Le roman de la rose

fate. One sees it only too clearly in the places where he speaks of those sensory pleasures, which are almost always the stumbling block of lively and impetuous loves.

It is not, however, that one does not find in his Romance the laws of that tender and delicate love, the passion of beautiful souls, who know no true good but that of loving. He has even spread its maxims in more than one place; but as he depicts a lover too lively to be formed on such noble ideas, he is often obliged to fall back on this love of sensibility to which nature only too ordinarily carries us. This is even the main part of his work, which he thinks to enliven sometimes by liberties that were not even permitted in a time when our language, less chaste than it is today, granted much more to the imagination than it does at present.

The Satire spread through this Romance.

Satire reigns no less in this Romance than love. Perhaps it is even more wisely treated there than this

this passion. Sometimes it revolves around the defects of the sex referring to women, which he exaggerates a bit too vividly and in terms that have been justly held against him. Sometimes he takes aim at that inequality of conduct held by lovers before and after their marriage: at another time he attacks the license of the Cloisters: and shall I say that living under the royal power, he ventures so far as to make a rather bold depiction of the manner in which peoples gave themselves Kings. After having spoken, then, of the simple and natural life of the first men, he shows the dissensions and the evils brought by property and the sharing of goods. Here is what he says of it at Verse 10060:

And the earth itself they divided (1)
And in the dividing (2) they placed boundaries:
And when they placed the boundaries
Many times they fought one another,
And they took (3) what they could,
The strongest had the largest parts...

And at Verse 10070:

Then it was necessary that one ordained
Someone who should guard the dwellings,
And who should take all the malefactors,

(1) Shared.

(2) In the sharing.
(3) Took away.

And