church door at Perpignan, and a yearly festival was ordained in their honor. For many hundreds of years after the decay of all this brilliant life in southern France, the statement was repeated that courts of love had been organized in gay Provence, which were described as assemblies of beautiful women, sitting in judgment on guilty lovers and deciding amorous questions, but the relentless search of the modern scholar has proved beyond a doubt that no such courts ever existed. A certain code of love there was most certainly, of which the troubadours sang, and whose regulations were matters of general conduct as inspired by the spirit of courtesy and gallantry which was current at the time, and very often were questions relating to the tender passion discussed _in extenso_ by the fairest ladies of the south, but more than that cannot be said with truth. The fiction is a pretty one, and among those who are said to have presided at these amorous tribunals are Queen Eleanor, the Countess of Narbonne, and the Countess of Champagne, and Richard Coeur de Lion has even been mentioned in this capacity. The courts were held at Pierrefeu, Digne, and Avignon according to tradition, women alone could act as judges, and appeals might be made from one court to another. This tradition but goes to show that after the decay of the Provencal civilization, its various ideas and ideals were drawn up into formal documents, that the spirit of the age might be preserved, and they in turn were taken by following generations in good faith as coexistent with the things which they describe.