What is love? Love is suffering. Love is feeling like if you can't wrap your beloved up in your arms right this instant you are positively going to die. Love is at the same time this world's greatest torment and greatest elation. Love is having infinite words brimming at your mouth, eager to tell your beloved your wildest thoughts, while at the same time being terrified of offending them. Love is chancing upon the woman who causes your heart to stop, and feeling at once the lust beginning to grow in your heart. Love is thinking about your love so constantly you feel your heart about to go up in flames, until you cannot help but woo her. Love is the vigilant planning of seduction, the careful arrangement of the perfect meeting, and finally succeeding in touching her hand. Love is suffering everyone can see. If no one can see your distress at not having your mistress by your side, then you are not in Love.
"When it come to love, those without understanding and wisdom are indifferent to life; it is the wisdom of love that no one ought to try and stay rational."
His Highness Equitan, ruler, judge, and king the Nanz, is the pinnacle of the love between a noble man and an everyday woman. In the eyes of Equitan, this woman (the wife of his seneschal) was not ordinary. She was courtly and verbose, and none compared. She bewitched him, the mischievous minx, the first time he simply heard a passing man mention her. He carefully planned a visit to her castle, and upon first glance she turned him into a shadow of his former self.
He was entirely incapacitated, the wench had him in her talons. His suffering was obvious; The king was gaunt and anxious, his hair unwashed and his robes wrinkled. He thought about her every waking moment - when he tried to rest her gaze was emblazoned inside his eyelids. He was entirely and utterly incapacitated.
He thought briefly of the seneschal, an old friend of his family's, but quickly pushed the inferior out of his mind. Equitan was compelled to love her, he had no choice in the matter. There was no way the seneschal could have the same feelings for the concubine he did, and the seneschal was in fact being quite selfish by not sharing his wife. Yes, Equitan would surely go mad if he didn't have this woman, so it was only right he take her. He decided to tell her that he would die if she refused his love.
The woman did not come to him easily. She protested, but was no match for Equitan's charm and boyish good looks. She insulted the king, saying he would seduce and leave her once he got what she believed he wanted. She claimed her husband to be the superior man morally. Fool! He pleaded with her to let him complete her, to give her a ring. Finally, she relented and allowed him to wed her in secret.
She would come under cover of darkness to see the man she grew to love, and she would leave again under the cover of darkness. Love can grow in the shadows, but left without light too long it will become asphyxiated. The king was plagued with betrothals and every face he encountered nagged him relentlessly about marrying, and this caused the woman to approach insanity. She had the nerve to tell the king she would just die if he married another, when she should have just been grateful a man of his status and nobility would even consider having her in his life.
She tricked him - in a desperate attempt to save their love - into agreeing to an evil, murderous plot. For their love to survive, they must rid themselves of the seneschal. He procured for her the venom of a deadly snake, while she arranged a dinner between the king and her soon-to-be-late husband. In her wily womanly ways, she slipped the venom into the seneschal's drink and the couple watched his eyes realize too late what had happened, as he fell to the floor clutching his neck in agony.
With the seneschal at their feet, eyes still open, the happy couple rejoiced and quickly consummated the victory of their love. Anyone who would like to understand can derive this lesson: Those who try to obstruct the passionate desires of a noble man, especially one as regal and courtly as King Equitan, will die in love's wake. These events took place as I (not as Marie de France) have related them to you. The Bretons composed a lay about them, about Equitan and how he conquered and captured the woman he loved so, and how she paved the way for their love to flourish in the light.
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