ulfilment of her promise." The
court discusses for awhile. "We cannot," answers Queen Eleanor, "go
against the Countess of Champagne's decision that love cannot exist
between man and wife. We therefore desire this lady to fulfil her
promise and give you her love." Again, there come to the Court of Love
of the Viscountess of Narbonne a knight and a lady, who desire to know
whether, having been once married, but since divorced, a love engagement
between them would be honourable. The viscountess decides that "Love
between those who have been married together, but who have since been
divorced from one another, is not to be deemed reprehensible; nay, that
it is to be considered as honourable." And these Courts of Love, be it
remarked, were frequently held on occasion of the marriage of great
personages; as, for instance, of that between Louis VII. and Eleanor of
Poitiers in 1137. The poetry of the early Middle Ages follows implicitly
the decisions of these tribunals, which reveal a state of society to
which the nearest modern approach is that of Italy in the eighteenth
century, when, as Goldoni and Parini show us, as Stendhal (whose "De
l'Amour" may be taken as the modern "Breviari d'Amor") expounds, there
was no impropriety possible as long as a lady was beloved by any one
except her own husband. No love, therefore, between unmarried people
(the cyclical romances, as before stated, and the Amadises, belong to
another time of social condition, and the only real exception to my rule
of which I can think is the lovely French tale of "Aucassin et
Nicolette"); and no love between man and wife. But love there must be;
and love there consequently is; love for the married woman from the man
who is not her husband. The feudal lady, married without being consulted
and without having had a chance of knowing what love is, yet lives to
know love; lives to be taught it by one of these many bachelors bound to
flutter about her in military service or social duty; lives to teach it
herself. And she is too powerful in her fiefs and kinsmen, too powerful
in the public opinion which approves and supports her, to be hampered by
her husband. The husband, indeed, has grown up in the same habits, has
known, before marrying, the customs sanctioned by the Courts of Love; he
has been the knight of some other man's wife in his day, what right has
he to object? As in the days of Italian _cecisbei_, the early mediaeval
lover might say with Goldoni's Don A