In Paradise what have I to do?  I do not care to go there unless I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, whom I love so much.  For to Paradise goes no one but such people as I will tell you of.  There go old priests and old cripples and the maimed, who all day and all night crouch before altars and in old crypts, and are clothed with old worn-out capes and old tattered rags; who are naked and footbare and sore; who die of hunger and want and misery.  These go to Paradise; with them I have nothing to do; but to Hell I am willing to go.  For, to Hell go the fine scholars and the fair knights who die in tournies and in glorious wars; and the good men-at-arms and the well-born.  With them I will gladly go.  And there go the fair courteous ladies whether they have two or three friends besides their lords.  And the gold and silver go there, and the ermines and sables; and there go the harpers and jongleurs, and the kings of the world.  With these will I go, if only I may have Nicolette, my very sweet friend, with me.

Three times, in these short extracts, the word “courteous” has already appeared.  The story itself is promised as “courteous”; Nicolette is “courteous”; and the ladies who are not to go to heaven are “courteous.”  Aucassins is in the full tide of courtesy, and evidently a professional, or he never would have claimed a place for harpers and jongleurs with kings and chevaliers in the next world.  The poets of “courteous love” showed as little interest in religion as the poets of the eleventh century had shown for it in their poems of war.  Aucassins resembled Christian of Troyes in this, and both of them resembled Thibaut, while William of Lorris went beyond them all.  The literature of the “siecle” was always unreligious, from the “Chanson de Roland” to the “Tragedy of Hamlet”; to be “papelard” was unworthy of a chevalier; the true knight of courtesy made nothing of defying the torments of hell, as he defied the lance of a rival, the frowns of society, the threats of parents or the terrors of magic; the perfect, gentle, courteous lover thought of nothing but his love.  Whether the object of his love were Nicolette of Beaucaire or Blanche of Castile, Mary of Champagne or Mary of Chartres, was a detail which did not affect the devotion of his worship.

So Nicolette, shut up in a vaulted chamber, leaned out at the marble window and sang, while Aucassins, when his father promised that he should have a kiss from Nicolette, went out to make fabulous slaughter of the enemy; and when his father broke the promise, shut himself up in his chamber, and also sang; and the action went on by scenes and interludes, until, one night, Nicolette let herself down from the window, by the help of sheets and towels, into the garden, and, with a natural dislike of wetting her skirts which has delighted every hearer or reader from that day to this, “prist se vesture a l’une main devant et a l’autre deriere si s’escorca por le rousee qu’ele vit grande sor l’erbe