This is all we hear of the beautiful Lady Maenz. But Bertran appears presently as the passionate admirer of another lady, of much more exalted rank. It must have been soon after his reconciliation with Count Richard that the troubadour met in his camp the Count’s sister Mathilda, the wife of the celebrated Duke Henry of Brunswick. The inflammable heart of the poet caught fire at her beauty, and his enthusiastic praise seems to have been received with much condescension. It tends to prove Bertran’s importance that it was by Richard’s express desire that his sister showed kindness to the troubadour, who, the manuscript adds, ‘was a renowned man and valorous, and might be of great use to the Count.’ In the praise of Mathilda Bertran wrote several beautiful _canzos_, one of which is particularly remarkable for an allusion in the first line to so prosaic a subject as dinner—the poem having been composed, it is said, one Sunday when that meal failed to be forthcoming at the ill-provided camp. In addition to these amorous entanglements Bertran was also married, although neither he nor his biographer deigns to mention so unimportant a personage as his wife. We know, however, that his children at Bertran’s death came to a compromise with their uncle Constantine as to the possession of Castle Autafort and its dependencies. One of his sons inherited with his father’s name some of his father’s poetic talent and, it appears, all his fierce passions. By this younger Bertran de Born, who has sometimes been mistaken for the great poet, we possess a _sirventes_ against King John worthy of the paternal example. The luckless king is mercilessly assaulted. The loss of his continental possessions is attributed to cowardice and irresolution, and the king’s immoderate love of the chase does not escape notice. The barons also come in for their share of vituperation. In fact everything is done _more patrio_. Bertran died at an advanced age, having entered a monastery not long before his death. Such was the not inappropriate close of a life passed in the wildest turmoil of political strife. As a type of the warlike mediæval baron, reckless and ruthless, Bertran stands unsurpassed in history or literature. But we have seen that the refining and softening influences of friendship, of love, of knightly courtesy, were not wholly absent from his career. Another consideration suggests itself. Would it not be worth while for the authorities of the Record Office to secure a competent hand to glean from the biography of this and other troubadours the many important and hitherto totally neglected facts bearing on the continental policy of the Plantagenets? CHAPTER XX. THE MONK OF MONTAUDON.