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While challenging the truism that troubadour song was invented by noblemen, he gives short shrift to the wandering jongleurs who sang in medieval taverns and hostelries.

As a modern troubadour, mining the social perspective of the chansons réalistes, Aznavour was the inheritor of a French tradition that can be traced back to the entertainment of the medieval jongleur.

The jongleur looks up at him and grins.

The other difference is that Tagore wasn’t a jongleur, that is, a singer of his own songs, though he might well have wanted such a career among his several.

Then another professional story-teller begins to compete with the jongleur, a story-teller whose object is to point a moral rather than to adorn a tale.