304s
In order to console ourselves here, we have read some charming letters; here is one of them from the little Duc du Maine, seven years old, whom Mme. de Maintenon had brought here to be cured. He wrote to his mother Mme. de Montespan, and the letter must certainly pass under the king’s eyes. What a school of style was that court!
“I am going off to write all the news of the house for thy diversion, my dear little heart, and I shall write far better when I shall think that it is for you, madame. Mme. de Maintenon spends all her time in spinning, and, if they would let her, she would also give up her nights to it, or to writing. She toils daily for my mind; she has good hope of making something of it, and the darling too, who will do all he can to have some brains, for he is dying with the desire of pleasing the king and you. On the way here I read the history of Cæsar, am at present reading that of Alexander, and shall soon commence that of Pompey. La Couture does not like to lend me Mme. de Maintenon’s petticoats, when I want to disguise myself as a girl. I have received the letter you write to the dear little darling; I was delighted with it; I will do what you bid me, if only to please you, for I loveyou superlatively. I was, and am still, charmed with the little nod that the king gave me on leaving, but was very ill pleased that thou didst not seem to me sorry: thou wast beautiful as an angel.”
Could any one be more gracious, more flattering, insinuating or precocious? To please was a necessity at that time, to please people of the world, quick-witted people. Never were men more agreeable; because there was never greater need of being agreeable. This youth, brought up among petticoats, took on from the beginning a woman’s vivacity, her coquetry and smiles. You see that he gets upon their knees, receives and gives embraces, and is amusing; there is no prettier trinket in thesalon.
Mme. de Maintenon, devout, circumspect and politic, also writes, but with the clearness and brevity of a worldly abbess or a president in petticoats. “You see that I take courage in a place more frightful than I can tell you; to crown the misery, we are freezing here. The company is poor; they respect and bore us. All the women are ill continually; they are loungers who have found the world really great as soon as ever they have been at Etampes.”
We have amused ourselves with this raillery, dry, disdainful, clear-cut and somewhat too short, and I have maintained to Paul that Mme. deMaintenon resembles the yews at Versailles, brushy extinguishers that are too closely clipped. Whereupon I spoke very ill of the landscapes of the seventeenth century, of Le Nôtre, Poussin and his architectural nature, Leclerc, Perelle, and of their abstract, conventional trees, whose majestically rounded foliage agrees with that of no known species. He lectured me severely, according to his custom, and called me narrow-minded; he maintains that all is beautiful; that all that is necessary is to put yourself at the right point of view. His reasoning was nearly as follows:
He claims that things please us by contrast, and that beautiful things are different for different souls. “One day,” said he, “I was travelling with some English people in Champagne, on a cloudy day in September. They found the plains horrible, and I admirable. The dull fields stretched out like a sea to the very verge of the horizon, without encountering a hill. The stalks of the close-reaped wheat dyed the earth with a wan yellow; the plain seemed covered with an old wet mantle. Here were lines of deformed elms; here and there a meagre square of fir-trees; further off a cottage of chalk with its white pool: from furrow to furrow the sun trailed its sickly light, and the earth, emptied of its fruits, was like a woman dead in child-bed whose infant they have taken away.
308s
“My companions were utterly bored, and called down curses on France. Their minds, strained by the rude passions of politics, by the national arrogance, and the stiffness of scriptural morality, needed repose. They wanted a smiling and flowery country, meadows soft and still, fine shadows, largely and harmoniously grouped on the slopes of the hills..The sunburnt peasants, dull of countenance, sitting near a pool of mud, were disagreeable to them. For repose, they dreamed of pretty cottages set in fresh turf, fringed with rosy honeysuckle. Nothing could be more reasonable. A man obliged to hold himself upright and unbending finds a sitting posture the most beautiful..
“You go to Versailles, and you cry out against the taste of the seventeenth century. Those formal and monumental waters, the firs turned in the lathe, the rectangular staircases heaped one above another, the trees drawn up like grenadiers on parade, recall to you the geometry class and the platoon school. Nothing can be better. But cease for an instant to judge according to your habits and wants of the day. You live alone, or at home, on a third floor in Paris, and spend four hours weekly in the saloons of some thirty different people. Louis XIV. lived eight hours a day, every day the whole year long, in public, and this public included all the lords of France. He held hisdrawing-room in the open air; the drawing-room is the park at Versailles. Why ask of it the charms of a valley? These squared hedges of hornbeam are necessary that the embroidered coats may not be caught. This levelled and shaven turf is necessary that high-heeled shoes may not be wetted. The duchesses will form a circle about these circular sheets of water. Nothing can be better chosen than these immense and symmetrical staircases for showing off the gold and silver laced robes of three hundred ladies. These large alleys, which seem empty to you, were majestic when fifty lords in brocade and lace displayed here theircordons bleusand their graceful bows. No garden is better constructed for showing one’s self in grand costume and in great company, for making a bow, for chatting and concocting intrigues of gallantry and business. You wish perhaps to rest, to be alone, to dream; you must go elsewhere; you have come to the wrong gate: but it would be the height of absurdity to blame a drawing-room for being a drawing-room.
“You understand then that our modern taste will be as transitory as the ancient; that is to say, that it is precisely as reasonable and as foolish. We have the right to admire wild, uncultivated spots, as once men had the right of getting tired in them. Nothing uglier to the seventeenth centurythan a true mountain. It recalled a thousand ideas of misfortune.
312s
“The men who had come out from the civil wars and semi-barbarism thought of famines, of long journeys on horseback through rain and snow, of the wretched black bread mingled with straw, of the foul hostelries, infested with vermin. They were tired of barbarism as we of civilization. To-day the streets are so clean, the police so abundant, the houses drawn out in such regular lines, manners are so peaceful, events so small and so clearly foreseen, that we love grandeur and the unforeseen. The landscape changes as literature does: then literature furnished longsugary romances and elegant dissertations; now-a-days it offers spasmodic poetry and a physiological drama. Landscape is an unwritten literature; the former like the latter is a sort of flattery addressed to our passions, or a nourishment proffered to our needs.
313s
“These old wasted mountains, these lacerating points, bristling by myriads, these formidable fissures whose perpendicular wall plunges with a spring down into invisible depths; this chaos of monstrous ridges heaped together, and crushingeach other like an affrighted herd of leviathans; this universal and implacable domination of the naked rock, the enemy of all life, refreshes us after our pavements, our offices and our shops. You only love them from this cause, and this cause removed, they would be as unpleasant to you as to Madame de Maintenon.”
314s
So that there are fifty sorts of beauty,—one for every age.
“Certainly.”
Then there is no such thing as beauty.
“That is as if you were to say that a woman is nude because she has fifty dresses.”
315s
Cauterets is a town at the bottom of a valley, melancholy enough, paved, and provided with an octroi. Innkeepers, guides, the whole of a famished population besieges us; but we have considerable force of mind, and after a spirited resistance we obtain the right of looking about and choosing.
Fifty paces further on, we are fastened upon by servants, children, donkey-hirers and boys, who accidentally stroll about us. They offer us cards, they praise up to us the site, the cuisine; they accompany us, cap in hand, to the very edge of the village; at the same time they elbow away all competitors: “The stranger is mine, I’ll baste you ifyou come near him.” Each hotel has its runners on the watch; they hunt the isard in winter, the traveller in summer.
The town has several springs: that of the King cured Abarca, king of Aragon; that of Cæsar restored health, as they say, to the great Cæsar. Faith is needed in history as well as in medicine.
316s
For example, in the time of Francis I. the Eaux Bonnes cured wounds; they were calledEaux d’arqtiebusades; the soldiers wounded at Paviawere sent to them. Now they cure diseases of the throat and chest. A hundred years hence they will perhaps heal something else; with every century medicine makes an advance.
“Formerly,” said Signarelle, “the liver was at the right and the heart at the left; we have reformed all that.”
A celebrated physician one day said to his pupils: “Employ this remedy at once, while it still cures.” Medicines, like hats, have their fashions.
Yet what can be said against this remedy? The climate is warm, the gorge sheltered, the air pure, the gayety of the sun is cheering. A change of habits leads to a change of thoughts; melancholy ideas take flight. The water is not bad to drink; you have had a beautiful journey; the moral cures the physical nature; if not, you have had hope for two months—and what, I beg to know, is a remedy, if not a pretext for hoping? You take patience and pleasure until either illness or invalid departs, and everything is for the best in the best of worlds.
Several leagues away, among the precipices, sleeps the lake of Gaube. The green water, three hundred feet in depth, has the reflexes of an emerald.
318s
The bald heads of the mountains are mirrored in it with a divine serenity. The slender column of the pines is reflected there as clear as in the air; in the distance, the woods clothed in bluish mist come down to bathe their feet in its cold wave, and the huge Vignemale, spotted with snow, shuts it about with her cliffs. At times a remnant of breeze comes to ruffle it, and all those grand images undulate; the Greek Diana, the wild, maiden huntress, would have taken it for a mirror.
320s
How one sees her come to life again in such sites! Her marbles are fallen, her festivals have vanished; but in the shivering of the firs, at the sound of the cracking glaciers, before the steely splendors ofthese chaste waters, she reappears like a vision. All the night long, in the outcries of the wind, the herdsmen could hear the baying of her hounds and the whistling of her arrows; the untamed chorus of her nymphs coursed over the precipices; the moon shone upon their shoulders of silver, and on the point of their lances. In the morning she came to bathe her arms in the lake; and more than once has she been seen standing upon a summit, her eyes fixed, her brow severe; her foot trod the cruel snow, and her virgin breasts gleamed beneath the winter sun.
The Diana of the country is more amiable; it is the lively and gracious Margaret of Navarre, sister and liberatress of Francis I. She came to these waters with her court, her poets, her musicians, her savants, a poet and theologian herself, of infinite curiosity, reading Greek, learning Hebrew, and taken up with Calvinism. On coming out of the routine and discipline of the middle ages, disputes about dogma and the thorns of erudition appeared agreeable, even to ladies; Lady Jane Grey, Elizabeth took part in these things: it was a fashion, as two centuries later it was good taste to dispute upon Newton and the existence of God. TheBishop of Meaux wrote to Margaret: “Madame, if there were at the end of the world a doctor who, by a single abridged verb, could teach you as much grammar as it is possible to know, and another as much rhetoric, and another philosophy, and so on with the seven liberal arts, each one by an abridged verb, you would fly there as to the fire.” She did fly there and got overloaded. The heavy philosophic spoil oppressed her already slender thought. Her pious poems are as infantile as the odes written by Racine at Port-Royal. What trouble we have had in getting free from the middle ages! The mind bent, warped and twisted, had contracted the ways of a choir-boy.
A poet of the country composed in her honor the following pretty song:—
“At the baths of ToulouseThere’s a spring clear and fair,And three pretty dovesCame to drink and bathe there;When at last they had bathedThus for months barely three,For the heights of CauteretsLeft they fountain and me.But why go to Cauterets,What is there to be seen?“It is there that we batheWith the king and the queen.And the king has a cotHung with jasmin in flower;The dear queen has the same,But love makes it a bower.”
Is it not graceful and thoroughly southern? Margaret is less poetic, more French: her verses are not brilliant, but at times are very touching, by force of real and simple tenderness.
A moderate imagination, a woman’s heart thoroughly devoted, and inexhaustible in devotion, a good deal of naturalness, clearness, ease, the art of narration and of smiling, an agreeable but never wicked malice, is not this enough to make you love Margaret and read here the Heptameron?
324s
326s
She wrote the Heptameron here; it seems that a journey to the waters was then less safe than now-a-days.
The first day of the month of September, as the baths of the Pyrenees mountains begin to have virtue, were found at those of Caulderets several persons, from France and Spain as well asother places; some to drink the water, others bathe in it, others to take the mud, which things are so marvellous, that invalids abandoned by the physicians return from them completely cured. But about the time of their return, there came on such great rains, that it seemed that God had forgotten the promise given to Noah never again to destroy the world by water; for all the cabins and dwellings of the said Caulderets were so filled with water that it became impossible to live in them.
327s
“The French lords and ladies, thinking to return to Tarbes as easily as they had come, found the little brooks so swollen that they could scarcely ford them. But when they came to pass the Bearnese Gave, which was not two feet deep when they first saw it, they found it so large andimpetuous, that they made a circuit to look for the bridges, which, being nothing but wood, were swept away by the vehemence of the water.
329s
"And some, thinking to break the violence of the course by assembling several together, were so promptly swept away, that those who would follow them lost the power and the desire of going after.” Whereupon they separated, each one seeking a way for himself. “Two poor ladies, half a league beyond Pierrefitte, found a bear coming down the mountain, before which they galloped away in such great haste that their horses fell dead under them at the entrance of their dwelling; two of their women, who came a long time after, told them that the bear had killed all their serving men.
“So while they are all at mass, there comes into the church a man with nothing on but his shirt, fleeing as if some one were chasing and following him up. It was one of their companions by the name of Guébron, who recounted to them how, as he was in a hut near Pierrefitte, three men came while he was in bed; but he, all in his shirt as he was, with only his sword, wounded one of them so that he remained on the spot, and, while the other two amused themselves in gathering up their companion, thought that he could not escape if not by flight, as he was the least burdened by clothing.
“The abbé of Saint-Savin furnished them with the best horses to be had in Lavedan, good Bearn cloaks, a quantity of provisions, and pretty companions to lead them safely in the mountains.”
But it was necessary to busy themselves somewhat, while waiting for the Gave to go down. In the morning they went to find Mme. Oysille, the oldest of the ladies; they devoutly listened to the mass with her; after which “she did not fail to administer the salutary food which she drew from the reading of the acts of the saints and glorious apostles of Jesus Christ.” The afternoon was employed in a very different fashion: they went into a beautiful meadow along the river Gave, where the foliage of the trees is so dense, “that the sun could neither pierce the shade nor warm the coolness, and seated themselves upon the green grass, which is so soft and delicate that they needed neither cushions nor carpets.” And each in turn related some gallant adventure with details infinitely artless and singularly precise. There were some relating to husbands and yet more about monks. The lovely theologian is the grand-daughter of Boccaccio, and the grand-mother of La Fontaine.
This shocks us, and yet is not shocking. Each age has its degree of decency, which is prudery for this and blackguardism for another.
333s
The Chinese find our trousers and close-fitting coat-sleeves horribly immodest; I know a lady, an Englishwoman in fact, who allows only two parts in the body, the foot and the stomach: every other word is indecent; so that when her little boy has a fall, the governess must say: “Master Henry has fallen, Madame, on the place where the top of his feet rejoins the bottom of his stomach.
The habitual ways of the sixteenth century were very different. The lords lived a little like men of the people; that is why they talked somewhat like men of the people. Bonnivet and Henri II. amused themselves in jumping like school-boys, and leaping over ditches twenty-three feet wide. When Henry VIII. of England had saluted Francis I. on the field of the cloth of gold, he seized him in his arms and tried to throw him, out of pure sportiveness; but the king, a good wrestler, laid him low by a trip. Fancy to-day the Emperor Napoleon at Tilsitt receiving the Emperor Alexander in this fashion. The ladies were obliged to be robust and agile as our peasants. To go to an evening party they had to mount on horseback; Margaret, when in Spain, fearful of being detained, made in eight days the stages for which a good horseman would have required fifteen days; one had, too, to guard one’s self against violence; once she had need of her two fists and all her nails against Bonnivet. In the midst of such manners, free talk was only thenatural talk; the ladies heard it every day at table, and adorned with the finest commentaries. Brantôme will describe for you the cup from which certain lords made them drink, and Cellini will relate you the conversation that was held with the Duchess of Ferrara. A milkmaid now-a-days would be ashamed of it. Students among themselves, even when they are tipsy, will scarce venture what the ladies of honor of Catherine de Medicis sang at the top of their voice and with all their heart. Pardon our poor Margaret; relatively she is decent and delicate, and then consider that two hundred years hence, you also, my dear sir and madam, you will perhaps appear like very blackguards.
Sometimes here, after a broiling day, the clouds gather, the air is stifling, one feels fairly ill, and a storm bursts forth. There was such an one last night. Each moment the heavens opened, cleft by an immense flash, and the vault of darkness lifted itself entire like a tent. The dazzling light marked out the limits of the various cultures and the forms of the trees at the distance of a league. The glaciers flamed with a bluish glimmer; the jagged peaks suddenly lifted themselves upon the horizon like an army of spectres.
337s
The gorge was illumined in its very depths; its heaped-up blocks, its trees hooked on to the rocks, its torn ravines, its foaming Gave, were seen under a livid whiteness, and vanished like the fleeting visions of an unknown and tortured world.
339s
Soon the voice of the thunder rolled in the gorges; the clouds that bore it crept midway along the mountain side, and came into collision among the rocks; the report burst out like a discharge of artillery. The wind rose and the rain came on. The inclined plane of the summits opened up under its squalls; the funeraldrapery of the pines clung to the sides of the mountain. A creeping plain came out from the rocks and trees. The long streaks of rain thickened the air; under the flashes you saw the water streaming, flooding the summits, descending the two slopes, sliding in sheets over the rocks, and from all sides in hurried waves running to the Gave. In the morning the roads were cut up with sloughs, the trees hung by their bleeding roots, great patches of earth had fallen away, and the torrent was a river.
340s
341s
Upon a hill, at the end of a road, are the remains of the abbey of Saint-Savin. The old church was, they say, built by Charlemagne; the stones, eaten and burned, are crumbling, the disjointed flags are incrusted with moss; from the garden the eye takes in the valley, brown in the evening light; the winding Gave already lifts into the air its trail of pale smoke.
It was sweet here to be a monk; it is in such places that theImitationshould be read; in such places was it written. For a sensitive and noble nature, a convent was then the sole refuge; all around wounded and repelled it.
Around what a horrible world! Brigand lords who plunder travellers and butcher each other; artisans and soldiers who stuff themselves with meatand yoke themselves together like brutes; peasants whose huts they burn, whose wives they violate, who out of despair and hunger slip away to tumult.
342s
No remembrance of good, nor hope of better. How sweet it is to renounce action, company, speech, to hide one’s self, forget outside things, and to listen, in security and solitude, to the divine voices that, like collected springs, murmur peacefully in the depths of the heart!
How easy is it here to forget the world! Neither books, nor news, nor science; no one travels and no one thinks. This valley is the whole universe; from time to time a peasant passes, or a man-at-arms. A moment more and he is gone; the mind has retained no more trace of him than the empty road. Every morning the eyes find again the great woods asleep uponthe mountain’s brow, and the layers of clouds stretched out on the edge of the sky. The rocks light up, the summit of the forests trembles beneath the rising breeze, the shadow changes at the foot of the oaks, and the mind takes on the calm and the monotony of these slow sights by which it is nourished. Meanwhile the responses of the monks drone confusedly in the chapel; then their measured tread resounds in the high corridors. Each day the same hours bring back the same impressions and the same images. The soul empties itself of worldly ideas, and the heavenly dream, which begins to flow within, little by little heaps up the silent wave that is going to fill it.
Far from it are science and treatises on doctrine. They drain the stream instead of swelling it. Will so many words augment peace and inward tenderness? “The kingdom of God consisteth not in word, but in power.” The heart must be moved, tears must flow, the arms must open toward an unseen place, and the sudden trouble will not be the work of the lips, but the touch of the hand divine. This hand it is which doth “lift up the humble mind;” this it is which teaches “without noise of words, without confusion of opinions, without ambition of honor, without the scuffling of arguments.” A light penetrates, and all at once the eyes see as it were a new heaven and a new earth.
344s
The men of the age perceive in its events only the events themselves; the solitary discovers behind the veil of things created the presence and the will of God. He it is who by the sun warms the earth, and by the rain refreshes it. He it is who sustains the mountains and envelops them at the setting of the sun in the repose of night. The heart feels everywhere, around and inside of things, an immense goodness, like a vague ocean of light which penetrates and animates the world; to this goodness it intrusts and abandons itself, like a child that drops asleep at evening on its mother’s knees. A hundred times a day divine things become palpable to it. The light streams through the morning mist, chaste as the brow of the virgin; thestars shine like celestial eyes, and yonder when the sun goes down the clouds kneel at the brink of heaven, like a blazing choir of seraphim.
346s
The heathen were indeed blind in their thoughts upon the grandeur of nature. What is our earth, but a narrow pass between two eternal worlds! Down there, beneath our feet, are the damned and their pains; they howl in their caverns and the earth trembles; without the sign of God, these walls would to-morrow be swallowed up in their abyss; they often come out thence by the bare precipices; the passers-by hear their shouts of laughter in the cascades; behind those gnarled beeches, glimpses have been caught of their grimacing countenances, their eyes of flame, and more than one herdsman, wandering at night towards their haunt, has been found in the morning with hair on end and twisted neck. But up there, in the azure, above the crystal, are the angels; many a time has the vault opened, and, in a long trail of light, the saints have appeared more radiant than molten silver, suddenly visible, then all at once vanished. A monk saw them; the last abbot was informed by them, in a vision, of the spring which healed his diseases. Another, long time ago, hunting wild beasts one day, saw a great stag stop before him with eyes filled with tears; when he had looked, he saw upon its antlers the cross of Jesus Christ, fell on his knees, and, on hisreturn to the convent, lived for thirty years doing penance in his cell, without any desire to leave it. Another, a very young man, who had gone into a forest of pines, heard far off a nightingale which sang marvellously; he drew near in astonishment, and it seemed to him that everything was transfigured; the brooks flowed as it were a long stream of tears, and again seemed full of pearls; the violet fringes of the firs shone magnificently, like a stole, upon their funereal trunks. The rays ran along the leaves, empurpled and azured as if by cathedral windows; flowers of gold and velvet opened their bleeding hearts in the midst of the rocks. He approached the bird, which he could not see among the branches, but which sang like the finest organ, with notes so piercing and so tender, that his heart was at once torn and melted. He saw nothing more of what was about him, and it seemed to him that his soul detached itself from his breast, and went away to the bird, and mingled itself with the voice which rose ever vibrating more and more in a song of ecstasy and anguish, as if it had been the inner voice of Christ to his Father when he was dying on the cross. When he returned towards the convent, he was astonished to find that the walls, which were quite new, had become brown as through age, that the little lindens in the garden were now great trees, that no face among themonks was familiar to him, and that no one remembered to have seen him. Finally an infirm old monk called to mind that in former times they had talked to him of a novice who had gone, a hundred years before, into the pine forest, but who had not come back, so that no one had ever known what had happened to him. Thus transported and forgotten will those live who shall hear the inner voices. God envelops us, and we have only to abandon ourselves to him in order to feel him.
For he does not hold communion through outside things only; he is within us, and our thoughts are his words. He who retires within himself, who listens no more to the news of this world, who effaces from his mind its reasonings and imaginations, and who holds himself in expectancy, in silence and solitude, sees little by little a thought rise in him which is not his own, which comes and goes without his will, and, whatever he may will, which fills and enchants him, like those words, heard in a dream, which make tranquil the soul with their mysterious song. The soul listens and no longer perceives the flight of the hours; all its powers are arrested, and its movements are nothing but the impressions which come to it from above. Christ speaks, it answers; it asks, and he teaches; it is afflicted, and he consoles. “My son, now will I teach thee the way of peace and true liberty.O Lord, I beseech thee, do as thou sayest, for this is delightful for me to hear.Be desirous, my son, to do the will of another rather than thine own, choose always to have less rather than more. Seek always the lowest place, and to be inferior to every one. Wish always, and pray, that the will of God may be wholly fulfilled in thee. Behold such a man entereth within the borders of peace and rest.O Lord, this short discourse of thine containeth within itself much perfection. It is little to be spoken, but full of meaning, and abundant in fruit.” How languid is everything alongside of this divine company! How all which departs from it is unsightly! “When Jesus is present, all is well, and nothing seems difficult: but when Jesus is absent everything is hard. When Jesus speaks not inwardly to us, all other comfort is nothing worth; but if Jesus speak but one word, we feel great consolation. How dry and hard art thou without Jesus! How foolish and vain, if thou desire anything out of Jesus! Is not this a greater loss than if thou shouldest lose the whole world? He that findeth Jesus, findeth a good treasure, yea, a Good above all good. And he that loseth Jesus, loseth much indeed, yea, more than the whole world! Most poor is he who liveth without Jesus; and he most rich who is well with Jesus. It is matter of great skill to know how to hold converse with Jesus; and to know how to keep Jesus, apoint of great wisdom. Be thou humble and peaceable, and Jesus will be with thee. Be devout and quiet, and Jesus will stay with thee..Thou mayest soon drive away Jesus and lose his favor if thou wilt turn aside to outward things. And if thou shouldest drive him from thee, and lose him, unto whom wilt thou flee, and whom wilt thou seek for thy friend? Without a friend thou canst not well live; and if Jesus be not above all a friend to thee, thou shalt be sad and desolate.”—“Behold! My God, and all things.” What can I wish more, and what happier thing can I long for? “My God, and all things.” To him that understandeth, enough is said; and to repeat it often is delightful to him that loveth.
Some died of this love, lost in ecstasies or drowned in a divine languor. These are the great poets of the middle ages.