Unfortunately the course of true love did not run smooth for long; the blast of jealousy troubled its waters. Bertran had written a few songs in praise of another lady, the wife of his friend the Viscount of Camborn. Pure gallantry, he alleged, was the motive, but the Lady Maenz refused to view the matter in this innocent light, and angrily discarded her lover. Bertran was in despair; he knew, the manuscript says, ‘that he could never regain her, or find another lady so beautiful, so good, so gentle, and so learned.’ In this dilemma Bertran had recourse to the following pretty conceit of gallantry. Whether he had heard the story of the Athenian artist who, from the combined charms of the most beautiful women, moulded the type of the Goddess of Love, seems doubtful; but the coincidence of ideas between the troubadour and the antique sculptor is striking. For Bertran de Born, the biographer tells us, went to the most beautiful ladies of the country asking from each the loan of her greatest charm (metaphorically it must be understood), and from these he reconstructed the ideal type of his lost love. The poem in which this is done is a model of grace and gallantry, flattering alike to the divers ladies whose beauties are commemorated, and to the one who in her being concentrates and surpasses the charms of all others. But her heart was unmoved, and, in a fit of amorous despair we must suppose, the troubadour now offered his services as knight and poet to another lady, complaining at the same time bitterly of the cruelty of his former love. His offer was not accepted, neither was it disdainfully rejected. It would have been a breach of courtesy and good faith to deprive a lady of her lover, and much as the Lady Tibors (this was the name of Bertran’s new flame) may have been desirous of the praise of one of the greatest troubadours of the time, she resisted the temptations of vanity. Her answer to Bertran is a model of good sense; at the same time it smacks a little of that technical pedantry with which the ladies of Provence were wont to treat difficult cases of love. ‘Either,’ said the Lady Tibors, ‘your quarrel is of a slight and temporary kind—and in that case I will try to effect your peace with your lady; or else you have been guilty of a serious offence towards her—and, if so, neither I nor any good lady ought to accept your services. But in case I find on inquiry that your lady has left you from fickleness and caprice, I shall be honoured by your love.’ The first of these surmises fortunately turned out to be true. By the interference of Lady Tibors the lovers’ quarrel was settled, and in commemoration of the event Bertran was ordered to write a song in which he declares his immutable love for Lady Maenz, paying at the same time a grateful and graceful tribute to the kind peacemaker.