Le roman de la rose

* Takes away.

It is that someone might steal them *
When they have put them together,
At which they are astonished without ceasing;
The third is the pain of leaving them,
As I told you before,
Wickedly they go deceiving themselves.
Thus money original: "pecune" takes its revenge,
Like a very noble and frank Lady,
On the Serfs who keep her enclosed;
In peace she stays and rests,
And makes the unhappy ones watch,
And worry and labor.
Under feet she thus keeps and tames them,
That she has honor and they the shame.
And the torment and the damage,
Which anguish their courage.

Does one not find style and much sense in the explanation he gives to this common maxim, that honors change manners; a maxim he believes as false as it was common in his time, and as it has still been since. Here is what he says of it:

And people say a word,
Commonly which is very foolish.
And some hold it as true,
By their foolish sense which misleads them;
That honors change manners; *
But those argue badly,

Verse 6527.

* Change.

* Change.

For honors do not make a change *
Rather they make signs and demonstrations.
What manners they had in them before,
When they were in small states.
And that they have held the paths,
By which they have come into honors.

Finally if I did not fear to burden this Preface, or to fatigue a Reader by the excessive length of these extracts, one would see that besides morality one still finds in this Romance a politeness of manners which does honor to our nation, having reached more than four centuries ago that point which most neighboring nations have not yet reached. There are even traits of politics, characters, portraits, maxims, rules of conduct, philosophical truths, sentiments: and all that makes it well felt that one was right to regard it in its time as an essential Book for the use of civil life, because there are few of these ancient Books where one finds at the same time such a great variety of necessary, useful, and agreeable things.