From Trails of the Troubadours , by Ramon de Loi [pseud. T HERE are trails and trails. But there is another kind of a trail, equally sweet. Anthony of Padua, I shall leave this town of Tours. By St. The trail of anger and the trail of contentment are normal and natural, and one can understand them. But who can understand or justify the trip taken by Eleanor, queen of the troubadours, when, big with the child of her lover, she fled, after a hurried divorce, the court of her husband, King Louis VII of France, by night marches and in disguise to reach the capital of her own kingdom, Poitiers the proud, there to meet that lover, Henry, duke of Anjou, the only man in Europe strong enough to hold her?
In her career Eleanor had two husbands, and both had infirmities: the first, King Louis of France, had an ingrowing conscience; the second, King Henry of England — he was Henry of Anjou when she married him — had an ingrowing toe-nail. The man with the conscience was beyond his age and never quite understood it; the man of the toe-nail was of his time, he reveled in it; he rode on the wave of it; he was, by all standards of all ages, a strong man.
For years he never knew defeat, in war, in intrigue, or in passion. His lands were the broadest and his scepter the most powerful [23] that Europe had seen in five hundred years. Yet Eleanor broke him in the end as she had broken Louis of France in the beginning.
She lived to see him robbed of his lands and his power, robbed even of his clothes and his jewels, lowered into a grave at Fontevrault, his huge body covered inadequately by the petticoat of a charitable prostitute. In the year of grace thousands of people traveled from Paris to Poitiers via Orleans, Blois, and Tours and looked with more or less indifferent eye on a country which is now much the same as it was a thousand years ago.
If these people thought at all, one knows well what they thought. They thought that nature was wonderful, or the reverse; and they thought that the hotels, the roads, the sky, the food, were good or bad or dirty; and they placed a good Anglo-Saxon curse or benediction upon each of these in turn.
