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Under the forest-trees of a stately place there was held a Court of Love, in imitation and revival of those pretty pageantries and tournaments of tongues which were the chief social and royal diversion of the Italy of Lucrezia Borgia and the France of Marguerite de Valois.

It was a golden August afternoon, towards the close of a day which had been hot, fragrant, full of lovely lights and shadows. Throned on a hill a mighty castle rose, aerial, fantastic, stately, with its colonnades of stone rose-garlanded, and its stone staircases descending into bowers of foliage and foam of flowers. Its steep roofs were as sheets of silver in the sun, its many windows caught the red glow from the west, and its bastions shelved downward to meet smooth-shaven lawns and thickets of oleanders luxuriant with blossom, crimson, white, or blush-colour. In the woods around, the oaks and beeches were heavy with their densest leafage; the deer couched under high canopies of bracken and osmunda; and the wild boars, sunk deep in tangles of wild clematis and beds of meadow-sweet, were too drowsy in the mellow warmth to hear the sounds of human laughter which were wafted to them on the windless air. In the silent sunshiny vine-clad country which stretched around those forests, in 'le pays de rire et de ne rien faire,' from many a steep church-steeple and many a little white chapel on the edge of the great rivers or in the midst of the vast wheat-fields, the vesper-bell was sounding to small townships and tiny hamlets.

It was seven o'clock, and the Court of Love was still open; the chamber of council, or throne-room, being a grassy oval, with grassy seats raised around it, like the seats of an amphitheatre; an open space where the forest joined the gardens, with walls, first of clipped bay, and then of dense oak foliage, around it; the turf had been always kept shorn and rolled, and the evergreens always clipped, and a marble fountain in the centre of the grass, of fauns playing with naiads, bore an inscription testifying that, in the summer of the year of grace 1530, the Marguerite des Marguerites had held a Court of Love just there, using those same seats of turf, shadowed by those same oak-boughs.

'Why should we not hold one also? If we have advanced in anything, since the Valois time, it is in the art of intellectual hair-splitting. We ought to be able to argue as many days together as they did. Only, I presume, their advantage was that they meant what they said, and we never or seldom do. They laughed or they sighed, and were sincere in both; but we do neither, we are gouailleurs always, which is not a happy temperament, nor an intellectually productive one.'

So had spoken the mistress of that stately place; and so, her word being law, had it been in the sunset hours before the nine o'clock dinner; and it was a pastime well suited to the luminous evenings of late summer in

The hush of old warm woods that lie

Low in the lap of evening, bright

And bathed in vast tranquillity.

She, herself, was seated on an ivory chair, carved with Hindoo steel, and shaped like a curule chair of old Rome. Two little pages, in costumes of the Valois time, stood behind her, holding large fans of peacock's plumes.

'They are anachronisms,' she had said with a passing frown at the fans, 'but they may remain, though quite certainly the Valois did not know anything of them any more than they knew of blue china and yellow tea.'

But the gorgeous green and gold and purple-eyed plumes looked pretty, so she had let them stay.

'We shall have so many jarring notes of "modernity" in our discussions,' she had said, 'that one note the more in decoration does not matter;' and, backed by them, she sat now upon her ivory throne, an exquisite figure, poetic and delicate, with her cream-white skirts of the same hue as her throne, and her strings of great pearls at her throat. Next her was seated an ecclesiastic of high eminence, who had in vain protested that he was wholly out of place in such a diversion. 'Was Cardinal Bembo out of place at Ferrara and Urbino?' she had objected; and had so successfully, in the end, vanquished his scruples, that the late sunbeams, slanting through the oak-leaves and on to that gay assemblage, had found out in it his handsome head and his crimson sash, and his blue eyes full of their and keen witty observation, and his white hands folded together on his knee.

In a semicircle whose wings stretched right and left were ranged the gentlemen and ladies who formed momentarily the house party of the château; great people all; all the women young and all the men brilliant, no dull person amongst them, dulness being the one vice condemned there without any chance of pardon. They were charming people, distinguished people, handsome people also, and they made a gay and gracious picture, reclining or sitting in any attitudes they chose on these grassy slopes, which had seen the court of Francis and of both Marguerites:

Above their heads floated a silken banner, on which, in letters of gold, were embroidered the wise words, 'Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit!'

'To return to our original demand—what is the definition of Love?' asked their queen and president, turning her lovely eyes on to the great ecclesiastic, who replied with becoming gravity:

'Madame, what can a humble priest possibly know of the theme?'

She smiled a little. 'You know as much as Bembo knew,' she made answer.

'Ah no, Madame! The times are changed.'

'The times, perhaps; not human nature. However, this is the question which must be first decided by the Court at large: How is the nature of Love to be defined?'

A gentleman on her left murmured:

'No one can tell us so as well you, Madame, who have torn the poor butterfly in pieces so often sans merci.'

'You have broken the first rule of all,' said the sovereign, with severity. 'The discussion is to be kept wholly free from all personalities.'

'A wise rule, or the Court would probably end, like an Italian village festa, in a free use of the knife all round.'

'If you be not quiet you will be exiled for contempt of court, and shut up in the library to write out Ovid's "Ars Amatoria." Once more, I inquire, how are we to define Love?'

'It was never intended to be defined, but to be enjoyed.'

'That is merely begging the question,' said their Queen. 'One enjoys music, flowers, a delicate wine, a fine sunset, a noble sonnet; but all these things are nevertheless capable of analysis and of reduction to known laws. So is Love. I ask once more: How is it to be defined? Does no one seem to know? What curious ignorance!'

'In woman, Love may be defined to be the desire of annexation; and to consist chiefly in a passionate clinging to a sense of personal property in the creature loved.'

'That is cynical, and may be true. But it is not general enough. You must not separate the love of man and the love of woman. We speak of Love general, human, concrete.'

'With all deference I would observe that, if we did not separate the two, we should never arrive at any real definition at all, for Love differs according to sex as much as the physiognomy or the costume.'

'Real Love is devotion!' said a beautiful blonde with blue eyes that gazed from under black lashes with pathetic tenderness.

'Euh! euh!' murmured one impertinent.

'Oh, oh!' murmured another.

'Ouiche!' said a third under his breath.

The sovereign smiled ironically:

'Ah, my dear Duchesse! all that died out with the poets of 1830. It belongs to the time when women wore muslin gowns, looked at the moon, and played the harp.'

'If I might venture on a definition in the langue verte,' suggested a handsome man, seated at the feet of the queen, 'though I fear I should be turned out of Court as Rabelais and Scarron are turned out of the drawing-room——'

'We can imagine what it would be, and will not give you the trouble to say any more. If the definition of Love be, on the contrary, left to me, I shall include it all in one word—Illusion.'

'That is a cruel statement!'

'It is a fact. We have our own ideal, which we temporarily place in the person, and clothe with the likeness, of whoever is fortunate enough to resemble it superficially enough to delude us, unconsciously, into doing so. You remember the hackneyed saying of the philosopher about the real John—the John as he thinks himself to be, and the John as others imagine him: it is never the real John that is loved; always an imaginary one built up out of the fancies of those in love with him.'

'That is fancy, your Majesty; it is not love.'

'And what is love but fancy?—the fancy of attraction, the fancy of selection; the same sort of fancy as allures the bird to the brightest plumaged mate?'

'I do not think any love is likely to last which is not based on intellectual sympathy. When the mind is interested and contented, it does not tire half so fast as the eyes or the passions. In any very great love there is at the commencement a delighted sense of meeting something long sought, some supplement of ourselves long desired in vain. When this pleasure is based on the charm of some mind wholly akin to our own, and filled for us with ever-renewing well-springs of the intellect, there is really hardly any reason why this mutual delight should ever change, especially if circumstances conspire to free it from those more oppressive and irritating forms of contact which the prose of life entails.'

'You mean marriage, only you put it with a great deal of unnecessary euphuism. Tastes differ. Giovanni Dupré's ideal of bliss was to see his wife ironing linen, while his mother-in-law looked on.'

'Dupré was a simple soul, and a true artist, but intellect was not his strong point. If he had chanced to be educated, the good creature with her irons would have become very tiresome to him.'

'What an argument in favour of ignorance!'

'Is it? The savage is content with roots and an earth-baked bird; but it does not follow, therefore, that delicate food does not merit the preference we give to it. I grant, however, that a high culture of taste and intelligence does not result in the adoration of the primitive virtues any more than of the earth-baked bird.'

'Is this a discussion on Love?'

'It is a discussion which grows out of it, like the mistletoe out of the oak. The ideal of Dupré was that of a simple, uneducated, emotional and unimpassioned creature; it was what we call essentially a bourgeois ideal. It would have been suffocation and starvation, torture and death, to Raffaelle, to Phidias, to Shelley, to Goethe. There are men, born peasants, who soar into angels; who hate, loathe, and spurn the bourgeois ideal from their earliest times of wretchedness; but there are others who always remain peasants. Millet did, Dupré did, Wordsworth did.'

The queen tinkled her golden handbell and raised her ivory sceptre.

'These digressions are admirable in their way, but I must recall the Court to the subject before them. Someone is bringing in allusions to cookery, flat-irons, and the bourgeois ideal which I have always understood was M. Thiers. They are certainly, however interesting, wholly irrelevant to the theme which we are met here to discuss. Let us pass on to the question next upon the list. If no one can define Love except as devotion, that definition suits so few cases that we must accept its existence without definition, and proceed to inquire what are its characteristics and its results.'

'The first is exigence and the second is ennui.'

'No, the first is sympathy and the second is happiness.'

'That is very commonplace. Its chief characteristic appears to me to be an extremely rapid transition from a state of imbecile adoration to a state of irritable fatigue. I speak from the masculine point of view.'

'And I, from the feminine, classify it rather as a transition (regretted but inevitable) from amiable illusions and generous concessions to a wounded sense of offence at ingratitude.'

'We are coming to the Italian coltellate! You both only mean that in love, as in everything else which is human, people who expect too much are disappointed; disappointment is always irritation; it may even become malignity if it take a very severe form.'

'You seem all of you to have glided into an apology for inconstancy. Is that inevitable to love?'

'It looks as if it were; or, at all events, its forerunner, fatigue, is so.'

'You treat love as you would treat a man who asked you to paint his portrait, whilst you persisted in painting that of his shadow instead. The shadow which dogs his footsteps is not himself.'

'It is cast by himself, so it is a part of him.'

'No, it is an accompanying ghost sent by Nature which he cannot escape or dismiss.'

'My good people,' said their sovereign impatiently, 'you wander too far afield. You are like the group of physicians who let the patient die while they disputed over the Greek root from which the name of his malady was derived. Love, like all other great monarchs, is ill sometimes; but let us consider him in health, not sickness.'

'For Love in a state of health there is no better definition than one given just now—sympathy.'

'The highest kind of love springs from the highest kind of sympathy. Of that there is no doubt. But then that is only to be found in the highest natures. They are not numerous.'

'No; and even they require to possess a great reserve-fund of interest, and a bottomless deposit of inexhaustible comprehension. Such reserve-funds are rare in human nature, which is usually a mere fretful and foolish chatterbox, tout en dehors, and self-absorbed.'

'We are wandering far from the single-minded passion of Ronsard and Petrarca.'

'And we have arrived at no definition. Were I to give one, I should be tempted to say that Love is, in health and perfection, the sense that another life is absolutely necessary to our own, is lovely despite its faults, and even in its follies is delightful and precious to us, we cannot probably say why, and is to us as the earth to the moon, as the moon to the tides, as the lodestone to the steel, as the dew of night to the flower.'

'Very well said, and applicable to both men and women, as descriptive of their emotions at certain periods of their lives. But——'

'For all their lives, until the ice of age glides into their veins.'

'You are poetical enough for Ronsard. Well, let us pass to another question. Does Love die sooner of starvation or of repletion?'

'Of repletion, unquestionably. Of a fit of indigestion he perishes never to rise again. Starved, he will linger on sometimes for a very long while indeed, and at the first glance of pity revives in full vigour.'

'Why, then, do women usually commit the error of surfeiting him? For I agree with you that a surfeit is fatal.'

'Because most women cannot be brought to understand that too much of themselves may bring about a wayward wish to have none of them. They call this natural and inevitable reaction ingratitude and inconstancy, but it is nothing of the kind; it is only human nature.'

'Male human nature. The wish for pastures new, characteristic of cattle, sheep and man.'

'"La femme est si souvent trompée parce qu'elle prend le désir pour l'amour." Someone wrote that; I forget who did, but it is entirely true. Une bouffée de désir, an hour's caprice, a swift flaming of mere animal passion which flares up and dies down like any shooting star, seems to a woman to be the ideal love of romance and of tragedy. She dreams of Othello, of Anthony, of Stradella, and all the while it is Sir Harry Wildair, or Joseph Surface, or at the best of things Almaviva. She is ready for the tomb in Verona, but he is only ready for the chambre meublée, or at most for the saison aux eaux.'

'Is she always ready for the tomb in Verona?' asked a sceptical voice. 'Does she not sometimes, even very often, marry Paris, and "carry on" with Romeo? If I may be allowed to say so, there are a few impassioned and profound temperaments in the world to many light ones; the bread and the sack are, as usual, unevenly apportioned, but these graver and deeper natures are not all necessarily feminine. It is when you have two great and ardent natures involved (and then alone) that you get passion, high devotion, tragedy; but this conjunction is as rare as the passing of Venus across the sun. Usually Romeo throws himself away on some Lady Frivolous, and Juliet breaks her heart for some fop or some fool.'

'That is only because all human life is a game of cross purposes; one only wonders who first set the game going, to amuse the gods or make them weep.'

'That question will scarcely come under the head of amatory analysis. Besides, the world has been wondering about that ever since the beginning of time, and has never received any answer to its queries.'

'If a quotation be allowed,' suggested the ecclesiastic, 'in lieu of an original opinion, I would beg leave to recall the Prince de Ligne's "Dans l'amour il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants." In the middle of the romance I see you all yawn, at the end you usually quarrel. Some wise man—I forget who—has said that it requires much more talent and much more feeling to break off an attachment amiably than to begin it.'

'Because we all feel so amiable at the beginning that it is easy to be so.'

'Admit also that there are very few characters which will stand the test of intimacy; very few minds of sufficient charm and originality to be able to bear the strain of long and familiar intercourse.'

'What has the mind to do with it?'

'That question is flippant and even coarse. The mind has something to do with it, even in animals; or why should the lion prefer one lioness to another? When d'Aubiac went to the gallows kissing a tiny velvet muff of Margaret de Valois, or when young Calixte de Montmorin knelt on the scaffold pressing to his lips a little bow of blue ribbon which had belonged to Madame de Vintimille, the muff and the ribbon represented a love with which certainly the soul had far more to do than the senses.'

'It was a sentiment.'

'A sentiment if you will, but strong enough to overcome all fear of death or personal regret. The muff, the ribbon, were symbols of an imperishable and spiritual devotion; these trifles, like Psyche's butterfly, were representative of an immortal element in mortal life and mortal feeling.'

'M. de Béthune would go to the scaffold like that himself,' said the sovereign lady with a smile of approval and of indulgent derision.

'And our lady,' hinted the Duc de Béthune, 'forgets her own rule, that all personalities are forbidden.'

'It is of no use to have the power to make laws if one have not also the power to transgress them. Well, if immortality is to enter into love, let wit also enter there. One is not beheaded every day, but every day one is liable to be bored. J'aime qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit. Every intellectual person must exact that. To worship my ribbon is nothing if you also fatigue my patience and my ear. The majority of people divorce love and wit. They are very wrong. It is only wit which can tell love when he has gone too far, or is losing ground, has repeated himself ad nauseam, or requires absence to restore his charm.'

'Ah, Majesté! by the time he has become such a philosopher has he not ceased to be love at all?'

'Oh no. That motto was chosen as the legend of this Court expressly for the truth it contains. Why does most love end so drearily in a sudden death by quarrelling or in a lingering death by tedium? Because it has had no wit, no judgment, no reserve, no skill. By way of showing itself to be eternal, it has hammered itself into pieces on the rock of repetition. Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit! What a world of endured ennui sighs forth in that appeal!'

'No woman upon earth has had so much love given her as the châtelaine of Amyôt, and no woman on earth ever viewed love with such unkind and airy contempt.'

She smiled. She neither denied nor affirmed the accusation.

'She has a crystal throne of her own from which she looks down on the weaknesses of mortals and cannot be touched by them,' said the Duc de Béthune.

She replied again, 'Qu'on m'aime, mais avec de l'esprit.'

'It is the motto of one who sets much greater store upon amusement than upon affection. Who can say, moreover, what may have the good fortune to be considered "esprit" by her? I fear she finds us all very dull to-day.'

'Dull, no. Sentimental perhaps.'

'Your heaviest word of censure!'

'To return to our theme: do you not punish inconstancy?'

'Certainly not. In the first place, inconstancy is a wholly involuntary, and therefore innocent, inclination. In the second, if any one be so stupid that he or she cannot keep the affections they have once won, they deserve to lose them, and can claim no pity.'

'Surely they may be the victims of a sad and unmerited fate?'

'Unmerited—no. They have not known how to keep what they had got. Probably they have worried it till it escaped in desperation, as a child teases a bird in a cage till the bird pushes itself through the bars, preferring the chance of losing itself on the road to the certainty of being strangled in prison.'

'Who would not prefer it?'

'The difficulty in most cases is that, in all loves, the scales of proportion are weighted unevenly: there is generally one lighter than the other. Say it is a poor nature and a great nature; say it is a strong passion and a passing caprice; say it is a profound temperament and a shallow one; in some way or other the scales are almost always imperfectly adjusted. When they are quite even—which happens once out of a million times—then there is a great and felicitous love; an exquisite and imperishable sympathy.'

'But who holds these magical scales? It is the holder who is responsible.'

'The holder is Fate.'

'Chance.'

'Opportunity.'

'Destiny.'

'Predestination.'

'Circumstance.'

'Affinity.'

'Affinity can only hold them on that millionth occasion when a perfect love is the result.'

'Usually Chance and Circumstance fill the scales, and they are two roguish boys who like to make mischief. Affinity is the angel; perhaps the only angel by which poor humanity is ever led into an earthly paradise.'

'That is worthy of Philip Sydney.'

'Or of the Earl of Lytton.'

'And is so charming that we will not risk having anything coarse or commonplace said after it. Let us adjourn the debate till to-morrow.'

'Nay, Majesté; let us pass to another question: What is the greatest dilemma of Love?'

'To have to galvanise itself into an imitation of life when it is dead.'

'Is it worse to be the last to love, or the first to grow tired?'

'In the former case one's self-esteem is hurt; in the latter one's conscience.'

'The wounds of conscience are sooner cured than those of vanity.'

'Whoever loves most loves longest.'

'No, whoever is least loved loves longest.'

'How is that to be explained?'

'The contradictions of human nature will usually suffice to explain everything.'

'But there may be another explanation also; the one who is least loved is the least cloyed, and the most apprehensive of alteration.'

'Love is best worked with egotism, as gold is worked with alloy.'

'Surely the essential loveliness of love is self-sacrifice?'

'That is a theory. In fact, the only satisfactory love is one which gives and receives mutual pleasure. When there is self-sacrifice on one side the pleasure also is one-sided.'

'Then the revellers of the Decamerone knew more of love than Dante?'

'That is approaching a theme too full of dangers to be discussed—the difference between physical and spiritual love. I do not consider that you have satisfactorily answered the previous question: What is the greatest dilemma of Love?'

'When, in the open doorway of its house of life, one passion, grown old and grey, passes out limping, and meets another passion newly come thither, and laughing, with the blossoms of April in its sunny hair.'

'What a sonnet in a sentence! What is Love to do in such a case? Shall he detain the grey-haired crippled guest?'

'He cannot. For the more he shall endeavour to retain him the thinner and paler and more impalpable will the withered and lame passion grow.'

'And the newly-come one?'

'Oh, he will enter, smiling and strong, and will fill the house with the music of his pipe and the odour of his hyacinths for awhile, until he too shall in turn pass outwards, when his music is silent and his flowers are dead.'

'Is Love then always to be mourned like Lycidas?'

'He is in no sense like Lycidas; Lycidas died, a perfect youth. Love, with time, grows pale and wan and feeble, and a very shadow of itself, before it dies.'

'There are some who say, if he have not immortality he is not Love at all; but only Caprice, Vanity, Wantonness, or faithless Fancy, masquerading in his dress.'

'How can that be immortal which has no existence without mortal forms?'

'Here is one of the notes of modernity! The sad note of self-consciousness; the consciousness of mortality and of insignificance; the memento mori which is always with us. And yet we do not respect death, we only hate it and fear it; because it will make of us a dreary, ugly, putrid thing. That is all we know. And the knowledge dulls even our diversions. We can be gouailleur, but we cannot be gay if we would.'

'There is too great a tendency here to use gros mots—devotion, death, immortality, &c. They are a mistake in a disquisition which wishes to be witty. They are like the use of cannon in an opera. But I think, even in France, the secret of lightness of wit is lost. We have all read too much German philosophy.'

'We will endeavour to be gayer to-morrow. We will wake all the shades of Brantôme.'

'Well,' their sovereign declared, as she rose, 'we have held our Court to little avail; some pretty things have been said, and some stupid ones, but we have arrived at no definite conclusion, unless it be this: that love is only respectable when it is unhappy, and ceases to exist the moment it is contented.'

'A cruel sentence, Madame!'

'Human nature is cruel; so is Time.'

When the sun had wholly set, and only a warm yellow glow through all the west told that its glory had passed, the Court broke up for that day, and strolled in picturesque groups towards the house as the chimes of the clock tower told the hour of dinner.

'How very characteristic of our time and of our world,' said the queen, as she drew her ivory-hued, violet-laden skirts over the smooth turf. 'We have talked for three whole hours of Love, and nobody has ever thought of mentioning Marriage as his kinsman!'

'He who has had the honour to marry you might well have done so, had he been here to-day,' murmured a courtier on her right.

She laughed, looking up into the deep-blue evening sky through the network of green leaves:

'But he was not here, so he was saved the difficulty of choice between an insincerity and a rudeness, always a very serious dilemma to him. Marriage is the grave of love, my dear friend, even if he be buried with roses for his pillow and lilies for his shroud.'

'But Love may be stronger than Death. Solomon has said so.'

'What is stronger than Death? Death is stronger than all of us. Tout cela pourrira. It is the despair of the lover and the poet, and the consolation of the beggar when the rich and the beautiful go past him.'

She spoke with a certain melancholy, and absently struck the tall heads of seeding grasses with her ivory sceptre.

'We have only wearied you, I fear,' said her companion, with contrition and mortification.

'That is the fault of Love,' she answered, with a smile.

As they left the shadow of the trees, crossing the grassland was a herd of cows and calves already passing away in the distance, going to their byres; far behind them, lingering willingly, were the herdsman and his love; he a comely lad in a blue blouse and a peaked cap, she a smiling buxom maiden with dusky tresses under a linen coif, and cheeks glowing like a 'Catherine pear, the side that's next the sun.'

'Lubin and Lisette,' said Béthune with a smile, 'practically illustrating what we have been spoiling with the too fine wire-drawing of analysis. I am sure that they come much nearer than we to the story-tellers of the Heptameron.'

The châtelaine of Amyôt looked at the two rustic lovers with a little wistfulness and a good-natured contempt.

They had passed out of the shade of the woods, and the rose-glow of evening illumined their interlaced figures as they followed their cows.

'"To know is much, yet to enjoy is more,"' she quoted. 'I suppose that is what you mean. Yet I rather incline to think that love as a sentiment is the product of education. The cows know almost as much of it as your Lubin and Lisette.'

'Brandès says,' observed one of her party, 'that love as a sentiment was always unknown in a state of nature, and was only created with the first petticoat. Petticoats have invariably been responsible for a great deal. They ruined France, according to the Great Frederic; but if they have raised us from the level of the cattle they have redeemed their repute.'

'Poor cattle! They have as much poetry in their eyes as there is in the Penseroso. Lubin and Lisette are Naturkinder; but when both a cow and Lisette become the property of Lubin, he will assign the higher place to the first, both in life and in death.'

'Well, he shall have both of them, for having met us at so apropos an instant,' she answered with, a little smile. 'Perhaps the only word of truth that has been said in the whole discussion was the quotation: "Il n'y a que les commencements qui sont charmants!"'

The great woodland which they traversed as she spoke opened into an avenue of beeches, long and straight, the branches meeting and interlacing overhead until the opening at the farther end looked like an arched doorway closing a cathedral aisle. The archway was filled with dim golden suffused light, and within that archway of twilight and golden haze there rose the snowy column of a high-reaching fountain; it was the first of the grandes eaux of the garden of Amyôt. And the sovereign of the Court of Love was she who had once been the Princess Napraxine.