t must
often pass through their brain and terrify them with its delicious
audacity; oh no, such a thing is not possible. But it is. The lady at
first, perhaps most often, singles out as a pastime some young knight,
some squire, some page; and, in a half-queenly, half-motherly way,
corrects, rebukes his deficiencies, undertakes to teach him his duty as
a servant. The romance of the "Petit Jehan de Saintre," written in the
fifteenth century, but telling, with a delicacy of cynicism worthy of
Balzac, what must have been the old, old story of the whole feudal
Middle Ages, shows the manner in which, while feeling that he is being
trained to knightly courtesy and honour, the young man in the service of
a great feudal lady is gradually taught dissimulation, lying, intrigue;
is initiated by the woman who looms above him like a saint into all the
foulness of adultery. Adultery; a very ugly word, which must strike
almost like a handful of mud in the face whosoever has approached this
subject of mediaeval love in admiration of its strange delicacy and
enthusiasm. Yet it is a word which must be spoken, for in it is the
explanation of the whole origin and character of this passion which
burst into song in the early Middle Ages. This almost religious love,
this love which conceives no higher honour than the service of the
beloved, no higher virtue than eternal fidelity--this love is the love
for another man's wife. Between unmarried young men and young women,
kept carefully apart by the system which gives away a girl without her
consent and only to a rich suitor, there is no possibility of love in
these early feudal courts; the amours, however licentious, between
kings' daughters and brave knights, of the Carolingian tales, belong to
a different rank of society, to the prose romances made up in the
fourteenth century for the burgesses of cities; the intrigues, ending in
marriage, of the princes and princesses of the cycle of Amadis, belong
to a different period, to the fifteenth century, and to courts where
feudal society scarcely exists; the squires, the young knights who hang
about a great baronial establishment of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries, have still to make their fortune, and do not dream of
marriage. The husband, on the other hand, the great lord or successful
knightly adventurer, married late in life, and married from the
necessity, for ever pressing upon the feudal proprietor, of adding on
new fiefs and new immuniti