Aucassins, li biax, li blons,
 Li gentix, It amorous,
 Est issous del gaut parfont,
 Entre ses bras ses amors
 Devant lui sor son arcon. 
 Les ex li baise et le front,
 Et le bouce et le menton. 
 Elle l’a mis a raison. 
 “Aucassins, biax amis dox,
 “En quel tere en irons nous?”
 “Douce amie, que sai jou? 
 “Moi ne caut u nous aillons,
 “En forest u en destor
 “Mais que je soie aveuc vous.” 
 Passent les vaus et les mons,
 Et les viles et les bors
 A la mer vinrent au jor,
 Si descendent u sablon
 Les le rivage.

Aucassins, the brave, the fair,
 Courteous knight and gentle lover,
 From the forest dense came forth;
 In his arms his love he bore
 On his saddle-bow before;
 Her eyes he kisses and her mouth,
 And her forehead and her chin. 
 She brings him back to earth again: 
 “Aucassins, my love, my own,
 “To what country shall we turn?”
 “Dearest angel, what say you? 
 “I care nothing where we go,
 “In the forest or outside,
 “While you on my saddle ride.” 
 So they pass by hill and dale,
 And the city, and the town,
 Till they reach the morning pale,
 And on sea-sands set them down,
 Hard by the shore.

There we will leave them, for their further adventures have not much to do with our matter.  Like all the romans, or nearly all, “Aucassins” is singularly pure and refined.  Apparently the ladies of courteous love frowned on coarseness and allowed no licence.  Their power must have been great, for the best romans are as free from grossness as the “Chanson de Roland” itself, or the church glass, or the illuminations in the manuscripts; and as long as the power of the Church ruled good society, this decency continued.  As far as women were concerned, they seem always to have been more clean than the men, except when men painted them in colours which men liked best.

Perhaps society was actually cleaner in the thirteenth century than in the sixteenth, as Saint Louis was more decent than Francis I, and as the bath was habitual in the twelfth century and exceptional at the Renaissance.  The rule held good for the bourgeoisie as well as among the dames cortoises.  Christian and Thibaut, “Aucassins” and the “Roman de la Rose,” may have expressed only the tastes of high-born ladies, but other poems were avowedly bourgeois, and among the bourgeois poets none was better than Adam de la Halle.  Adam wrote also for the court, or at least for Robert of Artois, Saint Louis’s nephew, whom he followed to Naples in 1284, but his poetry was as little aristocratic as poetry could well be, and most of it was cynically—­almost defiantly—­middle-class, as though the weavers of Arras were his only audience, and recognized him and the objects of his satire in every verse.  The bitter personalities do not concern us, but, at Naples, to amuse Robert of Artois and his court, Adam composed the first of French comic operas, which had an immense success, and, as a pastoral poem, has it still.  The Idyll of Arras was a singular contrast to the Idyll of Beaucaire, but the social value was the same in both; Robin and Marion were a pendant to Aucassins and Nicolette; Robin was almost a burlesque on Aucassins, while Marion was a Northern, energetic, intelligent, pastoral Nicolette.