[1] See the manners of the Azores: there, love of God and the other sort of love occupy every moment. The Christian religion, as interpreted by the Jesuits, is much less of an enemy to man, in this sense, than English protestantism; it permits him at least to dance on Sunday; and one day of pleasure in the seven is a great thing for the agricultural labourer, who works hard for the other six.
CHAPTER LI
LOVE IN PROVENCE UP TO THE CONQUEST OF TOULOUSE, IN 1328, BY THE BARBARIANS FROM THE NORTH
Love took a singular form in Provence, from the year 1100 up to 1328. It had an established legislation for the relations of the two sexes in love, as severe and as exactly followed as the laws of Honour could be to-day. The laws of Love began by putting completely aside the sacred rights of husbands. They presuppose no hypocrisy. These laws, taking human nature such as it is, were of the kind to produce a great deal of happiness.
There was an official manner of declaring oneself a woman's lover, and another of being accepted by her as lover. After so many months of making one's court in a certain fashion, one obtained her leave to kiss her hand. Society, still young, took pleasure in formalities and ceremonies, which were then a sign of civilisation, but which to-day would bore us to death. The same trait is to be found in the language of Provence, in the difficulty and interlacing of its rhymes, in its masculine and feminine words to express the same object, and indeed in the infinite number of its poets. Everything formal in society, which is so insipid to-day, then had all the freshness and savour of novelty.
After having kissed a woman's hand, one was promoted from grade to grade by force of merit, and without extraordinary promotion.
It should be remarked, however, that if the husbands were always left out of the question, on the other hand the official promotion of the lover stopped at what we should call the sweetness of a most tender friendship between persons of a different sex.[1] But after several months or several years of probation, in which a woman might become perfectly sure of the character and discretion of a man, and he enjoy at her hand all the prerogatives and outward signs which the tenderest friendship can give, her virtue must surely have had to thank his friendship for many a violent alarm.
I have spoken of extraordinary promotion, because a woman could have more than one lover, but one only in the higher grades. It seems that the rest could not be promoted much beyond that degree of friendship which consisted in kissing her hand and seeing her every day. All that is left to us of this singular civilisation is in verse, and in a verse that is rhymed in a very fantastic and difficult way; and it need not surprise us if the notions, which we draw from the ballads of the troubadours, are vague and not at all precise. Even a marriage contract in verse has been found. After the conquest in 1328, as a result of its heresy, the Pope, on several occasions, ordered everything written in the vulgar tongue to be burnt. Italian cunning proclaimed Latin the only language worthy of such clever people. 'Twere a most advantageous measure could we renew it in 1822.
Such publicity and such official ordering of love seem at first sight to ill-accord with real passion. But if a lady said to her lover: "Go for your love of me and visit the tomb of our Lord Jesus Christ at Jerusalem; there you will pass three years and then return"—the lover was gone immediately: to hesitate a moment would have covered him with the same ignominy as would nowadays a sign of wavering on a point of honour. The language of this people has an extreme fineness in expressing the most fugitive shades of feeling. Another sign that their manners were well advanced on the road of real civilisation is that, scarcely out of the horrors of the Middle Ages and of Feudalism, when force was everything, we see the feebler sex less tyrannised over than it is to-day with the approval of the law; we see the poor and feeble creatures, who have the most to lose in love and whose charms disappear the quickest, mistresses over the destiny of the men who approach them. An exile of three years in Palestine, the passage from a civilisation full of gaiety to the fanaticism and boredom of the Crusaders' camp, must have been a painful duty for any other than an inspired Christian. What can a woman do to her lover who has basely deserted her at Paris?