How the French Invented Love: Nine Hundred Years of Passion and Romance

by Marilyn Yalom

  There was a knight who had loved a lady

  While she was in her prime.

  She refused him her love and drove him away

  And then one day, she said: “Dear friend,

  I have given you a very hard time,

  Now, I recognize and grant you my love.”

  The knight responded:

  “By God, my lady, I’m sick to death

  Not to have known your favor in the past.

  Your face that was once like a lily

  Has so changed from bad to worse,

  That it seems to have been stolen from me.”

  When the lady heard herself so mocked,

  She became very angry and treacherously said:

  . . .

  “You would probably prefer

  The hugs and kisses of a beautiful young boy.”

  Stop for a moment to consider this amazing turn of events. The aging lady scorned by the knight accuses him of homosexuality, which was a crime punishable by death. She continues:

  “Seigneur, knight, you have spoken badly

  When you called my age into question.

  Even if I’ve used up all my allotted youth

  I am still beautiful and of such high estate

  That one would love me now with only partial beauty.”

  The knight ends up telling her that she is mistaken:

  “One does not love a lady for her parentage,

  But because she is beautiful, courteous, and wise.

  You will have to learn that truth once more.”9

  The bitterness carousing through this poem betrays the tensions that covertly existed between minstrels and their superiors, between suitors and supercilious ladies, between ideal love and base reality. The ideal lady, “beautiful, courteous, and wise,” is turned on her head in this picture of a proud aristocrat, who is vain, unsightly, and foolish. There is also a hint of the misogyny that was a given in medieval society, always ready to spring forth in vituperative denunciations of women. From the early days of Christianity, the church fathers presented women not only as inferior to men in every way but also as temptresses responsible for bringing evil into the world. Men were cautioned to beware of the Eve lurking in every woman. Still, though women were constantly devalued in religious discourse, as well as in the coarsely humorous, secular tales known as fabliaux, one didn’t expect to hear such sentiments on the tongue of a court minstrel.

  Another figure who contributed significantly to the flowering of chivalric romance in the late twelfth century was a mysterious woman called Marie de France. We know virtually nothing about her except that she lived in England and wrote twelve delightful lays and a number of fables. Presumably performed before the Anglo-Norman nobility that had ruled England since 1066, these “stories in verse,” as Marie called them, were undoubtedly instrumental in spreading the gospel of fin’amor to the other side of the English Channel.

  All of Marie’s lays dealt with love and presented the trials of lovers roiled by unfavorable forces: husbands, of course, but also the lovers themselves. Lovers were judged according to their generosity of spirit, their willingness to suffer, and, above all, their unending loyalty. There was no more noble goal in life than love, but only if the lovers were up to its measure. True love could even dissolve differences in rank, making a man or woman of low estate the equal of a prince or princess. Other song-poets, like Gace Brulé, would elaborate on this theme: “Love looks at neither birth nor riches. . . . It conquers all creatures . . . counts, dukes, kings of France.”

  When the king in Marie de France’s story “Equitan” offers himself to the wife of his seneschal, he woos her in the language of equality:

  Dearest lady, I give myself to you!

  Don’t think of me as your king,

  But as your vassal and your lover! 10

  With such honey-tongued speech, the king has little difficulty winning his suit. But these two lovers have internal flaws that lead to their doom. They plot the murder of the lady’s husband in a boiling bath and end up bringing this very same catastrophe upon themselves. The story ends with an explicit moral: “Whoever wishes evil on someone else will see misfortune fall back on himself.”

  As in “Equitan,” most of Marie de France’s lays concern women married to men they do not love; eight of the twelve center on adultery. Consider the story “Guigemar,” in which the leading lady has a jealous husband who keeps her permanently imprisoned in a room facing the sea. Her entire company consists of a sympathetic female servant and a priest-guardian. This unfortunate lady’s story is destined to intersect with that of the young knight Guigemar.

  In the beginning of the tale, Guigemar has all the attributes of the perfect knight except one: he is not susceptible to love. We are told, “Nature had committed an error by making him indifferent to love. . . . He acted as if he did not want to experience love. His friends as well as strangers saw this as a defect.”11 One day when he is at the hunt—his favorite activity—he spies a white hind and her fawn. Without hesitating, he aims an arrow that wounds the mother but also ricochets back upon him. In an instant, both knight and hind are lying on the ground, with Guigemar close enough to hear her expiring words: he will find no remedy to his wound until a lady suffers for the love of him and he for the love of her. As in Celtic legend, the supernatural erupts in the midst of a realistic scene and causes little surprise to the characters.

  Guigemar sets out on a journey that will bring him to the lady in question. He finds a boat conveniently moored without trace of an owner and settles in among luxurious furnishings, such as fine blankets, precious candlesticks, and a pillow that keeps you eternally young. (What a lovely idea!) As in Chrétien’s Lancelot, the narrator delights in the fabulous riches found within an enchanted realm. The magic boat carries Guigemar across the sea to his fated destination, to meet the lady sequestered by her jealous husband.

  Once the lady and her servant find Guigemar, more dead than alive, they carry him inside and tend to his needs. It is there that Guigemar is cured of his injury, only to fall into a kind of lovesickness that is equally painful. While he no longer feels the wound inflicted by the arrow, he discovers that “Love is a wound in his body.” Marie de France’s language, like that of Shakespeare and Proust, calls upon the vocabulary of sickness and injury to evoke the fierce turmoil that romantic love can generate. Of course, the lady is similarly wounded by love and shares with Guigemar the discovery of a mutual passion that will endure for a year and a half.

  Where is the husband during all this time? We don’t need to know. Inevitably he returns and discovers his wife’s adultery, putting an end to the lovers’ happiness. Guigemar is sent away in the same boat that took him to the land of love, and he returns, dejected, to his homeland. This last part of the story is replete with many more marvelous adventures that entail further use of the magic boat—this time by the lady—and the eventual reunion of the lovers.

  All these tales of female adultery probably sprang from the fact that medieval marriages among the nobility were rarely affairs of the heart. As we have seen, it was common for a nubile woman—as young as fifteen—to be wed to a much older man for reasons of property and rank. Small wonder that she dreamed of an attractive knight her own age with whom she could share transports unknown to conjugal life. Marie’s lays offered amorous fantasies as a counterreality to lived experience. If husbands had to put up with stories about wives in adulterous triangles, they could comfort themselves with the hope that such women appeared only in fiction.

  It is impossible to know to what extent female adultery was enacted in real life. Wives caught in the act might be turned out of the home by an irate husband, but the adulteress was not burned alive, as she might have been in earlier days, say, in ancient Rome, which condoned the slaying of both the woman and her lover. By the twelfth century, canon law regulated marriage in France, and its stance on adultery had considerably softened since antiquity. It specifically stated: “No man may kil
l his adulterous wife.”12 In fact, if a husband did not want to cast off his adulterous wife, it was he who had to do penance for two years.

  As for male adultery, it was never considered sufficient cause for a wife to forsake her husband. There had to be aggravating circumstances, such as the presence of the husband’s mistress under the marital roof. While medieval literature reflected a widespread obsession with female adultery, it paid scant attention to adulterous husbands, who were undoubtedly more common.

  Was the model of courtly love restricted to the nobility? In all probability, yes. Members of the lower classes had more elemental concerns, such as providing shelter and food for themselves and their families. Peasants and serfs in the country and artisans and merchants in the cities were as far removed from the tales of chivalric romance as jobless Americans were from the drawing-room characters of 1930s cinema. And yet there is evidence that even the lower strata of medieval society were not uninfluenced by the adulterous fantasies of their “betters.” A type of medieval song known as the “lament of the unhappy wife” (la mal mariée) was popular among peasants; it repeatedly explored the triangle of wife, husband, and lover. Here is one example drawn from a group collected by Ria Lemaire at the University of Poitiers:

  Fat lot I care, husband, about your love

  Now that I have a friend!

  He looks handsome and noble

  Fat lot I care, husband, about your love.

  He serves me day and night

  That is why I love him so.13

  The unhappily married wives of these popular songs, unaffected by feelings of guilt, sing out defiantly: “My husband cannot satisfy me / As a compensation I will take a lover.” In one ballad, the speaker complains of being beaten by her husband because he saw her kissing her ami. Now she plans her revenge: “I’ll make a cuckold of him. . . . I’ll go and sleep completely naked with my friend.”14

  In another ballad, the unhappy wife cries out repeatedly: “Don’t beat me, miserable husband!” But she also warns him:

  Because you mistreat me so,

  I shall choose a new lover.

  . . .

  He and I shall love each other

  And our pleasure will be double.15

  These songs suggest a trickle-down theory of culture, from high nobility to the popular classes. And since they are in the voice of the wife rather than her lover, they also reveal how cultural roles can cross gender boundaries. Some of the earliest troubadour poets were women, and some of the earliest popular French songs were sung by women “blues singers” bemoaning their marital fates and lauding their lovers.

  Although it is difficult to know how much these songs and stories related to actual practice, it is safe to say that they did affect the way people began to think about love. The invention of romantic love represents what we today call a paradigm shift, one that offered a radically new set of relations between the sexes and one that has had surprisingly long-lasting consequences.

  First, love became feminized. The lady took center stage and has, I believe, commanded the spotlight ever since. Both as the object of man’s desire and as the subject of her own desire, Frenchwomen have enjoyed unrivaled erotic prestige. In life as in literature, the descendants of Iseult and Guinevere are expected to be sexy. The French have never believed that women are any less passionate than men.

  Moreover, the twelfth century inaugurated a tradition of French women writers, who took up the theme of love from their own perspective. To name a few of the best known during the past nine hundred years: Marie de France, Christine de Pizan, Louise Labé, Madame de La Fayette, Madame de Staël, Marceline Desbordes-Valmore, George Sand, Colette, Simone de Beauvoir, Violette Leduc, Marguerite Duras, Françoise Sagan, Hélène Cixous, and Annie Ernaux. Many of these women openly expressed sexual longing, as in Labé’s cry that she was “burning” from love.

  Second, men and women had to meet certain standards appropriate for lovers. Looks counted, and still count, especially the woman’s looks. Falling in love was often occasioned by a lady’s sublime beauty. Love entered through the eyes and went directly to the heart. While the French speak of un coup de foudre (a stroke of lightning), the English expression is even more visually explicit: love at first sight. The man, too, was expected to be attractive, though his major attributes might lie elsewhere: he was judged primarily through his courage and loyalty.

  Third, it was generally agreed that romantic love was predicated on obstacles, there to intensify the experience, as any steamy novel worthy of the word “romance” will demonstrate today. Denis de Rougemont’s highly influential analysis argued that romantic love, as invented in the twelfth century and practiced since then, thrives by confronting obstacles.16 Yet, however perilous the journey and despite the opposition of family, religion, and society, medieval stories of extramarital love did not usually end in permanent ostracism or suicide. Their heroines were not likely to kill themselves, like Dido in Virgil’s Aeneid, and they weren’t constrained to wear an A for adultery as in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter.

  To this day, adultery just doesn’t have the same moral stigma in France that it has in the United States. My French friends could not understand the hullabaloo around Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky and criticized him only because they thought he should have chosen someone thinner with more class. Even a woman deputy in Parliament and leader of the religious right—anti-abortion and anti-gay—congratulated Clinton on his libido: “He loves women, this man! . . . It’s a sign of good health!”17

  The French are used to presidents who scarcely bother to conceal their extramarital affairs. Giscard d’Estaing, president from 1974 to 1981, even wrote about them in his memoirs and in two novels, the last one written when he was in his eighties. The adulterous secrets of Jacques Chirac, president from 1995 to 2007, were revealed by his former chauffeur, Jean-Claude Laumond, in a 2001 publication, and that same year, Chirac’s wife, Bernadette, admitted that she put up with his roving libido for the sake of the children, without letting him forget that he would be lost without her.18

  The late François Mitterrand, when asked by a journalist during his presidency whether it was true that he had a daughter outside his marriage, replied: “Yes, it’s true. And so what? It’s none of the public’s business.” When he died, the children from both of his unions attended his funeral in the company of their mothers, Danielle Mitterrand and Anne Pingeot.

  American wives of political husbands who have strayed from the marital bed and embarrassed the family—for example, the wives of Governors Mark Sanford and Arnold Schwarzenegger—no longer put up with such behavior; they head for the divorce courts and try to protect their children as best they can.

  It is noteworthy that all of these examples concern male adulterers. No woman has been president of France, and relatively few have been ministers, senators, or deputies. But Nicolas Sarkozy’s wife, Carla Bruni, has a past that would undoubtedly bar her from becoming an American first lady. An incredibly successful singer, songwriter, and former model (whose nude photos have circulated on the Internet), she made no secret of her thirty-some lovers, including singer Mick Jagger and former French prime minister Laurent Fabius. Her eight-year liaison with radio personality Raphaël Enthoven, which began when he was still married, produced a son out of wedlock. Enthoven’s ex-wife, Justine Lévy, got her revenge by writing about the affair in her 2004 novel, Rien de grave (Nothing Serious). Bruni’s surprising 2008 marriage to Nicolas Sarkozy, soon after his divorce, helped him regain some of the popularity he had enjoyed when he was first elected president.

  Sarkozy lost the presidency to François Hollande in 2012. Both men had unconventional marital lives behind them: Sarkozy’s three marriages and Hollande’s common-law union with Ségolène Royal, the mother of their four children. Having split with Ségolène following her unsuccessful bid for the presidency in 2007, Hollande could openly admit to the affair he was having with a journalist ten years younger. Any single one of these indiscretion
s would have doomed the candidacy of an American president.

  Fourth, though medieval literature privileged extramarital love, it also produced several remarkable works portraying spouses, like Erec and Enide, who remain passionately attached to one another. These tales suggest that marital love requires the same qualities of ingenuity, playfulness, and forbearance commonly associated with unmarried lovers.

  In the French circles familiar to me for the past fifty years, I have been struck over and over again by the efforts many men and women make to maintain the aura of romance in their marriages. Frenchwomen tend to privilege their roles as wives, whether they have children or not, whether they have jobs or not. Remember that the French word for woman—femme—is identical with the word for wife. In her best-selling book Le conflit: La femme et la mère (literally “The Conflict: Woman and Mother”), Elisabeth Badinter argues that women should not let the pressures of motherhood undermine their roles as wives.19

  I wonder if American women, especially if they have children and careers, privilege their position as wives in quite the same way. They would be unlikely to practice the kind of artifice I saw on the part of a woman in her eighties who made extreme efforts to keep her somewhat younger husband in her thrall. One day, returning from a shopping trip, she dramatically recounted how she had tripped and fallen in the street. Her husband, alternately distressed and angry, said she shouldn’t be gadding about in high heels. Later, when she told me that it wasn’t much of a fall, I asked why she bothered to mention it. “To keep Paul interested. If that hadn’t happened, I would have made up something else.”

  I recall a conversation with Elisabeth Badinter that was another eye-opener in my understanding of French romance. When her husband Robert Badinter was elected to the French Senate after a very long government career at the highest level, I thoughtlessly inquired, “I don’t know how old he is . . .” She cut me short with a smiling response: “He’s sixty-eight and handsome as a god.” I was amazed at her open expression of sensual love and could only babble: “An American woman would not have said what you just said.”