Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/126

104 obvious that the royal court, archaic like all courts, must declare in favour of the ancient and severe ideal of love, and that the 700 known members of the club were far from conforming their practice to it. By what is known of their habits, the great lords of that epoch were rather strange protectors of female honour. The most curious fact is that we find there the same persons who, in the debate about love, had defended the Roman de la Rose and attacked Christine de Pisan. Evidently it was merely a society amusement.

The intimate circle of Jean de Meun’s admirers consisted of men in the service of princes, both priests and laymen. It is identical with that of the first French humanists. One of them, Jean de Montreuil, provost of Lille, secretary to the dauphin and later to the duke of Burgundy, was the author of good many Ciceronian epistles, and, like his friends, Gontier and Pierre Col, he corresponded with Nicolas de Clemanges, the grave censor of the abuses in the Church. We now find him devoting his talents to the defence of the Roman de la Rose, and of its author, Jean de Meun. He asserts that several of the most learned and enlightened men honour the Roman de la Rose so much that their appreciation resembles a cult (paene ut colerent), and that they would rather do without their shirt than this book. He exhorts his friends to undertake its defence, like himself. “The more I study”—he writes to one of the detractors—“the gravity of the mysteries and the mystery of the gravity of this profound and famous work of Master Jean de Meun, the more I am astonished at your disapprobation.” He himself will defend it to his last breath, and many others will serve this cause with words and deeds.

The conviction with which Jean de Montreuil speaks, seems already to indicate that the question of love, after all, involved graver issues than those of a court amusement, and this is further proved by the fact that Jean Gerson, the illustrious chancellor of the university, took part in the quarrel. He hated the Roman de la Rose with implacable hatred. The book seemed to him to be the most dangerous pest, the source of all immorality. In his works he reverts again and again to the pernicious influence “of the vicious romaunt of the rose.” If he had a copy, which was the only one and worth a thousand pounds, he would rather burn it than sell it to be published.