One of his biographers says of him: "He was one of the most foolish men who ever lived, for he believed everything to be just as it pleased him, and as he would have it." It is a moot point whether this may not be rather wisdom than folly, for believing things to be as one desires them often goes a long way towards fulfilling that tacit prophecy.
Alas, things were not exactly as Vidal wished, in spite of his pleasant believings, but he had rosy hours and sang enchanting songs and gave much joy with his gifts and his charm. "Vierna," however, did not at all appreciate him. She gave him a ring and a little perfunctory graciousness, as she was bound to do to sustain her character as a courteous lady; but she appears to have wearied of his songs and his devotion. At last her husband tried to reconcile her to the troubadour, and to induce her to treat him more kindly. Vidal lost heart after a time, and concluded he was a fool.
"But beauty makes the sanest man go mad," he sang or said, and though he had many love-affairs and fancies, they seem to have been of slight seriousness compared with his passion for Azalais. In his erratic life, he haunted the neighbourhood of Carcassonne and Toulouse; visited Albi--whence the luckless Albigenses took their name--and Saissac and Cabaret near Carcassonne. In Provence he had an unpleasant adventure at St. Gilles, where the husband of a lady to whom he addressed love-songs and of whose love he had boasted, became enraged and bored the poet's too eloquent tongue.
In these strange times, the exquisite chivalric civilisation being but newly formed--like a sheet of ice on a dark pool--had very thin places. Vidal's friend Ugo del Baux bore him off--perhaps to his wonderful eyrie in the Alpilles--and nursed him till he was well again.
Vidal's wanderings were far and wide in Languedoc and Provence. We even hear of him singing in the little grey hill-top village of Beuil in the mountains to the north of Nice.
Near Carcassonne lived a famous beauty, Loba de Pegnautier. She inhabited the fortified town of Cabaret, and there knights and troubadours flocked to visit her, among them Pierre Vidal.
The story goes that in order to please her he adopted the crest or emblem of a Wolf in compliment to her name, Loba; and, dressed in a wolf-skin, ran out into the field and had himself hunted by the shepherds with their dogs. But Loba only made fun of him, and it appears that the shepherds hunted him rather too seriously, and altogether the foolish poet came off unhappily in this fantastic scheme of love-making.