"
The troubadours bewailed the desolate country, the beauty that was no
more. Montanhagol, although greatly intimidated by the Inquisition,
wrote a long poem on the subject, and the otherwise unknown Bernard
Sicard de Marvajols laments:
Oh! Toulouse and Provence,
And thou, land of Agence,
Carcassonne and Beziers!
As once I beheld you--as I behold you to-day!
Jacob of Vitry, a cultured French prelate, took a different view. He
inveighed against the "foolish poems, the lies of the poets, the
sing-song of the women, the coarse innuendoes of the jesters." "Such
vermin flourishes on the stream of temporal abundance; it literally
crawls over all food, for, as a rule, the meal is followed by a deluge
of idle talk." A reconciliation of the two worlds was impossible.
While the Waldenses flourished in Provence, various heretical sects
arose in the west of Germany and in the Netherlands; prominent among
them were the Apostolics, who took the Gospels literally, and introduced
communism and polygamy, and the communities of the Beghards and
Beguines, which roused little public attention, and did not aim at
reform, but advocated a life of contemplation.
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