Folquet de Marseilles

An excerpt in The Gentleman’s Magazine in 1835, translated by the excellent Louisa Stuart Costello, for whom the gents very sensibly made an exception:

If I must fly thee, turn away
Those eyes where love is sweetly dwelling,
And bid each charm, each grace decay,
That smile, that voice, all else excelling;
Banish those gentle wiles that won me,
And those soft words which have undone me!
That I may leave without regret
All that I cannot now forget;
That I may leave thee, nor despair
To lose a gem without compare.

Ms Costello observes that Folquet de Marselha was “one of the most furious of the persecutors of the Albigenses”, the “gentil troubadour” who gave us the idea of the Inquisition and who, at the sacking of Beziers, cried: “Kill all! God will know his own!”

(The anagrammatical Floquet was an albino gorilla, not an Albigeois killa. Let’s be clear about that, if nothing else.)

Trevor @ 12 June 2006 2:30 PM

Categories

Related posts

• Barn yarns
• The great electricity protection racket
• Spanish food’s getting better
• Multilingual texts/chapter and verse/layout grids
• Dutch in Korea

Previous/next post

Comments

Feeds: RSS2 · Atom

Trackback link.

Tell me if the spam dragon gives you a hard time. Log in if you want to be really foul.