How came this young woman, as virtuous as she was beautiful, to love this youth, whom at the opening of the story she did not even know? What external circumstances brought them together, and what workings of the heart made them pass from indifference to doubts and anxieties, and then to love? These two orders of thought are untwined simultaneously, on parallel lines by Chaucer, that dreamer who had lived so much in real life, that man of action who had dreamed so many dreams. Troilus despised love, and mocked at lovers: If knight or squyer of his companye Gan for to syke, or lete his eyen bayten On any woman that he coude aspye; He wolde smyle, and holden it folye, And seye him thus, "God wot she slepeth softe For love of thee, whan thou tornest ful ofte."[510] One day, in the temple, he sees Cressida, and his fate is sealed; he cannot remove his gaze from her; the wind of love has swept by; all his strength has vanished; his pride has fallen as the petals fall from a rose; he drinks deep draughts of an invincible poison. Far from her, his imagination completes what reality had begun: seated on the foot of his bed, absorbed in thought, he once more sees Cressida, and sees her so beautiful, depicted in outlines so vivid, and colours so glowing, that this divine image fashioned in his own brain is henceforth the only one he will behold; forever will he have before his eyes that celestial form of superhuman beauty, never more the real earthly Cressida, the frail daughter of Calchas. Troilus is ill for life of the love illness. He has a friend, older than himself, sceptical, trivial, experienced, "that called was Pandare," Cressida's uncle. He confides to him his woes, and asks for help. Pandarus, in Boccaccio, is a young nobleman, sceptical too, but frivolous, disdainful, elegant, like a personage of Musset. Chaucer transforms the whole drama and makes room for the grosser realities of life, by altering the character of Pandarus. He makes of him a man of mature years devoid of scruples, talkative, shameless, wily, whose wisdom consists in proverbs chosen among the easiest to follow, much more closely connected with Moliere's or Shakespeare's comic heroes than with Musset's lovers. Pandarus is as fond of comparisons as Gros-Rene, as fond of old saws as Polonius; he is coarse and indecent, unintentionally and by nature, like Juliet's nurse.[511] He is totally unconscious, and thinks himself the best friend in the world, and the most reserved; he concludes interminable speeches by: I jape nought, as ever have I joye. Every one of his thoughts, of his words, of his attitudes is the very opposite of Cressida's and her lover's, and makes them stand out in relief by a contrast of shade. He is all for tangible and present realities, and does not believe in ever foregoing an immediate and certain pleasure in consideration of merely possible consequences.