LES MIRACLES DE NOTRE DAME               269
Lors prent congie piteusement,                       Then piteously he takes his leave
Et maint en plorent tenrement.                      While in tears his barons grieve.
D'euls se part, en une abaie                           So he parts and in an abbey
Servi puis la vierge Marie                              Serves henceforth the Virgin Mary.
Observe that in this case Mary exacted no service! Usually the
legends are told, as in this instance, by priests, though they were told in
the same spirit by laymen, as you can see in the poems of Rutebeuf,
and they would not have been told very differently by soldiers, if one
may judge from Joinville; but commonly the Virgin herself prescribed
the kind of service she wished. Especially to the young knight who
had, of his own accord, chosen her for his liege, she showed herself
as exacting as other great ladies showed themselves toward their
Lancelots and Tristans. When she chose, she could even indulge in
more or less coquetry, else she could never have appealed to the sym-
pathies of the thirteenth-century knight-errant. One of her miracles
told how she disciplined the young men who were too much in the
habit of assuming her service in order to obtain selfish objects. A
youthful chevalier, much given to tournaments and the other worldly
diversions of the siècle, fell in love, after the rigorous obligation of his
class, as you know from your Dulcinea del Toboso, with a lady who, as
was also prescribed by the rules of courteous love, declined to listen to
him. An abbot of his acquaintance, sympathizing with his distress,
suggested to him the happy idea of appealing for help to the Queen
of Heaven. He followed the advice, and for an entire year shut him-
self up, and prayed to Mary, in her chapel, that she would soften the
heart of his beloved, and bring her to listen to his prayer At the end
of the twelvemonth, fixed as a natural and sufficient proof of his ear-
nestness in devotion, he felt himself entitled to indulge again in inno-
cent worldly pleasures, and on the first morning after his release, he
started out on horseback for a day's hunting. Probably thousands of
young knights and squires were always doing more or less the same
thing, and it was quite usual that, as they rode through the fields or