“‘Sire, they ask twenty sols for the price of it, and I’ve not one farthing to the good.’ “‘Now look,’ said Aucassin; ‘here is the money in my purse; take it and pay the fine.’ “‘Sire, many thanks. And may you find the thing you go a-seeking----’” Were I writing in French, I should make no apology for this long quotation; in French the poem of Aucassin is little known beyond the narrow circle of Romance philologists. _Habent sua fata libelli._ In England the magic touch of a man of genius has rested for one moment on this mediæval page, leaving it glorious and public. Of late, those gentlemen of learned leisure, who once translated Horace, then Dante, have divided their activity between the Rubaiyàt of Omar Khayyam and this same quaint _chante-fable_ of Aucassin and Nicolette, of which there are several excellent English versions. But let the reader consider the passage we have roughly and literally rendered from Suchier’s edition, not as a literary exercise, but as a plain statement of fact: a portrait of the French peasant, grotesquely faithful, and even to-day a speaking likeness. Observe the shock of black curling hair, the large nose, the broad jowl, the lips thick and ruddy, the stalwart frame; just such may be seen at any fair in Southern or Central France. Doubtless the anonymous author did not draw from life; he lived in an age of convention, and simply took the canon of ugliness; since, to him and his contemporaries, beauty resided only in a tender fairness, slenderness to the point of tenuity, long narrow eyes, slim lips, a neat straight nose, and a delicate pallor flushed with pink. But this is merely removing the picture from reality by one degree. To the _cantor’s_ world of the Middle Ages, the common was unclean, the vulgar ugly, the popular type a thing of repulsion. They confused the idea of comeliness and the idea of race. They admired only the rare. And this peasant had perforce to be all that our Prince Charming so obviously was not--swarthy, squat, red-lipped, hard-featured, rude, and a bit of a poltroon--so that he becomes a living image of his fellows employed in ploughing the glebe or hoeing the vineyard.