dies were sanctioned by the society of the seventeenth
and eighteenth centuries. In the mediaeval castle, where, as we have
seen, the lady, separated from her own sex, is surrounded by a swarm of
young men without a chance of marriage, and bound to make themselves
agreeable to the wife of a military superior; the woman soon ceases to
be the exclusive property of her husband, and the husband speedily
discovers that the majority, hence public ridicule, are against any
attempt at monopolizing her. Thus adultery becomes, as we have seen,
accepted as an institution under the name of _service_; and, like all
other social institutions, developes a morality of its own--a morality
within immorality, of faithfulness within infidelity. The lady must be
true to her knight, and the knight must be true to his lady: the Courts
of Love solemnly banish from society any woman who is known to have more
than one lover. Faithfulness is the first and most essential virtue of
mediaeval love; a virtue unknown to the erotic poets of Antiquity, and
which modern times have inherited from the Middle Ages as a requisite,
even (as the reproaches of poets of the Alfred de Musset school teach
us) in the most completely illicit love. Tristram and Launcelot, the two
paragons of knighthood, are inviolably constant to their mistress: the
husband may and must be deceived, but not the wife who helps to deceive
him. Yseult of Brittany and Elaine, the mother of Galahad, do not
succeed in breaking the vows made to Yseult the Fair and to Queen
Guenevere. The beautiful lady in the hawthorn _alba_ "a son cor en amar
lejalmens." But this loyal loving is for the knight who is warned to
depart, certainly not for the husband, the _gilos_, in whose despite
("Bels dous amios, baizem nos eu e vos--Aval els pratzon chantols
auzellos--_Tot O fassam en despeit del gilos_") they are meeting. The
ladies of the minnesingers are "pure," "good," "faithful" (and each and
all are pure, good, and faithful, as long as they do not resist) from
the point of view of the lover, not of the husband, if indeed a husband
be permitted to have any point of view at all. And as fidelity is the
essential virtue in these adulterous connections, so infidelity is the
greatest crime that a woman (and even a man) can commit, the greatest
misfortune which fate can send to an unhappy knight. That he leaves a
faithful mistress behind him is the one hope of the knight who, taking
the cross, departs to mee