lady. As will be seen in the following chapter, manner was even more
important than matter in troubadour lyrics, and commonplaces were
revivified by intricate rime-schemes and stanza construction accompanied
by new melodies. The conventional nature of the whole business may be
partly attested by the fact that no undoubted instance of death or
suicide for love has been handed down to us.

Reference should here be made to a legendary institution which seems to
have gripped the imagination of almost every tourist who writes a book
of travels in Southern France, the so-called _Courts of Love_.[9] In
modern times the famous Provençal scholar, Raynouard, attempted to
demonstrate the existence of these institutions, relying upon the
evidence of the _Art d'Aimer_ by André le Chapelain, a work written in
the thirteenth century and upon the statements of Nostradamus (_Vies des
plus célèbres et anciens poètes provençaux_, Lyons 1575). The latter
writer, the younger brother of the famous prophet, was obviously well
acquainted with Provençal literature and had access to sources of [20]
information which are now lost to us. But instead of attempting to write
history, he embellished the lives of the troubadours by drawing upon his
own extremely fertile imagination when the actual facts seemed too dull
or prosaic to arouse interest. He professed to have derived his
information from a manuscript left by a learned monk, the _Moine des
Iles d'Or_, of the monastery of St Honorat in the Ile de Lerins. The
late M. Camille Chabaneau has shown that the story is a pure fiction,
and that the monk's pretended name was an anagram upon the name of a
friend of Nostradamus.[10] Hence it is almost impossible to separate the
truth from the fiction in this book and any statements made by
Nostradamus must be received with the utmost caution. André le Chapelain
seems to have had no intention to deceive, but his knowledge of
Provençal society was entirely second-hand, and his statements