At the sudden and unexpected sight of his lady-love the heart of
the true lover invariably palpitates.

XX. A real lover is always the prey of anxiety and malaise.

XXIII. A person who is the prey of love eats little and sleeps little.

This last is, of course, a rule not only venerable, but universal. One
recalls Chaucer's Squire, "as fresshe as is the moneth of May," who
"coude songes make, and wel endite;... so hote he loved that by
nightertale he slep no more than doth the nightingale." Others of the
troubadour statutes are frankly suggestive of that moral laxity, not to
say obliquity of vision, of which we have spoken before.

I. Marriage cannot be pleaded as an excuse for refusing to love.

XI. It is not becoming to love those ladies who love only with a view to
marriage.

XXVI. Love can deny nothing to love.

With this little group of laws in mind one can but reflect that, pushed
to their logical conclusion, they are suggestive of moral laxity. We are
not, however, left to guessing. According to Andrew the Chaplain, the
court of the Countess of Champagne was asked, on April 29, 1174, to
decide this question: "Can real love exist between married people?" The
countess and her court decided "that love cannot exercise its powers on
married people," the following reason being given in proof of the
assertion: "Lovers grant everything, mutually and gratuitously, without
being constrained by any motive of necessity. Married people, on the
contrary, are compelled as a duty to submit to one another's wishes, and
not to refuse anything to one another. For this reason it is evident
that love cannot exercise its powers on married people. Let this
decision, which we have arrived at with great deliberation, and after
taking counsel of a large number of ladies, be held henceforward as a
confirmed and irrefragable truth."

Quite in line with this judgment is one reported from the court of Queen
Eleanor. A gentleman, the complainant in the suit, was deeply in love
with a lady who loved another. Taking compassion on him, however, she
promised that, if ever she should lose her first lover, the complainant
should be received as his successor. The lady shortly after married her
lover. Thereupon the complainant, citing the decision of the Countess of
Champagne, demanded her love. The lady refused, denying that she had
lost the love of her lover by marrying him. Wherefore the complainant
humbly sued for judgment, we presume it m