The plea of wedlock is not a sufficient excuse from love.
It is undoubted that love is always diminishing or increasing.
A two years' widowhood is enjoined for a deceased lover.
It is shameful to love those with whom marriage would be shameful.
A true lover does not desire the embrace of any one save his companion in love.
Easy acceptance renders love contemptible; a slow acceptance causes it to be held dear.
There is nothing to prevent one woman from being loved by two men, nor one man by two women.
In the last quoted of these remarkable laws (which were the work of women and of a few men who wished to please women), it will be observed that no authority or countenance is given to the loving of two women by one man. Our author regards the effect of these courts and their code as on the whole beneficial. His judgment may be sound, monstrous as the code seems to us, recognizing and even sanctioning as it did relations of the sexes not formed according to civil laws; for, as he says, "it refined the inevitable evil, substituted an easy for an almost impracticable moral code, and being compelled to draw a new line between venial offences and coarse licentiousness, exacted a rigid obedience to those laws." There is also some force in his plea that the courts of love "rescued woman from what would have become a condition of intolerable degradation, elevated affection rather than passion into the place of honor, and encouraged devotion in the stronger sex, grace and propriety in the weaker." It is undoubtedly true that when society became more rigid in sexual morality, and the mediæval code of love disappeared, there remained the tenderness and courtesy for the fairer and weaker sex which that code had done so much to develop.
Mr. Van Laun's first volume brings us down only to the Renaissance. But at that period the characteristic trait of French literature developed itself strongly. That trait is satire; not the bloody scourge of Juvenal, but a light, caustic, reserved, and almost pleasant although malicious satire--malicious in the French sense of _malice_, which is not so strong a word as its English counterpart. The difference between the French spirit and the English is shown by the fact that with free thought in the English race came stubborn dissent; in the French, light-hearted satire. "Satire," as Mr. Van Laun justly says, "is at the root of the French character, an instinct among the descendants of the ancient Gauls, who loved to fight and to talk well." This satire broke out in the sixteenth century with a brightness and causticity which has ever since distinguished French literature. The leader was Marguerite, sister to Francis I., the well-known Queen of Navarre. Her "Heptameron" is a strange book for a woman, and not a bad woman, a lady, and a queen, to have written. In it "she vents her contemptuous scorn upon husbands, although [perhaps because] she was married; against monks, though she was an ardent devotee of religion; against lawyers and doctors, though she was a queen." But it is most happily added that "her shrewdest satire of all is unconsciously pointed against herself; for she stands revealed to us a very woman, the rivals for whose favor are God and the devil, and who affords to neither of these more than a short coquettish glance."