Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/142

120 at it; so did Nicolas de Clemanges, three times over. A secretary to the duke of Orleans, the Milanese Ambrose de Mihis, addressed to Gontier Col a Latin letter, in which a courtier dissuades his friend from entering into court service. Translated into French, this letter figures among the works of Alain Chartier, under the title Le Curial, and afterwards Robert Gaguin translated it back into Latin.

The theme was even worked out by a certain Charles Rochefort in a long-winded allegorical poem, L’Abuzé en Court, afterwards attributed to King René. Towards the end of the fifteenth century, Jean Meschinot still rhymes as follows:

In the sixteenth century the old motif had lost nothing of its freshness.

For the most part the praises of a frugal life and of hard work in the fields are not based on the delights of simplicity and labour in themselves, nor on the security and independence they seemed to confer; the positive content of the ideal is the longing for natural love. The pastoral is the idyllic form assumed by erotic thought. Just like the dream of heroism which is at the bottom of the ideas of chivalry, the bucolic dream is somewhat more than a literary genre. It is a craving to reform life itself. It does not stop at describing the life of shepherds with its innocent and natural pleasures. People want to imitate it, if not in real life, at least in the illusion of a graceful game. Weary of factitious conceptions of love, the aristocracy sought a remedy for them in the pastoral ideal. Facile and innocent love amid the delights of nature seemed to be the lot of country people, theirs to be the truly enviable form of happiness. The villein, in his turn, becomes an ideal type.