CHAPTER IX
THE CONVENTIONS OF LOVE
It is from literature that we gather the forms of erotic thought belonging to a period, but we should try to picture them functioning as elements of social life. A whole system of amatory conceptions and usages was current in aristocratic conversation of those times. What signs and figures of love which later ages have dropped! Around the god of Love the bizarre mythology of the Roman de la Rose was grouped. Then there was the symbolism of colours in costume, and of flowers and precious stones. The meaning of colours, of which feeble traces still obtain, was of extreme importance in amorous conversation during the Middle Ages. A manual of the subject was written about 1458, by the herald Sicily in his Le Blason des Couleurs, laughed at by Rabelais. When Guillaume de Machaut meets his beloved for the first time, he is delighted to see her wear a white dress and a sky-blue hood with a design of green parrots, because green signifies new love and blue fidelity. Later, he sees her image in a dream, turning away from him and dressed in green, “signifying novelty,” and reproaches her with it in a ballad:
“En lieu de bleu, dame, vous vestesz vert.”[1]
Rings, veils and bands, all the jewels and presents of courtship had their special function, with devices and enigmatic emblems which sometimes were veritable rebuses. The standard of the dauphin in 1414 bore a gold K, a swan (cygne) and an L, indicating one of his mother’s maids of honour, who was called la Cassinelle. The “glorieux de court et transporteurs de noms,” at whom Rabelais mocked, represent “espoir” by a sphere, “mélancholie” by a columbine (ancolie). Numerous games served to express the finesses of senti-
- ↑ Instead of in blue, lady, you dress in green.
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