How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance Read online

  My French friend Marianne married Pierre in 1977, soon after a divorce that gave her sole custody of her twin daughters. She was twenty-nine at the time, and Pierre was forty-nine. Pierre’s sister, Jeanne, warned him that with such an age difference, he was likely to become a cuckold. Pierre responded that if that time were to come, he would survey the field of available men and choose a lover for his wife. Marianne did not wait for Pierre to find her a lover. Some fifteen years into their marriage, she fell in love with Stéphane, a Frenchman of her own age. Stéphane and Marianne did their best to keep their affair secret, but she was seen once too often exiting his apartment, and word got back to Pierre, who was at first incredulous and then enraged. He confronted his wife, asking her to choose between him and her lover. Deeply attached to Pierre, who had helped raise her daughters, but madly in love with Stéphane, she was torn between the two men and could not leave one or the other. Eventually she turned to Pierre’s sister, Jeanne, begging her to negotiate an arrangement.

  She would stay in the marriage until death, if she were allowed to be out of the house with no questions asked, from four to seven o’clock, every day except Sunday. After many hours of painfully frank talk, Pierre swallowed his pride and accepted her terms. They stayed married for another twelve years, until Pierre became terminally ill, whereupon Marianne nursed him faithfully until he died. She grieved him sincerely and then moved in with Stéphane.

  It is, I believe, a quintessentially French story. Since I knew all the parties concerned, I can say that they carried it off with great dignity. Marianne never spoke to me, or to anyone else, about the arrangement: I heard it from Jeanne. Although most of the people in their circle knew that Marianne and Stéphane were lovers, no one ever mentioned it. Everyone kept up appearances following the etiquette of their upper-bourgeois social class.

  How is it that Marianne, Pierre, and Stéphane were able to live out this unconventional scenario? Where in French history do we find the origins of such behavior? My mind immediately jumps back to the Middle Ages, to the fervent love stories of Lancelot and Guinevere, and Tristan and Iseult, and other tales of women halved between their husbands and their lovers. If this topos is by now a stock theme, incarnated in such world-famous novels as Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina, we should not forget that adultery as a literary subject first became fashionable in twelfth-century France. Yes, we are talking about the same century that encompassed the real-life history of Abélard and Héloïse.

  In real life, medieval women were subject to male authority, be it the rule of the father, the husband, or the priest. Remember how Héloïse submitted to absolute decisions made by her uncle and her teacher-lover-husband. Under Abélard’s tutelage, she was initiated into sex and love. At his insistence, she went to Brittany to have her baby and gave him up to the care of Abélard’s family. She married Abélard in secret despite her reservations about marriage, and she complied with his order to hide out in the convent where she had been raised. She even took the veil at his behest, though she had no sense of a religious vocation. Even such a remarkable woman as Héloïse bowed to the dictates of men. This was undoubtedly the case for almost all medieval women, be they peasants or princesses.

  Unlike the marriage of Abélard and Héloïse, most marriages among the nobility and upper bourgeoisie had nothing to do with love. In fact, the very suspicion of love between the unmarried was heavily censured, given the belief that love (amor in old French) was an irrational, destructive force. Marriages among the privileged classes were arranged by families in the interest of property and desired kinship, rather than by the future spouses themselves. Girls as young as thirteen or fourteen, but usually fifteen to seventeen, were married off to men of their same social condition, who were generally five to fifteen years older.

  But in literature and song things could be different. Twelfth-century lyric poetry and verse narratives responded to the fantasies of women as well as men, especially when women were patrons of the arts—a role they acquired increasingly in regional courts. Within a few generations, epic poems centering on battles, among them the heroic Song of Roland inspired by the First Crusade (1096–1099), gave way to chivalric romances featuring courageous knights and the gracious ladies they adored. If the lady happened to be someone else’s wife, well, that just added spice to the story. Indeed, more often than not, the beloved female was someone else’s wife. It didn’t take long for the lady and her lover to assume star billing in the cult of fin’amor—a term we usually translate as courtly love. This new vision of amorous relations between the sexes, which first emerged in song and on the page, would ultimately evolve into a model for all Western men and women, with or without the adulterous component. Today we call it romantic love.

  Let me pause for an objection. Surely men and women experienced something akin to romantic love before the twelfth century. The Bible tells us that King David lusted after Bathsheba, and that Isaac loved his new wife Rebekah. Ancient Greek tragedy gave us Phaedra, who burned with desire for her stepson Hippolytus, and Medea, whose jealous rage against her husband Jason caused her to murder their children. The Greek poet Sappho petitioned Aphrodite to transform her unrequited ardor for a young woman into reciprocal love, and the philosopher Plato extolled the love of boys as a natural phenomenon for older men. And who can forget Dido’s impassioned suicide after Aeneas abandoned her in Virgil’s great Latin epic, The Aeneid? Or Ovid’s rollicking Art of Love, which gave advice to randy suitors? It is easy to assume that love, such as we understand it today, has always existed.

  Yet something new in the history of love did emerge in France during the 1100s, a cultural explosion that proclaimed the rights of lovers to live out their passion despite all the objections mustered by society and religion. Even the history of Abélard and Héloïse, however rooted in submission to the church and traditional male dominance, was marked by this fledgling spirit that championed love for its own sake.

  In medieval stories, ardent lovers find themselves caught in a web of uncontrollable desire, placing them on a collision course with priests, parents, neighbors, and the ever-present husband. We see husbands enraged by wives attracted to other men. We see women making false accusations against the men who reject them. Reasonable men become bewitched by women, who are invariably young, beautiful, and blond. Foolish older women bemoan the loss of their charms and cling to younger men whose eyes search elsewhere. Money, social position, and age weigh in favor of some prospective mates over those who are less endowed. However great the differences between a twelfth-century castle and a contemporary ranch house, all these concerns are still with us. In matters of the heart, we are still kin to the storybook inhabitants of medieval France.

  This chapter describes how the French invented and propagated the ideals of courtly love. We start, as we must, in southern France, where troubadours introduced a new kind of song-poem in praise of an honored lady. Next we move to northern France, where minstrels took up troubadour themes and added their own refinements. In the north, at the court of Marie de Champagne, chivalric romances written in verse became the rage, most notably those of Chrétien de Troyes, whose tale of Lancelot and Guinevere would be read and imitated for centuries to come. Marie de Champagne’s chaplain, Andreas Capellanus, merits our attention for his Art of Courtly Love, which spread the precepts of courtly love throughout medieval Europe. We shall also look at a nasty interaction between a minstrel and a lady in an unusual verse story written by Conon de Béthune. Then we shall move to England, where a mysterious woman, Marie de France, gave poetic voice to many of the trials faced by lovers. To complete this collection of songs, poems, and stories destined for noble audiences, we shall consider laments of the “unhappy wife,” popular among the peasantry. This tour of twelfth-century culture will allow me to venture several generalizations that are open to debate.

  One medieval inhabitant of southern France has been credited with sowing the seeds for the flowering of romantic love in the Western world. In the
early twelfth century, William IX, Duke of Aquitaine, created the first troubadour love lyrics. These song-poems written in his native Provençal language focused exclusively on love and especially on the beloved woman, the domna. In a dramatic disavowal of traditional practice, William reversed masculine and feminine roles, granting the woman power over the man. Some of his early poems, it is true, reeked of gross misogyny and treated women as little more than “horses” to be ridden for male satisfaction, but other poems introduced the vision of the beloved as a mistress to be served and obeyed. It is this second model that would take root in high culture and spread its tendrils all over Europe.

  Before his death in 1127, Duke William was the most powerful nobleman in France. He possessed more land than the king and even refused to pay him homage, as was required by the feudal system. William was known as a rapacious warrior in battles against his neighbors and as the leader of a failed Crusade to the Holy Land. But he was, at the same time, a ladies’ man who carried his exploits to the bedchamber. All women were fair game, and he probably took some of them by force, as he took his neighbors’ lands. When he tired of his second wife, he simply replaced her with the Vicomtesse de Châtellerault. It didn’t matter to him (or to her?) that she was already married to one of his vassals. Not surprisingly, William was excommunicated. It is one of the ironies of history that such a brutal man was the founding father of romantic love.

  This example from one of William’s eleven extant poems reveals the newly exalted status of the female.

  By granting joy, my Lady can heal,

  By her anger she can kill.

  . . .

  If my Lady is willing to give me her love,

  I am ready to receive it and be grateful,

  Either to hide or proclaim it, and speak and act according to her pleasure . . . 1

  The William of this poem is respectful, submissive, attentive to his lady’s requests, willing to suffer her unpredictable whims—a far cry from the earlier brute who tyrannized men and women alike. Where did this new personality come from? Could it have been the influence of one woman, the Vicomtesse de Châtellerault? Does it echo strains of Christianity from the nascent cult of the Virgin Mary? Could it have sprung from Arab literature, which had already introduced love songs both in far-off Baghdad and nearby Spain? These questions continue to be debated by scholars, but all agree that William’s changed persona gave birth to a dramatically different vision of how women should be treated by men.

  The word “joy” employed by William became a key term in troubadour poetry. It represents the mystical fusion of two bodies and two souls in mutual ecstasy. In the words of the troubadour Bernart de Ventadorn, who sang the praise of William IX’s granddaughter, the renowned Eleanor of Aquitaine: “Joy, myself. Joy, my lady above all else.”2 Eleanor was married to the French king Louis VII from 1137 to 1152. By all accounts, she was a lively, beautiful, headstrong queen who may have strayed from the marital bed, while her earnest husband followed the straight and narrow. When their marriage was annulled, she left her two daughters in France and took as her second husband Henry II of England. At the court of England, Eleanor gave birth to three more daughters and five sons and continued to patronize the troubadours and minstrels who spoke her two native tongues—la langue d’oc, or Occitan, the language of southern France; and la langue d’oïl, the language of northern France, which we now call Old French.

  Troubadours included men of high rank and men of humble origins, and occasionally the troubadour was a trobairitz—that is, a woman. The Comtesse de Die, writing between 1150 and 1160, boldly presented herself as the director of erotic joy.

  My good friend, so pleasing, so handsome,

  When I hold you in my power,

  Sleeping with you at night,

  And give you a kiss of love,

  Know that my great desire

  Is to take you instead of my husband,

  But only if you will promise

  To do everything according to my will.3

  Rarely has a woman articulated her role as dominatrix with such clarity! She suggests that any man wanting a place in her bed would have to follow her sexual whims and fantasies. Still, legend tells us that the Comtesse de Die, married to Guilhem de Poitiers, fell unhappily in love with the poet and grand seigneur Raimbaut d’Orange, for whom she wrote poems of a very different nature.

  I have to sing, but I don’t want to sing,

  I am so full of rancor against the one I love

  I love him more than anything in the world.

  But neither kindness, nor courtesy, find favor with him

  Neither my beauty, nor my worth, nor my wit.

  I find myself cheated and betrayed

  As if I were ugly to behold.4

  Like her spiritual ancestor William IX of Aquitaine, the Comtesse de Die made no pretense that love existed without voluptuous intimacy. (Fortunately for posterity, the music to one of the Comtesse de Die’s song-poems has been preserved and can be heard today on a disc by the remarkable interpreter of medieval music, Elisabeth Lesnes.)

  In the north, minstrels known as trouvères took up troubadour themes, though the music itself was heavily influenced by the Parisian school of Notre Dame, which was devoted to the cult of the Virgin Mary. When you listen to this music from the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries, you discover that sacred and profane songs sound much alike, even if the words are different. Enough manuscripts still exist to give us a sense of the music, which was sung to the accompaniment of a small harp. Love in the north of France appears to have become more and more idealized, and the beloved lady more and more inaccessible, with the poet-minstrel downplaying his expectation of a physical reward. Unlike their southern counterparts, northern minstrels emphasized a love of longing rather than fulfillment.

  Suffering was a given for the lover-poet, such as Gace Brulé around the turn of the thirteenth century, who proudly proclaimed:

  I want my heart to suffer from Good Love

  Because no one has a heart as loyal as mine.

  Or again:

  Love makes me love the one who does not love me

  Thus I shall know nothing but pain and suffering.

  And:

  I am willing to suffer these sorrows

  So that I can augment my worth.5

  Suffering became a character test that would make the lover worthy of his lady’s affection. But whatever her feelings toward him, he was expected to be submissive and unswerving in his devotion, despite malevolent adversaries resolved to undo him. Those adversaries, called vilains or vileins in Old French (which originally meant of low birth and ultimately developed into our English word “villain”), might reveal the lover’s secret to a jealous husband or slander the lover or even injure him bodily.

  From the second half of the twelfth century onward, traveling minstrels celebrating the love of high-born women were ubiquitous in all French-speaking courts, not only on French soil but also in England at the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Henry II. Women were becoming a force to be reckoned with in noble society. While their men were often away at war or on Crusades or at the hunt, the women directed everyday life inside the château with their children, parents, servants, household knights, clerks, visiting friends, sycophants, and traveling entertainers. In numerous miniatures, they are portrayed dining at banquets, sharing the delights of music, food, and dance, and enjoying the pleasures of fin’amor. In romance texts, the number of female characters increased dramatically during this period, as if to reflect the growing importance of women in aristocratic life. Suddenly, more women were depicted in the song-poems recited before illiterate audiences gathering at castle doors and indoors among an aristocracy eager to hear the latest love story. What had previously been a poetic enterprise devoted primarily to male exploits now became truly co-ed. Alongside men warring against men in fierce battles, women and men became noble adversaries in the courtly game of love.

  I would like to have lived through t
hat shift in sensibility, when it became no longer possible for a knight to rely exclusively on his horse and sword. Male courtiers schooled in the new model of chivalry were required to learn dancing, verse writing, sweet talking, and chess. I would like to have seen the puzzled face of an old-time warrior as he listened to tales recounting the temptations of love or the earnest face of a mother as she encouraged her daughter to become not only a fine spinner and embroiderer but also an accomplished musician and an expert chess player. As I have elaborated in my book Birth of the Chess Queen, the board game that became de rigueur for aristocratic men and women provided a space where they could spar with their feelings as well as their chess pieces. And unlike games of dice, which were associated with license and disorder, chess provided a perfect metaphor for the ceremony of love among the nobility.

  By definition, that ceremony of love was intended primarily for the upper-class clique that frequented a court. Indeed, the French word courtoisie and its English cognate “courtesy” derive from the medieval cort, spelled cours in modern French and “court” in modern English. In the courts of French kings and queens, dukes and duchesses, counts and countesses, and lesser nobility, practitioners of courtoisie followed a prescribed set of rules designed to ensure polite commerce between the sexes and promote the idealized love created by southern troubadours and northern minstrels.

  The most famous court where this fashionable new love was celebrated belonged to Marie of Champagne, the eldest daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine and Louis VII. Through her marriage to Comte Henri of Champagne in 1164, Marie took possession of the court of Troyes, where she would reign until her death in 1198. It was under her auspices that some of the reputed “love trials” took place, she herself handing down seven judgments on the proper etiquette for lovers. For example, what gifts could lovers give each other? The Comtesse de Champagne answered: “a handkerchief, hair ribbons, a gold or silver crown, a clothes fastener, a mirror, a belt, a purse, a clothes tie, a comb, a muff, gloves, a ring, perfume, vases, trays, etc.”6 Asked in another case about the choice of a lover when a woman had two possibilities who were exactly equal except in fortune, the countess replied that the first man who had presented himself should be preferred. In a commentary that strikes us as unusual for its time, she added: “Indeed, a woman overflowing with material goods is more praiseworthy if she becomes devoted to a poor man rather than a very rich one.”