Violet Books
Illustration Plates by Arthur I. Keller
for a tale of Provence in days of the Troubadours
"She reached it easily." A romantic interlude for the troubadour & the lady, wrestling for the weightily symbolic apple, in William Lindsey's The Severed Mantle (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1909), a tale of the Troubadours and the Crusades. This book has an elegant art nouveau binding & seven color illustration plates by Arthur I. Keller.
"Inch by inch slide down the lichen-covered wall." The Severed Mantle is a pretty hard-hitting tale. In this sequence the fay young troubadour makes good his escape from a prison tower -- but not before skewering his turnkey & lingering just long enough to watch "blood flow from the hair breast & the eyes grow fixed in death."
"May God help the right! En garde, messieurs." A one-against-all battle sequence for the Troubadour-turned-knight in defense of saints & a demoiselle. Though confessing he is a singer of songs & no warrior, Rainbaut never wavers, & as his would-be slayers fall back, he jibes, "Are you so easily satisfied, my brave men of Vercelli? You do not like the tune a troubaour plans with his sword?"
"The Call of the Cross." A Gawainesque pose for Ramibaut of the Severed Mantle, as he calls upon all citizens of Provence to go with him to the Crusade, any that will fight for "the Cross, for the glory of his Lord Christ, and for the honor of his lady!"
