t the scimitars of Saladin's followers, the
fevers, the plagues, the many miserable deaths of the unknown East. "If
any lady be unfaithful," says Quienes de Bethune, "she will have to be
unfaithful with some base wretch."

Et les dames ki castement vivront
Se loiaute font a ceus qui iront;
Et seles font par mal conseil folaje,
A lasques gens et mauvais le feront,
Car tout li bon iront en cest voiage.

"I have taken the cross on account of my sins," sings Albrecht von
Johansdorf, one of the most earnest of the minnesingers; "now let God
help, till my return, the woman who has great sorrow on my account, in
order that I may find her possessed of her honour; let Him grant me this
prayer. But if she change her life (_i.e_., take to bad courses), then
may God forbid my ever returning." The lady is bound (the Courts of Love
decide this point of honour) to reward her faithful lover. "A knight,"
says a lady, in an anonymous German song published by Bartsch, "has
served me according to my will. Before too much time elapse, I must
reward him; nay, if all the world were to object, he must have his way
with me" ("und waerez al der Werlte leit, so muoz sin wille an mir
ergaen"). But, on the other hand, the favoured knight is bound to protect
his lady's good fame.

Se jai mamie en tel point mis,
Que tout motroit (m'octroit) sans esformer,
Tant doi je miex sonnor gaiter--

thus one of the interlocutors in a French _jeu-parti_, published by
Maetzner; a rule which, if we may judge from the behaviour of Tristram
and Launcelot, and from the last remnants of mediaeval love lore in
modern French novels, means simply that the more completely a man has
induced a woman to deceive her husband, the more stoutly is he bound to
deny, with lies, rows, and blows, that she has ever done anything of the
sort. Here, then, we find established, as a very fundamental necessity
of this socially recognized adultery, a reciprocity of fidelity between
lover and mistress which Antiquity never dreamed of even between husband
and wife (Agamemnon has a perfect right to Briseis or Chryseis, but
Clytaemnestra has no right to Aegisthus); and which indeed could scarcely
arise as a moral obligation except where the woman was not bound to love
the man (which the wife is) and where her behaviour towards him depended
wholly upon her pleasure, that is to say, upon her satisfaction with his
behaviour towards her. This,