lover is a vision surrounded by auras. But flesh
and blood is flesh and blood . . .and phlegm and
dung and mucous and bile and etc.

Once woman ceased to be a symbol, she
became a person, a passion, a robber of reason
—a literal and metaphorical scum-bag.

No wonder the ladies were afraid to submit.
With submission, love and its raison d’étre be-
came the discarded backdrop for a fait accom-
pli. The love was no longer ennobling (ergo: the
animal soul pawed and dragged down its ration-
al counterpart), and the woman was no longer
mounted on a pedestal (ergo: with the man on
top, she was mounted, period). And man’s de-
sire—well, that often died along with his
suffering.

It's natural, then, that the really legendary
lovers chose the most distant and unattainable
objects they could conceive of. Guilhem de la
Tour, for instance, loved the woman he lived
with.6 Now, such women were worn on every-
day occasions and were inevitably mundane.
But Guilhem’s enamorata was unearthly; in fact,
she was dead. On the eve of her burial, Guilhem
visited her grave and, after ten days of morbid
embracing and poignant conversation (she was
a good listener), he went home firm in the belief
that she would rise from her tomb and come
back to him. She didn’t. But for years, it was
only Beatrix he longed for. She was the perfect
lover—mystical, ethereal and unobtrusive. It
was a passion that rivaled even Jaufre Rudel’s.

Jaufre Rudel was ingenious. In an age which
valued prolonged desire, he contrived a won-
derful device. He fell in love with the Countess
of Tripoli—a woman he had never seen but
whose beauty had filled his imagination so en-
chantingly that southern France became a glo-
rious vantage point. And so it remained for
several years until, despite the protests of his
friends and patron, he resolved at last to cross
the ocean to be near her.



Maybe he just got sick. Or maybe, as his
biographers prefer to believe, the anticipation
of seeing her was too much for his little heart to
bear. In any case, as the boat was approaching
Tripoli, he apparently expired. But only appar-
ently. For as the countess rushed to his side, her
presence revived him and he pronounced him-
self fulfilled at last and died again in her arms—
a self-extinction metaphorically equivalent to
orgasm, but which Jaufre seems to have taken
much too literally, since Petrarch and other
chroniclers affirm that this time he actually did
die, and in all probability with his pants on.”

True, Jaufre was a strange and nearly legend-
ary breed. But while to him sex must have
seemed an unspeakable defilement, most were
not so theoretical. Even troubadours who con-
stantly reminded women that sex was debasing
and honor was all had an ultimately sensual
physicality in mind. Woman was like a fine
wine. A man twirls it about, observes its color,
its clarity, savoring its bouquet and rolling it
around on his languishing taste-buds. And
though the swallow is only the means to the
end, the end is still very definitely in view. Most
pleas for chastity were only lip-service. Even
Sordello, a troubadour who repeatedly swore
he’d rather die than see a lady even taint her
honor, happened to kidnap a Veronese countess
and that didn’t help her honor a bit. Nor did it

discredit his poetry. Such scandal was irrele-
vant. In fact, women were irrelevant. Love was

the important thing and the trick was to keep it
alive as long as possible, feeding it little by
ever-so-little in an extended and delicious
tease. Men could nudge at the gates to the
ovarian fortress, but entrance, they knew,
should be delayed. The ultimate object was sex;
men wanted what they waited for. They just
didn’t want it right away. And this largely ex-
plains why other men’s wives proved such
suitable candidates for adoration. Forbidden,
illicit, deliciously dangerous—yet slightly
damaged, they promised all the more to be
ultimately affordable. They were perfectly
fashioned for desire.

Desire is a tricky business. In Greece, Plu-
tarch had admired Spartan marriages where, for
years, man approached his wife in darkness, in
secret and in haste “so as not to be satiated. . .
there was still place for unextinguished desire.”8
It was a useful formula and was later picked up
in the Middle Ages when the notion of infre-
quent and clandestine meetings was embraced
a lot more than the ladies were. The medieval
magic of love was uncertainty. Even the ro-
mances preserved this ideal. The lady could
be snatched away at any moment by a darken-
ing scandal or a jealous husband, or be ab-
sorbed into the ethers which spawned her, dis-
appearing into the mist on a white palfrey. The
knight wanted her like that: distant, pure, mys-
terious, virginal—a blonde Mary ascending into

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