Le roman de la rose

And did good justice to the plaintiffs,
Nor should anyone dare to contradict him,
Then they assembled to elect him....
A great churl original: "villain," meaning a low-born but powerful man among them they elected,
(1) Of all as many as they were.

The most robust of as many as they (1) were,
(2) Greater.

The most brawny, and the biggest (2)
And they made him Prince and Lord.
(3) That one.

He (3) swore that he would hold justice for them
If each in right faith delivered to him
Of the goods so that he might live....
From there came the beginning
Of the Kings and earthly Princes
According to the ancient Books.

He continues for some time
on the same tone: but these are
matters that one would treat today
in a gentler and
more temperate manner. In the strokes of
satire that escape him so naturally
against love itself, for which he nevertheless
pretends to give laws under the
auspices of the sovereign arbiter of this
passion, one finds the most singular
instructions, which a matron
who no longer knows pleasures except
by an ancient and sad memory,
can give to a young person
who is beginning to enter the world.
It is from there, as I have said,
that

that Regnier drew his Macette a famous hypocritical character in French satire; but
one has only to recur to the original.
One finds there those naive strokes that flow
from the source, and which do not fail to
strike, despite the roughness or the sim-
plicity that one expects to encounter there.
And whatever we are told, one sees well
that if the love of delicacy and of
sentiments was sometimes the beautiful
passion of our fathers, it was only
too often confused with that love
which knows only a base voluptuousness.
Here is an example in volume 2, Verse
14653.

For nature is not so foolish
As to cause Marotte to be born,
Only for Robichon
If the understanding is fixed there,
Nor Robichon for Mariette,
Nor for Agnes, nor for Perrette;
Rather she made you, fair son, doubt it not,
All for all, and all for all,
Each woman common for each man
And each man common for each woman.

These are only the minor
strokes of these instructions of the Ma-
tron. But the character who figures
most for satire is False-Seeming original: "Faux-semblant".
See what the Author makes him
say