Ho, Gautier, je n’en voeil plus! fi! 
 Dites, seres vous tous jours teus! 
 Vous estes un ors menestreus!

“Ho, Walter!  I want no more of that:  Shame!  Say! are you going to be always like that?  You’re a dirty beggar!” A fight seems inevitable, but Marion turns it into a dance, and the whole party, led by the pipers, with Robin and Marion at the head of the band, leave the stage in the dance which is said to be still known in Italy as the “tresca.”  Marion is in her way as charming as Nicolette, but we are less interested in her charm than in her power.  Always the woman appears as the practical guide; the one who keeps her head, even in love:—­

   Elle l’a mis a raison: 
    “Aucassins, biax amis dox,
    En quele tere en irons nous?”
    “Douce amie, que sai jou? 
    Moi ne caut ou nous aillons.”

The man never cared; he was always getting himself into crusades, or feuds, or love, or debt, and depended on the woman to get him out.  The story was always of Charles VII and Jeanne d’Arc, or Agnes Sorel.  The woman might be the good or the evil spirit, but she was always the stronger force.  The twelfth and thirteenth centuries were a period when men were at their strongest; never before or since have they shown equal energy in such varied directions, or such intelligence in the direction of their energy; yet these marvels of history,—­these Plantagenets; these scholastic philosophers; these architects of Rheims and Amiens; these Innocents, and Robin Hoods and Marco Polos; these crusaders, who planted their enormous fortresses all over the Levant; these monks who made the wastes and barrens yield harvests;—­all, without apparent exception, bowed down before the woman.

Explain it who will!  We are not particularly interested in the explanation; it is the art we have chased through this French forest, like Aucassins hunting for Nicolette; and the art leads always to the woman.  Poetry, like the architecture and the decoration, harks back to the same standard of taste.  The specimens of Christian of Troyes, Thibaut, Tristan, Aucassins, and Adam de la Halle were mild admissions of feminine superiority compared with some that were more in vogue, If Thibaut painted his love-verses on the walls of his castle, he put there only what a more famous poet, who may have been his friend, set on the walls of his Chateau of Courteous Love, which, not being made with hands or with stone, but merely with verse, has not wholly perished.  The “Roman de la Rose” is the end of true mediaeval poetry and goes with the Sainte-Chapelle in architecture, and three hundred years of more or less graceful imitation or variation on the same themes which followed.  Our age calls it false taste, and no doubt our age is right;—­every age is right by its own standards as long as its standards amuse it;—­but after all, the “Roman de la Rose” charmed Chaucer,—­it may well charm you.  The charm may not be that of Mont-Saint-Michel or of Roland; it has not the grand manner of the eleventh century, or the jewelled brilliancy of the Chartres lancets, or the splendid self-assertion of the roses:  but even to this day it gives out a faint odour of Champagne and Touraine, of Provence and Cyprus.  One hears Thibaut and sees Queen Blanche.