Читать книгу The Line of Love; Dizain des Mariages - James Branch Cabell - Страница 6

"D'aquest segle flac, plen de marrimen, S'amor s'en vai, son jot teinh mensongier."

So Florian married Sylvie, and made her, they relate, a fair husband, as husbands go. And children came to them, and then old age, and, lastly, that which comes to all.

Which reminds me that it was an uncomfortable number of years ago, in an out-of-the-way corner of the library at Allonby Shaw, that I first came upon_ Les Aventures d'Adhelmar de Nointel. This manuscript dates from the early part of the fifteenth century and is attributed—though on no very conclusive evidence, says Hinsauf,—to the facile pen of Nicolas de Caen (circa 1450), until lately better known as a lyric poet and satirist.

The story, told in decasyllabic couplets, interspersed after a rather unusual fashion with innumerable lyrics, seems in the main authentic. Sir Adhelmar de Nointel, born about 1332, was once a real and stalwart personage, a younger brother to that Henri de Nointel, the fighting Bishop of Mantes, whose unsavory part in the murder of Jacques van Arteveldt history has recorded at length; and it is with the exploits of this Adhelmar that the romance deals, not, it may be, without exaggeration.

In any event, the following is, with certain compressions and omissions that have seemed desirable, the last episode of the Aventures. The tale concerns the children of Florian and Sylvie: and for it I may claim, at least, the same merit that old Nicolas does at the very outset; since as he veraciously declares—yet with a smack of pride:

Cette bonne ystoire n'est pas usée, Ni guère de lieux jadis trouvée, Ni ècrite par clercz ne fut encore.