cusatio recta--Against love marriage is an
insufficient excuse--resulted in a sort of moral bigamy that was
sanctioned generally by custom, in Provence by the clergy, and which, like
marriage was contracted in the presence of witnesses. Gerard de
Roussillon, a mediaeval writer, described a lady who while marrying one man
coincidentally gave a ring and promise of love to another. The proceeding
was strictly in accordance with the sentiment of the day which regarded
love as incompatible with marriage.

A case in point is contained in the reports of Martial d'Auvergne. A
knight loved a lady who could not accept his vows inasmuch as she loved
some one else. But she promised to do so if it so happened that she lost
the other man--a contingency which to-day would mean if he died or ran
away. Very differently the jurisprudence of the epoch interpreted it. The
lady married the man she loved whereupon the knight exacted fulfilment of
the agreement. Queen Eleanor, before whom the case was heard, decided in
his favor, on the ground, perhaps subtle, that the lady's husband, in
becoming her husband, became _ipso facto_, by that very act, amatorially
defunct.

In a case not similar but cognate, judgment rendered by the Countess of
Champagne was as follows: "By these presents we declare and affirm that
love cannot exist between married people for the reason that lovers grant
everything unconstrainedly whereas married people are obliged to submit to
one another. Wherefore shall this decision, reached prudently in
conformity with the opinion of many other ladies, be to you all a constant
and irrefragible truth. So adjudged in the year of grace 1174, the third
day of the calends of May, seventh indiction."

In another case Ermengarde of Narbonne decided that the addition of the
marriage tie cannot invalidate a prior affair, _nisi_--unless the lady has
in mind to have done with love forever.

Decretals of this nature, however absurd they may seem, were at least
serviceable in the reforms they effected. According to the civil law if a
husband absented himself for ten years, the wife had the right to remarry.
According to the law of love, the absence of a lover, however prolonged,
did not release the lady from her attachment. The civil law authorized a
widow to remarry in a year and a day. The law of love exacted for the
heart a widowhood of twice that period. The civil law permitted a husband
to beat his wife reasonably. The law of love