The Waning of the Middle Ages/Chapter 9
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 sentiment, such as The King who does not lie, The Castle of love, Sales of love, Games for sale. In one of them, for instance, the lady mentions a flower; the young man has to answer by a rhymed compliment.
“Je vous vens la paasserose.
—Belle, dire ne vous ose
Comment Amours vers vous me tire,
Si l’apercevez tout sans dire.”[2]
The game of Castle of love consisted of a series of allegorical riddles.
“Du chastel d’Amours vous demant:
Dites le premier fondement!
—Amer loyaument.
“Or me nommez le mestre mur
Qui joli le font, fort et seur!
—Celer sagement.
“Dites moy qui sont li crenel,
Les fenestres et li carrel!
—Regart atraiant.
“Amis, nommez moy le portier!
—Dangier mauparlant.
“Qui est la clef qui le puet deffermer?
—Prier courtoisement.”[3]
Since the times of the troubadours the casuistry of love had occupied a large place in courtly conversation. It was, so to say, curiosity and backbiting raised to the level of a literary form. At the court of Louis of Orleans people amuse themselves at meals by “tales, ballads” and “graceful questions.” Poets are especially laid under contribution. Machaut is requested by a company of ladies and noblemen to reply to a series of “partures of love and of its adventures.” Every love-affair is discussed according to rigorous rules. “Beau sire, which would you prefer: that people spoke ill of your lady and that you found her good, or that she were well spoken of and you should find her bad?” The strict conception of honour obliged a gentleman to answer: “Lady, I should prefer to hear her well spoken of and that I should find her bad.”
Does a lady, neglected by her lover, break faith by choosing another? May a knight bereft of all hope of seeing his lady, whom a jealous husband keeps locked up, seek a new love? One step more and love questions will be treated as lawsuits, as in the Arrestz d’Amour of Martial d’Auvergne.
The courtly code did not serve exclusively for making verses; it claimed to be applicable to life, or at least to conversation. It is very difficult to pierce the clouds of poetry and to penetrate to the real life of the epoch. How far did courting and flirtation during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries come up to the requirements of the courtly system: or to the precepta of Jean de Meun? Autobiographical confessions are very rare at that epoch. Even when an actual love-affair is described with the intention of being accurate, the author cannot free himself from the accepted style and technical conceptions. We find an instance of this in the too lengthy narrative of a love-affair of an old poet and a young girl, which Guillaume de Machaut has given us in Le Livre du Voir-Dit. He was approaching his sixtieth year, when Peronnelle d’Armentiéres, of a noble family in Champagne, sent him, in 1362, her first rondel, in which she offered her heart to the celebrated poet, whom she did not know, and invited him to enter with her into a poetical love correspondence. The poor poet, sickly, blind of one eye, gouty, at once kindles. He replies to her rondel and an exchange of letters and of poems begins. Peronnelle is proud of her literary connection; she does not make a secret of it, and begs the poet to put in writing the true story of their love, inserting their letters and their poetry. Machaut readily complies.
“I shall make,” he says, “to your glory and praise, something that will be well remembered.”
“And, my very sweet heart, are you sorry because we have begun so late? By God, so am I; but here is the remedy: let us enjoy life as much as circumstances permit, so that we may make up for the time we have lost; and that people may speak of our love a hundred years hence, and all well and honourably; for if there were evil, you would conceal it from God, if you could.”
The narrative connecting the letters and the poetry teaches us what degree of intimacy was considered compatible with a decent love-affair. The young lady may permit herself extraordinary liberties, provided everything takes place in the presence of third parties, her sister-in-law, her maid or her secretary. At the first interview, which Machaut has been waiting for with misgivings, because of his unattractive appearance, Peronnelle falls asleep, or pretends to sleep, under a cherry tree, with her head on the poet’s knees. The secretary covers her mouth with a green leaf and tells Machaut to kiss the leaf. Just when the latter takes courage to do so, the secretary pulls the leaf away.
She grants him other favours. A pilgrimage to Saint Denis, at the time of the fair, provides them with an opportunity of passing some days together. One afternoon, overcome by the heat of mid-June, they fly from the crowd at the fair to take a few hours’ rest. A burgher of the town provides them with a double-bedded room. The blinds are closed and the company lies down. The sister-in-law takes one of the two beds. Peronnelle and her maid occupy the other. She orders the bashful poet to lie down between them, which he does, lying very still for fear of disturbing her. On waking, she orders him to kiss her.
At the end of the trip, she permits him to come and wake her, in order to take leave, and the narrative gives us to understand that she refused him nothing. She gives him the golden key of her honour, to guard that treasure, or what was left of it.
The poet’s good fortune ended there. He did not see her again, and, for lack of other adventures, he filled the rest of his book with mythological excursions. At last she lets him know that their relations must end, because of a marriage, probably. He resolves to go on loving and revering her till the end of his days. And after their death, he will pray God, to reserve for her, in the glory of Heaven, the name he gave her: Toute-belle.In the Voir-Dit of Machaut religion and love are mixed up with a sort of ingenuous shamelessness. We need not be shocked by the fact that the author was a canon of the church of Reims, for, in the Middle Ages, minor orders, which sufficed for a canon (Petrarch was one), did not absolutely impose celibacy. The fact that a pilgrimage was chosen as an occasion for the lovers to meet was not extraordinary either. At this period pilgrimages served all sorta of frivolous purposes. But what astonishes us is that Machaut, a serious and delicate poet, claims to perform his pilgrimage ”very devoutly.” At mass he is seated behind her:
He says his hours as he is waiting for her in the garden. He glorifies her portrait as his God on earth. Entering the church to begin a novene, he takes a mental vow to compose a poem about his beloved on each of the nine days—which does not prevent him from speaking about the great devotion with which he said his prayers.
We shall revert elsewhere to the astonishing ingenuousness with which, before the Council of Trent, worldly occupations were mixed up with works of the Faith.
As regards the tone of the love-affair of Machaut and Peronnelle, it is soft, cloying, somewhat morbid. The expression of their feelings remains enveloped in arguments and allegories. But there is something touching in the tenderness of the old poet, which prevents him from seeing that “Toute-belle,” after all, has but played with him and with her own heart.
To grasp what little we can of actual love relations, apart from literature, we should oppose to the Voir-Dit, as a pendant, Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry pour l'Enseignement de ses Filles, written at the same epoch. This time we are not concerned with an amorous old poet; we have to do with a father of a rather prosaic turn of mind, an Angevin nobleman, who relates his reminiscences, anecdotes and tales “pour mes filles aprandre à roumancier.” This might be rendered, “to teach my daughters the fashionable conventions in love matters.” The instruction, however, does not turn out romantic at all. The moral of the examples and admonitions which the cautious father recommends to his daughters tends especially to put them on their guard against the dangers of romantic flirtations. Take heed of eloquent people, always ready with their “false long and pensive looks and little sighs, and wonderful emotional faces, and who have more words at hand than other people.” Do not be too encouraging. He himself, when young, was conducted by his father to a castle to make the acquaintance of a young lady to whom they wanted to betroth him. The girl received him very kindly. He conversed with her on all sorts of subjects, so as to probe her character somewhat. They got to talk of prisoners, which gave the knight a chance to pay a neat compliment: "Mademoiselle, it would be better to fall into your hands as a prisoner than into many another’s, and I think your prison would not be so hard as that of the English.’ She replied that she had recently seen one whom she could wish to be her prisoner. And then I asked her, if she would make a bad prison for him, and she said not at all, and that she would hold him as dear as her own person, and I told her that the man would be very fortunate in having such a sweet and noble prison. What shall I say? She could talk well enough, and it seemed, to judge from her conversation, that she knew a good deal, and her eyes had also a very lively and lightsome expression.” When they took leave she begged him two or three times to came back soon, as if she had known him for a long time already. “And when we had departed my lord my father said to me: ‘What do you think of her whom you have seen? Tell me your opinion.’ ‘Monseigneur, she seems to me all well and good, but I shall never be nearer to her than I am now, if you please.’” Her lack of reserve left him without any desire to get better acquainted with her. So they did not get engaged, and of course the author says that he afterwards had reason not to repent it.
It is to be regretted that the chevalier has not given more autobiographical details and fewer moral exhortations, because these personal traits, showing how customs adapted themselves to the ideal, are very rare in the traditions of the Middle Ages.
In spite of his avowed intention to teach his girls “à roumancier,” the knight de la Tour Landry thinks, before all things, of a good marriage; and marriage had little to do with love. He reports to them a “debate” between his wife and himself, on the question, whether it is becoming “d’amer par amours.” He thinks that a girl may, in certain cases, for example, “in the hope of marrying,” love honourably. His wife thinks otherwise. It is better that a girl should not fall in love at all, not even with her betrothed, otherwise piety would suffer in consequence. "For I have heard many women say who were in love in their youth, that when they were in church, their thoughts and fancies made them dwell more on those nimble imaginations and delights of their love-affairs than on the service of God, and the art of love is of such nature that just at the holiest moments of the service, that is to say, when the priest holds our Lord on the altar, the most of these little thoughts would come to them.” Machaut and Peronnelle might have confirmed this.
It is not easy for us to reconcile the general austerity of the Chevalier de la Tour Landry with the fact that this father does not scruple to instruct his daughters by means of stories which would not have been out of place in the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. Still, even more recent literature, that of the Elizabethan age, for instance, may remind us how completely the world becomes estranged from the erotic forms of a few centuries back. As for betrothals and marriages, neither the graceful forms of the courtly ideal nor the refined frivolity and open cynicism of the Roman de la Rose had any real hold upon them. In the very matter-of-fact considerations on which a match between noble families was based there was little room for the chivalrous fictions of prowess and of service. Thus it came about that the courtly notions of love were never corrected by contact with real life. They could unfold freely in aristocratic conversation, they could offer a literary amusement or a charming game, but no more. The ideal of love, such as it was, could not be lived up to, except in a fashion inherently false.
Cruel reality constantly gave the lie to it. At the bottom of the intoxicating cup of the Roman de la Rose the moralist exposed the bitter dregs. From the side of religion maledictions were poured upon love in all its aspects, as the sin by which the world is being ruined. Whence, exclaims Gerson, come the bastards, the infanticides, the abortions, whence hatred, whence poisonings?—Woman joins her voice to that from the pulpit: all the conventions of love are the work of men: even when it dons an idealistic guise, erotic culture is altogether saturated by male egotism: and what else is the cause of the endlessly repeated insults to matrimony, to woman and her feebleness, but the need of masking this egotism? One word suffices, says Christine de Pisan, to answer all these infamies: it is not the women who have written the books.
Indeed, medieval literature shows little true pity for woman, little compassion for her weakness and the dangers and pains which love has in store for her. Pity took on a stereotyped and factitious form, in the sentimental fiction of the knight delivering the virgin. The author of the Quinze Joyes de Marvage, after having mocked at all the faults of women, undertakes to describe also the wrongs they have to suffer. So far as is known, he never performed this task.
Civilization always needs to wrap up the idea of love in veils of fancy, to exalt and refine it, and thereby to forget cruel reality. The solemn or graceful game of the faithful knight or the amorous shepherd, the fine imagery of courtly allegories, however brutally life belied them, never lost their charm nor all their moral value. The human mind needs these forms, and they always remain essentially the same.
- ↑ Instead of in blue, lady, you dress in green.
- ↑ I sell you the hollyhock.—Belle, I dare not tell How Love draws me towards you, But you perceive it, without saying a word.
- ↑ Of the castle of Love I ask you: Tell me the first foundation!—To love loyally. Now mention the principal wall Which makes it fine, strong and sure!—To conceal wisely. Tell me what are the loopholes, The windows and the stones!—Alluring looks. Friend, mention the porter!—Ill-speaking danger. Which is the key that can unlock it!—Courteous request.
- ↑ Vide page 37.
- ↑ When the priest said: Agnus Dei, Faith I owe to Saint Crepais, Sweetly she gave me the pax Between two pillars of the church. And I needed it indeed, For my amorous heart was Troubled that we had to part soon.