Where, then, I repeat, did Saadi get that modern European idea of altruistic self-sacrifice as a test of love? Evidently from Europe by way of Arabia. His own language indicates this--his suspicious boast of his knowledge of real love as of one who has just made a strange discovery, and his coupling it with the knowledge of Arabic. Now it is well known that ever since the ninth century the Persian mind had been brought into a contact with the Arabic which became more and more intimate. The Arabs had a habit of sacrificing their lives in chivalrous efforts to save the life or honor of maidens whom the enemy endeavored to kidnap. The Arabs, on their part, were in close contact with the European minds, and as they helped to originate the chivalrous spirit in Europe, so they must have been in turn influenced by the developments of the troubadour spirit which culminated in such maxims as Montagnogout's declaration that "a true lover desires a thousand times more the happiness of his beloved than his own." As Saadi lived in the time of the troubadours--the twelfth and thirteenth centuries--it was easy for him to get a knowledge of the European "ways and forms of courtship." In Persia itself there was no courtship or legitimate lovemaking, for the "lover" hardly ever had met his bride before the wedding-day. Nevertheless, if we may believe William Franklin,[35] a Persian woman might command a suitor to spend all day in front of her house reciting verses in praise of her beauty; and H.C. Trumbull naïvely cites, as evidence that Orientals love just as we do, the following story: "Morier tells ... of a large painting in a pleasure-house in Shiraz, illustrative of the treatment of a loyal lover by a heartless coquette, which is one of the popular legends of Persia. Sheik Chenan, a Persian of the true faith, and a man of learning and consequence, fell in love with an Armenian lady of great beauty who would not marry him unless he changed his religion. To this he agreed. Still she would not marry him unless he would drink wine. This scruple also he yielded. She resisted still, unless he consented to eat pork. With this also he complied. Still she was coy, and refused to fulfil her engagement, unless he would be contented to drive swine before her. Even this condition he accepted. She then told him that she would not have him at all, and laughed at him for his pains. The picture represents the coquette at her window, laughing at Sheik Chenan as he is driving his pigs before her."