The Last Troubadour

...Nature reacts to shut out certain harmful rays of the sun, and in so doing also excludes rays that might be beneficial...

...She learned that his poems were full of her...

...And there it was that she had to endure the last pangs of earthly love...

...Sister Agnes was troubled...

...Sister Agnes was destined to endure the torments of sentimental unrest, which gave her life a secret and touching sense, for many years...

...A face without real beauty, but veiled by that expressive languor which so often arouses sentiment...

...Jenny Manivet was a friend of the daughter of the house...

...In it there alternates burning passion, vehement despair, with the most peaceful resignation...

...I delight," he wrote to a friend, "in attaching a memory to everything, to a flower, a fruit, a leaf, a color...

...Negro children are more liable to suffer from nutritional diseases, and especially from rickets, because the large amount of pigment in their skin actually shuts out the energizing rays of the sun and thus prevents or at least impairs the full activity of vitamins...

...In the Anthology of Occitan Literature, the fame of Aubanel, only a little lower than the glory of Mistral, occupies a place akin to that of Catullus in relation to Virgil, or of Petrarch as compared to Dante...

...At Avignon the Aubanels were, and still are, hereditary printers to the Holy See...

...He chose as a title, La Miougrano-entre-douberto (or The Open Pomegranate) therein alluding to his own everopen wound...

...His poems are the outpouring of confidential lyrism, the overflowing of a heart broken by love which, however, made of his ill fortune an enchantment...

...Their cutaneous pigmentation protects them from sunstroke and other evil effects of the sun in tropical regions, but it does not increase their immunity to disease...

...Sometimes this cenacle of fiery young poets met at Maillane, at Mistral's house, the Mas du Juge, and sometimes at Avignon, at the Aubanel Press...

...Thus a host of insignificant objects, dull ones to a lot of people, appeal to me and move me and stir me profoundly...

...Like them he created poetry out of the most fugitive elements: he vivified and adorned fleeting contingencies of the hour in order to present them to the object of his devotions...

...This is particularly true with regard to tuberculosis and other affections that are usually supposed to be very much benefited by exposure to sunlight, and with regard to which we might naturally think that the energizing rays of the sun would increase resistive vitality...

...The one is soft as the moving air but the other is panting, fiery and full of bitterness...

...But even more often it was at the Gi6ras, a friendly family whose son wrote and who owned a small place between Venosque and Carpentras, the FontS6gugne, verdant and rich in springs, to which the F~libres, in memory of their happy youth, dedicated a garland of brindes and votive poems...

...No one thinks for a moment, however, that because of the presence of this color pigmentation in their skin, the Negroes are ever so much healthier than the whites...

...She was a tall, thin girl with dark plaits and full lips often parted in a melancholy smile...

...These qualities make the work of the great Occitan poet unique in the literature of his land...

...Then came hard but salutary intervention...

...Toward I855 there lived between Arles and Avignon a 360 THE COMMONWEAL August 7, I9z9 little group of young men: Mistral, Roumanille, Aubanel, Paul AtOne, Alphonse Daudet...

...The old tendency to get into the shade and stay there on hot days represents a very precious instinct...

...They called to her mind the resignation and ardor of the man who accepts but cannot forget...

...He sent her a flower and begged for a photograph...

...His love was a cult which makes life with its grave or joyful emotions a perpetual offering for the beloved...

...Here it was that the man came into the world, who, but for an unfortunate love affair, might have been, instead of a great lyric poet, just one of the humble and unknown artizans of that period of literary and political renaissance in Provence called the F61ibrige...

...In this manner Zani is as near to Beatrice as to Laura...

...It represents nature's protective reaction against the sun, and the human system is quite capable of setting up such barriers as will prevent injury from sunlight if it is only given the opportunity...

...Oh my God,' I said...

...Friends from Avignon visited her and spoke of the past...

...She was the incarnation of yearning, secret reserve amid the laughter and light-heartedness of her companions...

...Trees may not have been invented for the purpose of affording shade but they are marvelous contributors to health as well as to the joy of life...

...Their dark color is due to the gathering of pigment in the so-called pigmentary layer of the skin, so as to protect the underlying tissues from the actinic rays of the sun and particularly from their tendency to produce heat effects deeper than the outer layers of the skin...

...Her place of residence was changed eighteen times...

...Je paraissais heureuse et j'~tais sans repos," she said to Aubanel before leaving--a pure Racinian line, unconsciously uttered, and for a keepsake she gave him the rosary she had prayed on as a child...

...From there onward she was beyond the reach of worldly ties, shadows of a shadow, phantoms of a dream...

...August 7, 1929 THE COMMONWEAL 359 son is usually supposed to be evidence that the possessors of it have been to Palm Beach for several months of the winter, basking on the sands and enjoying the sunlight down there...

...Until the revolution of 1789, which robbed the Papacy of its "Comtadine" territory they bore the papal arms, as an exclusive privilege, over their door...

...At first she taught little girls at Bourg-Argental, then in 1856 she was sent to Paris to nurse in the Hbpital Necker...

...and this pigmentation of the skin under the influence of sunlight is one of them...

...It is there "amid pools and ivy-covered benches" that, in the spring of 185o, Aubanel met Jenny Manivet who was to be the Zani of The Open Pomegranate, and out of whom the poet's devotion created the most angelic figure of Occitan literature since that "Princesse Lointaine" who many hundred years ago inspired the troubadour Jaufr~ Rudel with equally plaintive harmonies...

...In 1854, Aubanel, while staying in Rome, received a letter from his friend Roumanille, announcing that Jenny Manivet was going to become a Sister of Charity of Saint Vincent de Paul...

...On the contrary, they are distinctly less healthy and have ever so much less resistive vitality than the white people living in similar conditions near them...

...Nature, in fact, has very wonderful checks and brakes on human tendencies to exaggeration either in the matter of food taking or exercise or exposure to light or any other unsalutary habits...

...I read your letter," he wrote to his friend, "and from the beginning understood all...

...She at once struck the imagination of Aubanel...

...His verses formed a bouqet of sentiments whose perfumes were rare and suavely blended...

...But what gives the poems of the Miougrano-entre-duberto a loftiness and a magnificence not to be found in the finest achievements of courtly poetry is the fact that they soar above the order of the purely profane to almost mystical heights...

...She died in 1886, the same year as Aubanel...

...The terrible shock he experienced at this news made Aubanel realize how much he loved her...

...Aubanel left only one book, a collection of verse {nspired by a single theme, his youthful love for a friend who became a Sister of Charity at the age of twenty-six...

...It is now known that children who are fed on cod liver oil, or for that matter on cream or other fatty materials the vitamin content of which has not been impaired by having been subjected to heat, derive more good out of these materials if they get out into the sunlight...

...Thus, by a mysterious telepathy, time was dealt out equally to each...

...Two years later Aubanel recalled her temporarily to life and bequeathed her memory to literary posterity by publishing, in x86o, his La Miougrano-entreduberto...

...But being deeply religious, he neither uttered any complaints nor showed any signs of rebellion...

...Oh my Godl Jenny is goingl" Quickly he returned, hoping to see her at least once again...

...And she replied: "Here the soul is glad but the heart is suffering...

...Font-S~gugne--wrote Mistral in his Memori e Racont6--was the cradle of a glorious dream, a gentle "cour d'amour" on a hillside, amid blue distances, with a flight of young men who worshiped beauty under three kinds: poetry, love and Provence, for them synonymous, and a few gracious, laughing girls to keep them company...

...It must not be forgotten that exposure of some of these materials to sunlight immediately before consumption of them seems to add to their energizing qualities...

...In this, Aubanel followed the traditions of the troubadours...

...Some of them are extremely precious and we have only just begun to learn their value...

...Without repose," as she described herself, so she remained until she was at last released to go to her final rest...

...I fell on my knees and prayed and wept...

...There was a parting scene between the young girl and her little court of poets, the last minutes being given to the most fervent of them aU, to the pure intercourse of two hearts filled by faith and love with unspeakable melancholy...

...In Negro children, however, this exposure to sunlight is much less efficient than it is in white children since the actinic rays of the sun cannot penetrate so deeply into the tissues...

...It is easy to carry exposure to the sun too far...

...The present fad for acquiring a coat of tan, either by the direct action of sunlight or by artificial means, is almost inevitably certain to prevent the very valuable action of the sun in heahh-giving ways thereafter...

...The Melissinde of Jaufr6 Rudel, the Laura of Petrarch, although inaccessible, remain, notwithstanding, creatures of flesh for their poets, gani transcends the sphere of human realizations--Aubanel regards her as someone set aside, an angelic creature who has paused in its flight an instant close to him, in order to give him a foretaste of heavenly beatitude...

...Henceforth Zani, once out of the novitiate, was known as Sister Agnes...

...We may wisely recall that the dwellers in Africa and our own colored inhabitants, their descendants, are exceedingly well tanned as the result of many centuries of exposure to strong sunlight...

...They died without seeing each other again, and, singularly pathetic detail, without ever having exchanged, since they first met, a single letter...

...Rising ceaselessly and falling, at times aflame with terrestial fire, at others cool and divinely fragrant, these immortal E16gies are "from the land and the sea...

...her memories were breaking her heart...

...The fact of the matter is that when white people acquire a coat of tan that is rather deep in color, the further beneficial action of the sun on them is very largely prevented...

...Twenty-flve tears changed into diamonds" has been said of these elegies which exhale the same torment, the same chaste and passionate melancholy as the Canzoniere of Petrarch or the Winterreise of Schubert...

...Does this not sound like an echo, sorrowful but purified by sacrifice, of Iseult's lament: "Tout ce que je sais me tourmente et tout ce que je vois--le ciel me tourmente et cette mer, et mort corps et ma vie...

...A common ideal animated them, the revival of the Langue d'oc which had given mediaeval literature some of its proudest and yet most delicate flowers and which now, because of the successful invasion of the Langue d'oil, was reduced to the status of a patois and restricted to popular proverbs, watch-night stories and almanacs...

...There is no good reason to think, however, that tanning in itself is of any particular service to health...

...There are many different rays in sunlight...

...The human body has no accumulators but must get its supply both of food and energy every day...

...Others are rather seriously disturbing and mankind has known about them for a long while and has invented certain precautions which the fashion of the moment is thrusting aside with results that will surely prove to be harmful rather than beneficial...

...Aubanel's love disembodies her and his poetry is akin to that of those troubadours who offered loving litanies of mystical lyrism to Our Lady rather than to the others who dedicated verses to the queens of the courts of love...

...Poetry and love were one for Aubanel...

...Her superiors decided she must leave France where she could not find peace, and ordered her to Constantinople...

...THE LAST TROUBADOUR By THI~RI~SE LAUBAUDEN HE city of Avignon has celebrated the centenary of the birth of Theodore Aubanel, the greatest lyric poet born in Provence since the far-off days of the troubadours, when a Peire Vidal or a Bernart de Ventadour taught courtly Europe the most exquisite and delicate modes of singing of love...

...He, too, was buried in a religious habitmin the cagoule of the White Penitents whose rule he had piously kept throughout life...

...The health that is obtained during summer outings is not in direct ratio to the coat of tan that has been rapidly acquired...

...I wept as one weeps for someone very dear who is going to die...

...Est modus in rebus," moderation in all things is best...

...And from the twofold sorrow there came forth the immortal poems, one by one like vermeil seeds out of the wounded fruit...

...And again: "Something is making me ill which is not an illness...