How the French Invented Love (5 page)

The bedchamber scene leaves no doubt as to the corporeal pleasures both lovers enjoyed.

    
It was so exceedingly sweet

    
And good—the kisses, the embraces—

    
That Lancelot knew a delight

    
So fine, so wondrous, that no one

    
In the world had ever before

    
Known anything like it, so help me

    
God! And that’s all I’m allowed

    
To tell you; I can say no more.

The art of Chrétien is not prurient. It stops short of describing the physical details of lovemaking because such descriptions were considered too coarse for noble sensibilities. A chivalric story respects silence and leaves much to our imagination.

Chrétien set the gold standard for love stories during the late twelfth century. His numerous imitators spread the vision of the young hero doggedly pursuing a sentimental education alongside his escapades as a warrior. There could be various twists in the plot, but if the story did not portray romantic love, it would not have found an enthusiastic audience.

A
nother commanding figure at the court of Marie de Champagne was the chaplain Andreas Capellanus. Like Chrétien, he wrote and prospered under Marie’s generous patronage. His book
The Art of Courtly Love
(
De arte honeste amandi
), written in 1185, became the official guide for practitioners of
fin’amor
, not only in the provincial city of Troyes but throughout medieval Europe. Circulated both in the original Latin and in the vernacular of each country, its admonitions were cited endlessly to demonstrate how lovers should behave.

Capellanus presented love as an all-consuming attraction between two noble participants who were equal in every way. The man had to treat the lady as if she were of higher status, however. He had to address her as if he were her feudal subject and he always had to submit to her will. In the first part of his treatise, he lays out thirteen precepts for an ideal lover.

    Flee avarice like the plague and embrace its opposite.

    Remain chaste for the one you love.

    Don’t try to destroy the love of a lady who is happily bound to another.

    Don’t look for love with a woman you would not marry.

    Remember to avoid lying.

    Avoid revealing the secrets of your love.

    By obeying in every way the commands of the ladies, try to belong to the chivalry of love at all times.

    When giving and receiving the pleasures of love, try to respect modesty at all times.

    Don’t bad-mouth others.

    Don’t divulge lovers’ secrets.

    In every circumstance, be polite and courteous.

    In giving yourself to the pleasures of love, do not exceed the desire of your lover.

    Be worthy of the chivalry of love.
⁸

The lover was expected to show respect for his beloved, demonstrate extravagant marks of adoration, perform exploits in her honor, and remain true to her even if he received nothing in recompense. It was up to the lady to decide if she would reward him with the gift of her person. For the most part, Capellanus focused on extramarital love and repeated Marie de Champagne’s declaration that love could exert its power between two married people because they were bound by duty. Married people could not even experience jealousy in regard to one another, according to Marie and Capellanus, since marriage was a contractual arrangement that had nothing to do with spontaneous attraction. Only nonmarried lovers could experience jealousy, which was considered intrinsic to “true love.” Marie’s reasoning suited her personal situation, first as a married woman whose husband was away for long periods during the Crusades, and then as an unmarried widow. Just as she had persuaded Chrétien to privilege adultery in his
Lancelot
, so too she leaned upon Capellanus to write about nonmarital love as if it were a lofty ideal.

But by the time Capellanus had finished his opus, he made a complete about-face and no longer condoned extramarital affairs. Suddenly, in the third and final section of his work, he condemned adulterous love and made a good case for love in marriage, but the damage had already been done. Adultery had already become the major model for romance in medieval France.

Courtly love was predicated on desire so intense that it could not be bound by the conventional rules of society. Passion took precedence over everything, including ties to husbands, family, overlords, and the dictates of the Catholic Church. Not surprisingly, the church reacted vigorously to the adulation of profane love; at the beginning of the thirteenth century, it even tried to suppress it through the arm of the Inquisition. But before that time, the cult of courtly love openly defied religious prohibitions, and in so doing, created the trio of familiar stock characters: the husband, the wife, and her lover.

Another adulterous couple, Tristan and Iseult, rivaled Lancelot and Guinevere as the most popular French model of star-crossed lovers. Later audiences throughout the world would come to know them through Wagner’s incomparable opera,
Tristan and Isolde
. In the earliest Tristan saga based on oral Celtic sourses, the hero is sent to Ireland by King Mark to fetch his bride, Iseult. On the return voyage, Tristan and Iseult accidentally drink the love potion intended for Iseult and Mark. Henceforth, the lovers are eternally bound to each other by a fatal passion, despite Iseult’s subsequent marriage to King Mark. In centuries to come, the love potion became a robust metaphor for the mystery of passion that starts at first sight and endures in spite of everything designed to annihilate it.

W
hile the works of Chrétien and Capellanus and various versions of
Tristan and Iseult
were creating a groundswell in favor of courtly love, the poet Conon de Béthune revealed its underside in a long poem derived from an unpleasant incident at the French court at the time of the marriage of the young king Philippe Auguste to Isabelle de Hainaut. Philippe Auguste was the son of the widowed Adèle de Champagne, the third wife of Louis VII. Her two brothers, Henri and Théobald de Champagne, married the two daughters of Louis VII and Eleanor d’Aquitaine, thus making Adèle the wife of her brothers’ father-in-law! More pertinent to our concern, it also made her the sister-in-law of Marie de Champagne. When the minstrel Conon de Béthune came to the royal court, both Adèle and Marie ridiculed him because of his Flanders accent. Conon got his revenge on these contemptuous ladies in the following savage piece, which I have translated at length, since you are unlikely to find it elsewhere.

    
Once upon a time, in another country,

    
There was a knight who had loved a lady

    
While she was in her prime.

    
She refused him her love and drove him away

    
And then one day, she said: “Dear friend,

    
I have given you a very hard time,

    
Now, I recognize and grant you my love.”

The knight responded:

    
“By God, my lady, I’m sick to death

    
Not to have known your favor in the past.

    
Your face that was once like a lily

    
Has so changed from bad to worse,

    
That it seems to have been stolen from me.”

    
When the lady heard herself so mocked,

    
She became very angry and treacherously said:

    
 . . .

    
“You would probably prefer

    
The hugs and kisses of a beautiful young boy.”

Stop for a moment to consider this amazing turn of events. The aging lady scorned by the knight accuses him of homosexuality, which was a crime punishable by death. She continues:

    
“Seigneur, knight, you have spoken badly

    
When you called my age into question.

    
Even if I’ve used up all my allotted youth

    
I am still beautiful and of such high estate

    
That one would love me now with only partial beauty.”

The knight ends up telling her that she is mistaken:

    
“One does not love a lady for her parentage,

    
But because she is beautiful, courteous, and wise.

    
You will have to learn that truth once more.”
⁹

The bitterness carousing through this poem betrays the tensions that covertly existed between minstrels and their superiors, between suitors and supercilious ladies, between ideal love and base reality. The ideal lady, “beautiful, courteous, and wise,” is turned on her head in this picture of a proud aristocrat, who is vain, unsightly, and foolish. There is also a hint of the misogyny that was a given in medieval society, always ready to spring forth in vituperative denunciations of women. From the early days of Christianity, the church fathers presented women not only as inferior to men in every way but also as temptresses responsible for bringing evil into the world. Men were cautioned to beware of the Eve lurking in every woman. Still, though women were constantly devalued in religious discourse, as well as in the coarsely humorous, secular tales known as fabliaux, one didn’t expect to hear such sentiments on the tongue of a court minstrel.

A
nother figure who contributed significantly to the flowering of chivalric romance in the late twelfth century was a mysterious woman called Marie de France. We know virtually nothing about her except that she lived in England and wrote twelve delightful lays and a number of fables. Presumably performed before the Anglo-Norman nobility that had ruled England since 1066, these “stories in verse,” as Marie called them, were undoubtedly instrumental in spreading the gospel of
fin’amor
to the other side of the English Channel.

All of Marie’s lays dealt with love and presented the trials of lovers roiled by unfavorable forces: husbands, of course, but also the lovers themselves. Lovers were judged according to their generosity of spirit, their willingness to suffer, and, above all, their unending loyalty. There was no more noble goal in life than love, but only if the lovers were up to its measure. True love could even dissolve differences in rank, making a man or woman of low estate the equal of a prince or princess. Other song-poets, like Gace Brulé, would elaborate on this theme: “Love looks at neither birth nor riches. . . . It conquers all creatures . . . counts, dukes, kings of France.”

When the king in Marie de France’s story “Equitan” offers himself to the wife of his seneschal, he woos her in the language of equality:

    
Dearest lady, I give myself to you!

    
Don’t think of me as your king,

    
But as your vassal and your lover!
¹⁰

With such honey-tongued speech, the king has little difficulty winning his suit. But these two lovers have internal flaws that lead to their doom. They plot the murder of the lady’s husband in a boiling bath and end up bringing this very same catastrophe upon themselves. The story ends with an explicit moral: “Whoever wishes evil on someone else will see misfortune fall back on himself.”

As in “Equitan,” most of Marie de France’s lays concern women married to men they do not love; eight of the twelve center on adultery. Consider the story “Guigemar,” in which the leading lady has a jealous husband who keeps her permanently imprisoned in a room facing the sea. Her entire company consists of a sympathetic female servant and a priest-guardian. This unfortunate lady’s story is destined to intersect with that of the young knight Guigemar.

In the beginning of the tale, Guigemar has all the attributes of the perfect knight except one: he is not susceptible to love. We are told, “Nature had committed an error by making him indifferent to love. . . . He acted as if he did not want to experience love. His friends as well as strangers saw this as a defect.”
¹¹
One day when he is at the hunt—his favorite activity—he spies a white hind and her fawn. Without hesitating, he aims an arrow that wounds the mother but also ricochets back upon him. In an instant, both knight and hind are lying on the ground, with Guigemar close enough to hear her expiring words: he will find no remedy to his wound until a lady suffers for the love of him and he for the love of her. As in Celtic legend, the supernatural erupts in the midst of a realistic scene and causes little surprise to the characters.

Guigemar sets out on a journey that will bring him to the lady in question. He finds a boat conveniently moored without trace of an owner and settles in among luxurious furnishings, such as fine blankets, precious candlesticks, and a pillow that keeps you eternally young. (What a lovely idea!) As in Chrétien’s
Lancelot
, the narrator delights in the fabulous riches found within an enchanted realm. The magic boat carries Guigemar across the sea to his fated destination, to meet the lady sequestered by her jealous husband.

Once the lady and her servant find Guigemar, more dead than alive, they carry him inside and tend to his needs. It is there that Guigemar is cured of his injury, only to fall into a kind of lovesickness that is equally painful. While he no longer feels the wound inflicted by the arrow, he discovers that “Love is a wound in his body.” Marie de France’s language, like that of Shakespeare and Proust, calls upon the vocabulary of sickness and injury to evoke the fierce turmoil that romantic love can generate. Of course, the lady is similarly wounded by love and shares with Guigemar the discovery of a mutual passion that will endure for a year and a half.