Eve.  A little hard!

Devil.  He’ll soon be soft enough! 
 Harder than hell he is till now.

Eve.  He’s very frank!

Devil.  Say very low! 
 To help himself he does not care;
 The helping you shall be my share;
 For you are tender, gentle, true,
 The rose is not so fresh as you;
 Whiter than crystal, or than snow
 That falls from heaven on ice below. 
 A sorry mixture God has brewed,
 You too tender, he too rude. 
 But you have much the greater sense,
 Your will is all intelligence. 
 Therefore it is I turn to you. 
 I want to tell you—­

Eve.  Do it now!

The woman’s greater intelligence was to blame for Adam’s fall.  Eve was justly punished because she should have known better, while Adam, as the Devil truly said, was a dull animal, hardly worth the trouble of deceiving.  Adam was disloyal, too, untrue to his wife after being untrue to his Creator:—­

La femme que tu me donas
 Ele fist prime icest trespass
 Donat le mei e jo mangai. 
 Or mest vis tornez est a gwai
 Mal acontai icest manger. 
 Jo ai mesfait par ma moiller.

The woman that you made me take
 First led me into this mistake. 
 She gave the apple that I ate
 And brought me to this evil state. 
 Badly for me it turned, I own,
 But all the fault is hers alone.

The audience accepted this as natural and proper.  They recognized the man as, of course, stupid, cowardly, and traitorous.  The men of the baser sort revenged themselves by boorishness that passed with them for wit in the taverns of Arras, but the poets of the higher class commonly took sides with the women.  Even Chaucer, who lived after the glamour had faded, and who satirized women to satiety, told their tale in his “Legend of Good Women,” with evident sympathy.  To him, also, the ordinary man was inferior,—­stupid, brutal, and untrue.  “Full brittle is the truest,” he said:—­

For well I wote that Christ himself telleth
 That in Israel, as wide as is the lond,
 That so great faith in all the loud he ne fond
 As in a woman, and this is no lie;
 And as for men, look ye, such tyrannie
 They doen all day, assay hem who so list,
 The truest is full brotell for to trist.

Neither brutality nor wit helped the man much.  Even Bluebeard in the end fell a victim to the superior qualities of his last wife, and Scheherazade’s wit alone has preserved the memory of her royal husband.  The tradition of thirteenth-century society still rules the French stage.  The struggle between two strong-willed women to control one weak-willed man is the usual motive of the French drama in the nineteenth century, as it was the whole motive of Partenopeus of Blois, one of the best twelfth-century romans; and Joinville described it, in the middle of the thirteenth, as the leading motive in the court of Saint Louis, with Queen Blanche and Queen Margaret for players, and Saint Louis himself for pawn.