Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/280

250 Thus says a song of the fifteenth century. Deschamps says of the lovers of a lady:

Although other colours also had their meaning in amorous symbolism, a man exposed himself specially to raillery by dressing in blue or in green, above all in blue, for a suggestion of hypocrisy was mixed up with it. Christine de Pisan makes a lady say to her lover who draws attention to his blue dress:

That is probably why, by a very curious transition, blue, instead of being the colour of faithful love, came to mean infidelity too, and next, besides the faithless wife, marked the dupe. In Holland the blue cloak designated an adulterous woman, in France the “cote bleue” denotes a cuckold. At last blue was the colour of fools in general.

Whether the dislike of brown and yellow sprang from an æsthetic aversion or from their symbolic signification remains undecided. Perhaps an unfavourable meaning was attributed to them, because they were thought ugly.