Aucassin and Nicolete
1909
Here is a love story that refuses to behave like a proper medieval romance. Aucassin, young heir to a Count, falls desperately in love with Nicolete, a captured Saracen girl raised as a Christian in his father's household. But unlike any self-respecting knight, Aucassin refuses to take up arms or embrace knighthood unless he can have his beloved. His father throws him in prison. Nicolete is sent away. And yet the two young lovers persist, searching for each other through forests and foreign lands, their determination as stubborn as it is tender. What makes this 12th-century French poem remarkable is its tone: playful, ironic, sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, yet capable of genuine ache. It is the only surviving example of the chantefable, a form that blends prose and verse meant to be sung. The story subverts the conventions of courtly romance at every turn, letting its heroes be foolish and brave and endlessly, improbably devoted. Some eight hundred years later, the sheer joy of two people refusing to give up on each other still resonates.
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“In Paradise what have I to do? I care not to enter, but only to have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, whom I love so dearly well. For into Paradise go none but such people as I will tell you of. There go those aged priests, and those old cripples, and the maimed who all day long and all night long cough before the altars, and in the crypts beneath the Churches; those who go in worn old mantles and old tattered habits; who are naked and barefoot, and full of sores; who are dying of hunger and thirst, of cold and wretchedness. Such as these enter Paradise and with them I have nought to do. But in Hell I will go. For to Hell go the fair clerks and the fair knights who are slain in the tourney and the great wars, and the stout archer and the loyal man. With them I will go. And there go the fair and the courteous ladies, who have friends, two or three, together with their wedded lords. And there pass the gold and the silver, the ermine and all rich furs, harpers and minstrels, and the happy of the world. With these will I go, so only that I have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, by my side.””
— Unknown
