facts, was
composed between 1225 and 1275 by two poets, one writing later than the
other and under somewhat different inspiration. The story is
allegorical, and its main thread has to do with the adventures of a
young man, at once the hero and the poet, in his attempt to pluck a
beautiful rose, which he finds hedged about with thorns in a garden full
of marvels. In his attempts to reach the rose the lover is alternately
aided and hindered by various allegorical personages, whose names
suggest the part they play, such as Kindly Greeting and Modesty and
Vanity and Pity. To the poet who first undertook the telling of this
marvellous allegory, Guillaume de Lorris, woman is a superior being,
almost an angel; and love is a divine thing. Love is the theme of his
poem:

"Ce est li Romanz de la Rose
Ou l'Art d'Amours est toute enclose."

(This is the Romance of the Rose, wherein is all the art of love.) And
it is real love that he teaches; for the God of Love himself commands
the lover: "It is my wish and my command that you centre all the
devotion of your heart in one place." His lover is gentle and courteous;
we are in an atmosphere not very different from that of the romances of
chivalry.

When Jean de Meung undertakes, some fifty years later, to complete the
romance left unfinished by Guillaume, we find that woman is for him the
incarnation of all vices; that love is a wicked thing, the root of all
evil; that the art of deceiving women, not of loving them, is worth
learning. Nay, the utmost libertinage is sanctioned; there is no such
thing as fidelity in love, for it is contrary to the law of nature,
which designed _toutes pour touz et touz pour toutes_--all women for all
men, and all men for all women. Jean de Meung has absorbed all that the
most cynical libertines of antiquity could teach him, and to that he has
added his own rancor against woman. It is Ovid's _Art of Love and Remedy
of Love_ revised for mediaeval use. Anything further from the gallantry
of the romances of chivalry could hardly be found. And yet this cynical
attitude was, as we have attempted to show, but an outgrowth of
gallantry run mad; for in the beginning, gallantry, says Montesquieu,
"is not love, but it is the delicate, the light, the perpetual pretence
of loving."

VIII

MARIE DE BRABANT AND MAHAUT D'ARTOIS

THE household of the kings of France, so lately under the wise control
of Blanche de Castille or the pure infl