service for life, and the priest and court around
blessed the union and bore witness to its
celebration. Then, giving him a ring as the sign of
their everlasting union, the lady raised him with
that one holy kiss which was the last and dearest
and highest consecration of their love. So
thoroughly spiritualised was this knightly union
of friend and lady, that a woman was assumed
to have lost her lover if by chance she married
him; for it was impossible, according to the
ideas of the times, that the knight and the
husband, the lover and the possessor, should be one
and the same person. Wherefore the lady who
married her knight, but who had promised
another aspirant that if ever she changed her
friend she would take him in his stead, was
held by Eleanor de Guienne, presiding over the
Cours d'Amour, to be bound by her promise,
seeing that she had lost her knight when she
became his wife—an anecdote sufficiently
expressive of the spirit of these chivalric unions,
and the sharp line drawn between marriage and
love.

There were four degrees or stages in the
progress of this knightly love. When desirous of
pleasing, but afraid to speak and paying only
mute court, the knight was then a hésitant;
when encouraged so far as to humbly express
his feelings otherwise than by dumb show, he
was a priant; when retained as a knight and
given a silken cord, gloves, or a sash to wear—
her colours, in fact—he was then an écouté, a
knight who had the right to maintain the
supremacy of his lady's charms against all comers,
and wear her favours in his helmet; but if
after this she publicly pledged her love to him,
and gave him a kiss, then he was her drutz or
ami, her friend nearer and dearer to her than
any other human being, for whom was reserved
all the ineffable love of her soul, all the gracious
tenderness of her heart and fancy. This was
the boon which fair and fruitful Provence gave
to the women of the middle ages; the effects of
which were felt to the furthest corner of the then
civilised world, and which have not entirely died
away even to this day. Dante is full of this
chivalric, or what we should now call passionless
and platonic, love for Beatrice; and in
many of the older poets before Dante the same
exalted state of spiritual ecstasy is to be traced;
the same rendering up of heart and soul, with
never a trace of grosser longing than for that
divine charity of love, that noble pity of woman-
hood, which would give back thought for
thought, and gracious acceptance of faithful
service.

          Trustful in servitude
              I have been and will be,
And loyal unto love my whole life through.
          A hundredfold of good
             Hath he not guerdon'd me
For what I have endured of grief and woe?
Since he hath given me unto one of whom
    Thus much he said,—Thou mightest seek for aye
          Another of such worth, so beauteous.
              Joy therefore may keep house
          In this my heart, that it hath loved so well
              Meseems I scarce could dwell
    Ever in weary life or in dismay
If no true service still my heart gave room.*
* Rinaldo d'Aquino. Rossetti's translation.

These chivalric unions never throve heartily
in England. A less imaginative race, with
thicker senses, it was scarcely possible for us
to subtilise and refine on this subject;
perhaps well for us, in one sense, since it led us
earlier than most others to the perception
of the fact that the truest love is contained
in the happiest marriage, and that the lady does
not always lose her friend when she transforms
him into her husband.

In France, that earlier chivalrous respect for
women which acknowledged their moral
superiority and besought grace and guidance at their
hands, still exists in modernised form; less
distinctly than a couple of centuries ago, but with
marked emphasis yet, and undeniable social and
legal results. The notable facts that women
possess half the capital of France—that they
are habitually employed in many of the callings
devoted here solely to men,—that they are
considered intellectually capable of managing large
commercial concerns, and are always associated
with the husband's business as he would associate
any other intelligent and trusty friend, their
wide social influence, and the moral hold which,
as mothers, they retain on every man to the end
of his life, and the allowance of strong personal
friendships between them and men without
scandal necessarily accruing, so long as strict
personal respect is maintained, and the world
sees no familiarity—all these circumstances of
social life in France are remnants of chivalric
times, filtered through the salons of the
sixteenth century. What those salons were, one
of the best of our new writers shall tell us, in
that delightful book of hers which goes by the
name of the loveliest woman of the last
generation.†
† Madame Récamier. By Madame M.

In the beginning of the seventeenth century
the Hotel Rambouillet took its place in the
civilised world as the latest form of the spirit
of chivalry which had never died out from
France. Madame de Rambouillet was only
twenty-two, when ill health and her own inborn
refinement drove her from the coarse and noisy
fêtes of the court, and led her to form a court of
her own; a salon in which beauty of language,
delicacy of manner, and the acceptance of men
for what they were themselves and not for their
fathers' names, were the principal features.
Malherbe and Vaugelas, the one a poet, the
other a purist, grammarian, and academician,
and both creators of French style, were among
the most favoured guests. They were each
between forty-five and fifty years of age, not
personally attractive in any special manner, and not
of the social class usually courted by ladies since
the race of the Troubadours had ceased in the
land, and song was no longer a claim to favour.