sky:  some were throwing sticks and stones, tearing their coats, striking and pushing...  The sane man was deeply surprised and saw that they were mad; nor could he find a single man in his senses.  Yet greater was their surprise at him, and as they saw that he did not follow their example, they concluded that he had lost his senses....  So one strikes him in front, another behind; he is dashed to the ground and trampled under foot... at length he flees to his house covered with mud, bruised [88] and half dead and thankful for his escape”:  The mad town, says Peire Cardenal, is the present world:  the highest form of intelligence is the love and fear of God, but this has been replaced by greed, pride and malice; consequently the “sense of God” seems madness to the world and he who refuses to follow the “sense of the world” is treated as a madman.

Peire Cardenal is thus by temperament a moral preacher; he is not merely critical of errors, but has also a positive faith to propound.  He is not an opponent of the papacy as an institution:  the confession of faith which he utters in one of his sirventes shows that he would have been perfectly satisfied with the Roman ecclesiastical and doctrinal system, had it been properly worked.  In this respect he differs from a contemporary troubadour, Guillem Figueira, whose violent satire against Rome shows him as opposed to the whole system from the papacy downwards.  He was a native of Toulouse and migrated to Lombardy and to the court of Frederick II. when the crusade drove him from his home.  “I wonder not, Rome, that men go astray, for thou hast cast the world into strife and misery; virtue and good works die and are buried because of thee, treacherous Rome, thou guiding-star, thou root and branch of all iniquity...  Greed blindeth thy eyes, and too close dost thou shear thy [89] sheep... thou forgivest sins for money, thou loadest thyself with a shameful burden.  Rome, we know of a truth that with the bait of false forgiveness, thou hast snared in misery the nobility of France, the people of Paris and the noble King