young wife was at their mercy. Besides, the
Courts of Bearn openly maintain that this right grew up naturally:
"The eldest-born of the peasant is accounted the son of his lord, for
he perchance it was who begat him."[26]

[26] When I published my _Origines_ in 1837, I could not have
known this work, published in 1842.

All feudal customs, even if we pass over this, compel the bride to go
up to the castle, bearing thither the "wedding-dish." Surely it was a
cruel thing to make her trust herself amongst such a pack of celibate
dogs, so shameless and so ungovernable.

A shameful scene we may well imagine it to have been. As the young
husband is leading his bride to the castle, fancy the laughter of
cavaliers and footmen, the frolics of the pages around the wretched
poor! But the presence of the great lady herself will check them? Not
at all. The lady in whose delicate breeding the romances tell us to
believe,[27] but who, in her husband's absence, ruled his men,
judging, chastising, ordaining penalties, to whom her husband himself
was bound by the fiefs she brought him,--such a lady would be in no
wise merciful, especially towards a girl-serf who happened also to be
good-looking. Since, according to the custom of those days, she openly
kept her gentleman and her page, she would not be sorry to sanction
her own libertinism by that of her husband.

[27] This delicacy appears in the treatment these ladies
inflicted on their poet Jean de Meung, author of the _Roman
de la Rose_.

Nothing will she do to hinder the fun, the sport they are making out
of yon poor trembler who has come to redeem his bride. They begin by
bargaining with him; they laugh at the pangs endured by "the miserly
peasant;" they suck the very blood and marrow of him. Why all this
fury? Because he is neatly clad; is honest, settled; is a man of mark
in the village. Why, indeed? Because she is pious, chaste, and pure;
because she loves him; because she is frightened and falls a-weeping.
Her sweet eyes plead for pity.

In vain does the poor wretch offer all he has, even to her dowry: it
is all too little. Angered at such cruel injustice, he will say
perhaps that "his neighbour paid nothing." The insolent fellow! he
would argue with us! Thereon they gather round him, a yelling mob:
sticks and brooms pelt upon him like hail. They jostle him, they throw
him down. "You jealous villain, you Lent-faced villain!" they cry; "no
one takes your