"The air was rent with names of ladies" in the big tournaments of the day. "On, valiant knights, fair eyes behold you!"
The proclamation of the beauty of his lady, as all romances of that day remind us, was one of the serious duties of the knight, and Cervantes only slightly caricatures the custom when he makes Don Quixote "station himself in the middle of a high road and refuse to let the merchants of Toledo pass unless they acknowledged there was not in the universe a more beautiful damsel than the peerless Dulcinea del Toboso."
There was also a sort of official post or title, Poursuivant d'Amour, the knight dedicating himself to love as to a religion with solemn fervour. The Duke of Lancaster, says Froissart, "possessed, as part of his inheritance in Champagne, the Castle of Beaufort, of which an English Knight called Poursuivant d'Amour was Captain." It appears that this was a title which knights used to give themselves on account of wearing the portraits or colours of their mistress and challenging each other to fight in her honour.
To be in love was a social necessity. It was hopelessly "bad form" to be otherwise.
"A knight without love is an ear of wheat without grain," says some authority of the day.
It certainly was a lovelorn time! "Love was everything," says Justin Smith, an author whose two large volumes on the troubadours testify to wide study of the subject, "and we cannot wonder that much was made of it. Its hopes and fears were the drama of that day. Sweet and passionate thoughts were the concert and the opera. Tales of successful and unsuccessful wooing were the novels.... Love, as we are to learn, was the shoot of modern culture, and the tree that now overspreads us with its boughs bloomed, even in their time, into a poetry as unsurpassed and as unsurpassable after its kind as the epics of Homer."
But this immense change in the attitude of mind towards life and towards women naturally could not take place without producing a universal upheaval of the current morality: a thorough upsetting of the doctrines upon which the husband had hitherto founded an authority practically limitless.
IN THE CAMARGUE, FROM THE RAILWAY.
By E. M. Synge.