Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/328

286 Ne hurtez plus à l'uis de ma pensée, Soing et Soucy, sans tant vous travailler; Car elle dort et ne veult's'esveiller, Toute la nuit en peine a despensée,

En dangier est, s'elle n'est bien pansée; Cessez, ceasez, laissez la sommeiller; Ne hurtez plus à l'uis de ma pensée, Soing et Soucy, sans tant vous travailler"

For the spirit of the epoch nothing heightened so much the acrid flavour of sad and sensitive love as the addition of an element of profanation. Religious travesty has created something better than the obscenities of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles; it furnished the form for the tenderest love-poem which that age produced: L'Amant rendu Cordelier à l'Observance d' Amours.

Already the poetical club of Charles d'Orléans had imagined a literary brotherhood whose members, in analogy to the reformed Franciscans, called themselves "amourex de l'observance." The author of L'Amant rendu Cordelier developed this motif. Who is this author? Is it really Martial d'Auvergne? It is hard to believe it, so much does this poem rise above the level of his work.

The poor disillusioned lover comes to renounce the world in the strange convent, where only "the martyrs of love" are received. He tells the Prior the touching story of his despised love; the latter exhorts him to forget it. Under a medieval guise we seem to perceive already the genre of Watteau. Only the moonlight is wanting to remind us of Pierrot. "Was she not in the habit," asks the Prior, "of giving you a sweet look or saying 'God save you' in passing?"—"I had not got so far in her good graces," replies the lover; "but at night I stood about the door of her house, and looked up at the eaves."