Le roman de la rose

be judged at least by its weight. But he ordered that the chest should not be opened until after his funeral.

After the final funeral rites, the Religious, touched by the piety of the deceased, assembled to open the chest, which they found filled with beautiful and large pieces of slate, on which the late Jean de Meun had traced Arithmetic and Geometric figures. These good Religious, indignant at seeing themselves played by a Poet, took it into their heads to exhume his body: but the Parliament of Paris, informed of this inhumanity, issued a Decree that obliged the Jacobins to give the deceased an honorable burial in the very Cloister of their Convent.

I will not write the Life of this ingenious Poet here, I refer to that by André Thevet, although it is languidly written; it will be found following the Prefaces of this Book.

I cannot better give the plan of this famous Romance than by reporting

what the Poet Baïf said about it, in a Sonnet to King Charles IX. Here it is:

Sire, beneath the discourse of an imagined dream,
Within this old Romance you will find deduced,
The painful pursuit of a desirous Lover
Against a thousand labors, obstinate in his flame.
Before reaching his destined good,
Evil-Tongue and Danger try to put him to flight:
At the end Fair-Welcome, taking the lead,
Lodges him after having traveled long.
The Lover in the Orchard, as a reward for the hardships,
Which he constantly endures, suffering diverse pains,
Gathers from the flowering Rosebush the precious Bud.
Sire, this is the subject of the Romance of the Rose,
Where the pursuit of thorny loves is enclosed;
The Rose is the gracious Guerdon reward of love.

* Guerdon, reward.

Thus this Garden, or this Orchard so agreeable, of which it is so often spoken in this Romance, is none other than the Garden of Cipris Venus, as our Poets call it; and this precious Flower that one goes there to gather, has at all times been