and the courts decided such questions as whether a lover could love two ladies at the same time, whether lovers or married couples were the more affectionate, whether love was compatible with avarice, and the like. [21] A special poetical form which was popular among the troubadours may have given rise to the legend. This was the _tenso_,[11] in which one troubadour propounded a problem of love in an opening stanza and his opponent or interlocutor gave his view in a second stanza, which preserved the metre and rime-scheme of the first. The propounder then replied, and if, as generally, neither would give way, a proposal was made to send the problem to a troubadour-patron or to a lady for settlement, a proposal which came to be a regular formula for concluding the contest. Raynouard quotes the conclusion of a _tenso_ given by Nostradamus in which one of the interlocutors says, "I shall overcome you if the court is loyal: I will send the _tenso_ to Pierrefeu, where the fair lady holds her court of instruction." The "court" here in question was a social and not a judicial court. Had any such institution as a judicial "court of love" ever been an integral part of Provençal custom, it is scarcely conceivable that we should be informed of its existence only by a few vague and scattered allusions in the large body of Provençal literature. For these reasons the theory that such an institution existed has been generally rejected by all scholars of repute. CHAPTER III [22] TECHNIQUE Provençal literature contains examples of almost every poetical _genre_. Epic poetry is represented by Girart of Roussillon,[12] a story of long struggles between Charles Martel and one of his barons, by the Roman de Jaufre, the adventures of a knight of the Round Table, by Flamenca, a love story which provides an admirable picture of the manners and customs of the time, and by other fragments and _novelas_ or shorter stories in the same style. Didactic poetry includes historical works such as the poem of the Albigeois crusade, ethical or moralising _ensenhamens_ and religious poetry. But the dominating element in Provençal literature is lyrical, and during the short classical age of this literature lyric poetry was supreme. Nearly five hundred different troubadours are known to us at least by name and almost a thousand different stanza forms have been enumerated. While examples of the fine careless rapture of inspiration are by no means wanting, artificiality reigns supreme in the majority of cases. Questions of technique receive the most sedulous attention, and the principles of stanza construction, rime correspondence and rime distribution, as evolved by the [23] troubadours, exerted so wide an influence upon other European literature that they deserve a chapter to themselves.