Transcribed from the 1908 Kegan Paul, Trench, Trubner & Co. edition by David Price, email ccx074@pglaf.org AUCASSIN AND NICOLETTE TRANSLATED FROM THE OLD FRENCH BY FRANCIS WILLIAM BOURDILLON LONDON KEGAN PAUL, TRENCH, TRUBNER & CO. LTD. DRYDEN HOUSE, GERRARD STREET, W. 1908 _All rights reserved_ INTRODUCTION The story of Love, that simple theme with variations _ad libitum_, _ad infinitum_, is never old, never stale, never out-of-date. And as we sometimes seek rest from the brilliant audacities and complex passions of Wagner or Tschaikowsky in the tender simplicity of some ancient English air, so we occasionally turn with relief from the wit and insight and subtlety of our modern novelists to the old uncomplicated tales of faerie or romance, and find them after all more moving, more tender, even more real, than all the laboured realism of these photographic days. And here before us is of all pretty love-stories perhaps the prettiest. Idyllic as Daphnis and Chloe, romantic as Romeo and Juliet, tender as Undine, remote as Cupid and Psyche, yet with perpetual touches of actual life, and words that raise pictures; and lightened all through with a dainty playfulness, as if Ariel himself had hovered near all the time of its writing, and Puck now and again shot a whisper of suggestion. Yet it is only of late years that the charm of this story has been truly appreciated. Composed probably in Northern France, about the close of the twelfth century,--the time of our own Angevin kings and the most brilliant period of Old-French literature,--it has survived only in a single manuscript of later date, where it is found hidden among a number of tales in verse less pleasing in subject and far less delightful in form. There it had lain unknown till discovered by M. de Sainte-Palaye, and printed by him in modernised French in 1752, one hundred and fifty years ago. There is no space here to follow its fortunes since. Even after this revival it was not till more than one hundred years later that it began to attain to any wide recognition. And in England this recognition has been mainly due to Mr Pater's delightful essay in his early work "Studies in the History of the Renaissance." Since the publication of this book in 1873, the story of Aucassin and Nicolette has had an ever-growing train of admirers both in England and America, and various translations have appeared on both sides of the Atlantic. It has also been translated into several other European languages, besides versions in modern French.