The Lais of Marie de France

As with Guigemar, Les Deus Amants features the inappropriate, excessive love of an old man for a woman of a different generation. Whereas in Guigemar the elderly, possessive figure is a husband, in Les Deus Amants, it is a father who views his daughter as “a comfort to him ever since he had lost the queen” (82). The king is so unwilling to relinquish the familial arrangement that sustains him, he sets his daughter’s suitors with the impossible challenge of climbing a mountain while carrying his daughter, and not stopping to rest.

As with Guigemar, natural law intervenes in the form of a valiant young man who is so enthusiastic about the daughter that he forgets to take the strengthening potion, thinking that his love will carry her all the way up the mountain. However, the limitations of human anatomy catch up with him, and he perishes after completing the challenge. The poignancy of this lay is in the fact that love, no matter how strong, is limited in how many obstacles it can overcome. Love can perform the miracle of enabling a young man to carry a woman up a mountain unaided, but it cannot prevent his death from exhaustion or give the princess the courage to go on without him. Although the king is remorseful, readers are left with an impression of his selfish entreaty, which leads to two young people’s deaths. Rather than following the most natural course of a marriage, the young people are now a monument.