The visitor to Provins’ ville haute today will find a city filled with remarkably well-preserved medieval monuments, several inaugurated under the initiative of Thibaut, Fourth Count of Champagne and King of Navarre, Provins’ native son and the man whose reign marks that city's high point in the Middle Ages. Thibaut began constructing the city walls, founded the Couvent des Cordelières, and was largely responsible for Provins’ great fame as a textile and trading centre, thanks in part to its biannual fairs, the ‘foires de Provins’. To this day, the city remains proud of its most famous ruler. In the Church of Sainte Quiriace still stands a baptismal font into which it is said that King Philippe Auguste lowered the child Thibaut; in shops throughout the city is sold candy which is named after the famous rose which Thibaut is said to have brought back from the Orient for Queen Blanche. In these and many other ways, on practically every street, the strolling visitor can find reminders of ‘Thibaut le Chansonnier’ under whose rule Provins became a major medieval commercial and artistic centre.

Did Thibaut write his songs on his palace walls, as Claude Fauchet and others after him claimed? And if so, do any remnants of these remain in Provins today? The legend has long been abandoned by historians as apocryphal (indeed, few now even appear to know that such a debate ever took place), and any questions surrounding it have not received serious attention for some time.