With all this romance and poetry there went a freedom of intercourse between the sexes that not infrequently led to serious immorality. Not only did the ladies play rather rough games and listen to very vulgar stories with the men, but they received visits from men in their bed-chambers, tête-à-tête. More surprising still, ladies sometimes visited men in this way, without its being considered a serious breach of etiquette, as one can see in the fashionable romance of Jean de Dammartin et Blonde d'Oxford. The ladies, when they really fell in love, did not attempt to conceal the passion from any feeling of shame or delicacy; nay, they were commonly very forward, and became ardent suitors sometimes, with less of restraint in word and deed than was shown by the chivalrous knight under similar circumstances. Indeed, the knight had need to be a veritable Joseph to withstand temptation, if there were many scenes in real life like that described, for example, in the romance of Amis et Amiles, where the good knight is pursued by a demoiselle who positively insists on loving him.
The hours of the lady's day were regulated, we may suppose, by the proverb which says:
"Lever à cinq, diner à neuf,
Souper à cinq, coucher à neuf,
Fait vivre d'ans nonante et neuf."
(Rising at five, dining at nine, supping at five, sleeping at nine, makes one live to ninety-and-nine.) Sometimes, instead of rising at five and dining at nine, it is rising at six and dining at ten, supping at six and to bed by ten; but we are not, in this case, promised the ninety-and-nine years of life. Dinner between nine and ten, and other meals at suitable hours, seems to have been the rule in France even until the sixteenth century. Breakfast was a very uncertain meal (think of breakfast before a nine o'clock dinner!), but supper was almost as elaborate as dinner. As candles and lamps were very expensive, being regarded as almost a luxury, there was some reason in the early hours for meals. For the same reason, in summer, when there were no fires to supply light, most people went to bed as soon as it grew dark. The lady of the house is told, in a French housekeeper's book of the fourteenth century, to see that the candles are not wasted. She must go around to see that all fires are out and the house properly closed and that the servants are in bed. These latter are to place the candle allowed them on the floor, at a safe distance from the bed, and the lady must take care "to teach them to put out their candle with the mouth, or with the hand before getting in bed, and not by throwing their chemises over it"--servants, mistress, and all, be it remembered, slept naked.
The kind of life we have been describing, the washing of hands, the plentiful food, the wine, the amusements, the rich costumes--all these are things belonging to the lady. The woman of the poorer classes, the laboring woman, had no such comforts; lucky was she, indeed, if she had enough of coarse food and coarse clothing for herself and children. The mediaeval moralists noted the inequality of the classes, and one of them compares the fare of the rich, which we have mentioned, with that of the poor: "There was not one among them, great or small, who did not have a fine appetite for dry (black) bread, and garlic, and salt; nor did they eat anything else with these, neither mutton, nor beef, nor a bit of goose or young spring chicken. And after the meal they took up the basin with both hands, and drank water." Having attempted to give some idea of the life of a lady of the time, we may now turn to the life of Blanche de Castille, the first lady of France in the second quarter of the thirteenth century. For the first time we shall find a woman whose history will include a large part of the history of France during her period. As a late biographer, Elie Berger, Histoire de Blanche de Castille, says: "Her life, during a great part of the thirteenth century, is the life of France itself, the France to which she gave peace; her history is the history of the power of the throne, of the monarchy, outside of which there was then no France, no patrie."