istres et conserves, je vais
traiter et raconter et inventer ung galimatias_."

THE DIZAIN OF QUEENS OF THAT NOBLE MAKER IN THE FRENCH TONGUE, MESSIRE
NICOLAS DE CAEN, DEDICATED TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS ISABELLA OF PORTUGAL,
OF THE HOUSE OF THE INDOMITABLE ALFONSO HENRIQUES, AND DUCHESS DOWAGER
OF BURGUNDY. HERE BEGINS IN AUSPICIOUS WISE THE PROLOGUE.

The Prologue

A Sa Dame

Inasmuch as it was by your command, illustrious and exalted lady, that I
have gathered together these stories to form the present little book,
you should the less readily suppose I have presumed to dedicate to your
Serenity this trivial offering because of my esteeming it to be not
undeserving of your acceptance. The truth is otherwise: your postulant
approaches not spurred toward you by vainglory, but rather by equity,
and equity's plain need to acknowledge that he who seeks to write of
noble ladies must necessarily implore at outset the patronage of her who
is the light and mainstay of our age. I humbly bring my book to you as
Phidyle approached another and less sacred shrine, _farre pio et
saliente mica_, and lay before you this my valueless mean tribute not as
appropriate to you but as the best I have to offer.

It is a little book wherein I treat of divers queens and of their
love-business; and with necessitated candor I concede my chosen field to
have been harvested, and scrupulously gleaned, by many writers of
innumerable conditions. Since Dares Phrygius wrote of Queen Heleine, and
Virgil (that shrewd necromancer) of Queen Dido, a preponderating mass of
clerks, in casting about for high and serious matter, have chosen, as
though it were by common instinct, to dilate upon the amours of royal
women. Even in romance we scribblers must contrive it so that the fair
Nicolete shall be discovered in the end to be no less than the King's
daughter of Carthage, and that Sir Dooen of Mayence shall never sink in
his love affairs beneath the degree of a Saracen princess; and we are
backed in this old procedure not only by the authority of Aristotle but,
oddly enough, by that of reason.

Kings have their policies and wars wherewith to drug each human
appetite. But their consorts are denied these makeshifts; and love may
rationally be defined as the pivot of each normal woman's life, and in
consequence as the arbiter of that ensuing life which is eternal.
Because--as anciently Propertius demanded, though not, to speak the
truth, of any woma