Le roman de la rose

say in volume 2, Verse 11657, etc. and 12396.

Morality spread through this Romance.

Our fathers always wanted to season their most licentious works with a relish of morality. They did not take the trouble to give them those useful and gracious tints of manners, which the ancients taught us to scatter lightly in our writings. They wanted sermons, crushing by a tedious length and by trivial maxims. One always knows what they are going to say even before reading it. One sees a sample of it at the very head of this Romance; fortunately that does not go as far as disgust. The Author gives a glimpse of what he could have done, but he has the discretion not to give himself up entirely to the taste of his century.

He knew how to employ the morality he scattered in this Romance in two ways. The first, but the most ingenious, is a foundation of manners that he hid in the economy of his work, and which one can only well perceive at the end of the reading. I have already remarked that he paints a young man

man seduced by purely exterior graces, and who gives himself up all at once to the most insane love. He is anxious, he is agitated, he runs, he seeks the means to satisfy himself: he cannot succeed, but he is only more struck by the arrows of love: he gives himself up to this divinity; he listens to its laws and observes them; he hopes for relief from it and receives only sorrows. Reason presents herself, who wants to dissuade him from loving: as wise as she is, she cannot make herself heard by a youth preoccupied with a foolish love. She comes to him in vain even at times when his pains are both most vivid and most piercing; she gains no more one time than the other. He does not trouble himself with the refusals made by Wealth, so necessary in loves, to communicate herself to him: he wants to reach the goal of his desires: that is what he is solely occupied with. He finds there insurmountable difficulties that make him implore the forces of the God of Love, who is willing in his favor to gather them all. What pains to surmount