During the Middle Ages the primitive freshness of Christian chastity began to lose its charm. No more romances of chastity were written, and in actual life men no longer sought daring adventures in the field of chastity. So far as the old ideals survived at all it was in the secular field of chivalry. The last notable figure to emulate the achievements of the early Christians was Robert of Arbrissel in Normandy. Robert of Arbrissel, who founded, in the eleventh century, the famous and distinguished Order of Fontevrault for women, was a Breton. This Celtic origin is doubtless significant, for it may explain his unfailing ardor and gaiety, and his enthusiastic veneration for womanhood. Even those of his friends who deprecated what they considered his scandalous conduct bear testimony to his unfailing and cheerful temperament, his alertness in action, his readiness for any deed of humanity, and his entire freedom from severity. He attracted immense crowds of people of all conditions, especially women, including prostitutes, and his influence over women was great. Once he went into a brothel to warm his feet, and, incidentally, converted all the women there. "Who are you?" asked one of them, "I have been here twenty-five years and nobody has ever come here to talk about God." Robert's relation with his nuns at Fontevrault was very intimate, and he would often sleep with them. This is set forth precisely in letters written by friends of his, bishops and abbots, one of whom remarks that Robert had "discovered a new but fruitless form of martyrdom." A royal abbess of Fontevrault in the seventeenth century, pretending that the venerated founder of the order could not possibly have been guilty of such scandalous conduct, and that the letters must therefore be spurious, had the originals destroyed, so far as possible. The Bollandists, in an unscholarly and incomplete account of the matter (_Acta Sanctorum_, Feb. 25), adopted this view. J. von Walter, however, in a recent and thorough study of Robert of Arbrissel (_Die Ersten Wanderprediger Frankreichs_, Theil I), shows that there is no reason whatever to doubt the authentic and reliable character of the impugned letters. The early Christian legends of chastity had, however, their successors. _Aucassin et Nicolette_, which was probably written in Northern France towards the end of the twelfth century, is above all the descendant of the stories in the _Acta Sanctorum_ and elsewhere. It embodied their spirit and carried it forward, uniting their delicate feeling for chastity and purity with the ideal of monogamic love. _Aucassin et Nicolette_ was the death-knell of the primitive Christian romance of chastity. It was the discovery that the chaste refinements of delicacy and devotion were possible within the strictly normal sphere of sexual love.