Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/135

Rh 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