Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/44

26 they give only trouble and anxiety; they have to be clothed, shod, fed; they are always in danger of falling and hurting themselves; they contract some illness and die. When they grow up, they may go to the bad and be put in prison. Nothing but cares and sorrows; no happiness compensates us for our anxiety, for the trouble and expenses of their education. Is there a greater evil than to have deformed children? The poet has no word of pity for their misfortune; he holds

Happy are bachelors, for a man who has an evil wife has a bad time of it, and he who has a good one always fears to lose her. In other words, happiness is feared together with misfortune. In old age the poet sees only evil and disgust, a lamentable decline of the body and the mind, ridicule and insipidity. It comes soon, at thirty for a woman, at fifty for a man, and neither lives beyond sixty, for the most part. It is a far cry to the serene ideality of Dante’s conception of noble old age in the Convivio!

The world, says Deschamps, is like an old man fallen into dotage. He has begun by being innocent, then he has been wise for a long time, just, virtuous and strong:

In another place he laments: Pour quoy est si obscurs le temps, Que li uns l’autre ne cognoist, Mais muent les gouvernements De mal en pis, si comme on voit?