At last Archimbaut resolves to keep his wife a close prisoner in a tower, and ‘May I be hanged by the throat,’ he says, ‘if ever she go out without me even to church, to hear mass, and that only on high feast days!’ So poor Flamenca is shut up in the tower with only two devoted maidens, Alice and Margarida, to comfort her in her misery. And here the poet takes the opportunity of indulging in a psychological excursion which one would expect in Feydeau or the younger Dumas rather than in a _romancier_ of the thirteenth century. As she could not love her husband and had no child to be fond of, he suggests, it was a blessing, or ‘a great favour of God,’ as he puts it, for Flamenca, that the feeling of love entirely ceased in her for a season. For if she still had had love in her heart with no object to centre it upon, her condition would have been infinitely more unhappy. But Flamenca’s fate is not to last, nor are Archimbaut’s misdeeds to be left unpunished for ever. The avenger is nigh. He takes the form of a perfect beau of the period, described by the poet in the most glowing colours; with his riches, his valour, his courteous demeanour, his love of poetry and song, his scholarship—for he has gone through his _trivium_ and _quadrivium_ at the University of Paris—and last, not least, his beauty, down to the whiteness of his skin and the very shape of his mouth and ears. Guillem de Nevers, for such is his name, hears of Archimbaut’s jealous atrocities, which have become the butt of all the gay troubadours of the country, and at once resolves to comfort the lady and punish the monster. The question is, how to baffle the watchfulness of this Argus and Cerberus combined. The manner in which this question is solved is a marvel of ingenuity. The first and greatest difficulty is to establish communication with the imprisoned lady. The tower is watched against any possibility of approach, and she never leaves it except to go to church. The church, therefore, must be the scene of operations.