si s’en ala aval le gardin”; she raised her skirts with one hand in front and the other behind, for the dew which she saw heavy on the grass, and went off down the garden, to the tower where Aucassins was locked up, and sang to him through a crack in the masonry, and gave him a lock of her hair, and they talked till the friendly night-watch came by and warned her by a sweetly-sung chant, that she had better escape.  So she bade farewell to Aucassins, and went on to a breach in the city wall, and she looked through it down into the fosse which was very deep and very steep.  So she sang to herself—­

Peres rois de maeste
 Or ne sai quel part aler. 
 Se je vois u gaut rame
 Ja me mengeront li le
 Li lions et li sengler
 Dont il i a a plente.

Father, King of Majesty! 
 Now I know not where to flee. 
 If I seek the forest free,
 Then the lions will eat me,
 Wolves and wild boars terribly,
 Of which plenty there there be.

The lions were a touch of poetic licence, even for Beaucaire, but the wolves and wild boars were real enough; yet Nicolette feared even them less than she feared the Count, so she slid down what her audience well knew to be a most dangerous and difficult descent, and reached the bottom with many wounds in her hands and feet, “et san en sali bien en xii lius”; so that blood was drawn in a dozen places, and then she climbed up the other side, and went off bravely into the depths of the forest; an uncanny thing to do by night, as you can still see.

Then followed a pastoral, which might be taken from the works of another poet of the same period, whose acquaintance no one can neglect to make—­Adam de la Halle, a Picard, of Arras.  Adam lived, it is true, fifty years later than the date imagined for Aucassins, but his shepherds and shepherdesses are not so much like, as identical with, those of the Southern poet, and all have so singular an air of life that the conventional courteous knight fades out beside them.  The poet, whether bourgeois, professional, noble, or clerical, never much loved the peasant, and the peasant never much loved him, or any one else.  The peasant was a class by himself, and his trait, as a class, was suspicion of everybody and all things, whether material, social, or divine.  Naturally he detested his lord, whether temporal or spiritual, because the seigneur and the priest took his earnings, but he was never servile, though a serf; he was far from civil; he was commonly gross.  He was cruel, but not more so than his betters; and his morals were no worse.  The object of oppression on all sides,—­the invariable victim, whoever else might escape,—­the French peasant, as a class, held his own—­and more.  In fact, he succeeded in plundering Church, Crown, nobility, and bourgeoisie, and was the only class in French history that rose steadily in power and well-being, from the time of the crusades to the present day, whatever his occasional suffering may have been;