What can be prettier than this quaint picture of mediæval wooing, and what more magnificent than the wedding ceremony performed in the presence and with the assistance of five bishops and ten abbots, and lasting much too long for the impatience of Archimbaut, ‘for it was past the sixth hour (noon) before he had married her’? At the banquet the bridegroom and the father of the bride have to wait at table according to ancient custom; but the eyes of the former continually go where his heart is, and inwardly he curses the appetite of the guests and the long-winded songs of the joglars. After nine days’ feasting he hurries home to prepare his house for his bride. All this looks auspicious enough for the happiness of the couple. But this bright beginning is but a clever trick on the narrator’s part to show in its darkest dye the monstrous vice which turns brightness itself into night. This vice is jealousy. The King of France, to do honour to his trusty baron Gui of Nemours, escorts Flamenca to her husband, and attends with his wife and his court the festivities arranged by Archimbaut to celebrate the occasion. At the tournament which takes place the king carries on the point of his lance, by way of _gage d’amour_, the sleeve of a lady’s dress. ‘I don’t know whose it was,’ the poet adds diplomatically. The queen’s jealousy suggests Flamenca, and she loses no time to impart her suspicion to Archimbaut, who immediately takes fire at the thought. He keeps his countenance while his guests are present, but inwardly he feels sad, and tormented by ‘a burning sickness called jealousy.’ ‘What was I thinking of,’ he frequently says to himself, ‘when I took a wife? God! I was mad. Was I not well off and happy before? Evil befall my parents that they should have counselled me to take what did never good to any man!’ The symptoms of the ‘burning sickness’ are described with graphic vivacity. Archimbaut shuts himself up; in every visitor he suspects a suitor of his wife; he pretends to be very busy, and adds, in a whispered aside, ‘I should like to kick you out head foremost.’ He then calls to his servants for water, to wash for dinner, in order to make people go, and if this does not avail he will say, ‘Dear sir, will you have dinner with us, for it is time? I hope you will. There will be a good opportunity for flirting’—looking all the while like a dog who shows his teeth. So far so good; but we can hardly believe that a noble and gallant knight should lose all sense of decency so entirely as to go about unwashed and unshaven, letting his beard grow long and matted ‘like a badly made sheaf of oats,’ except in places where he had torn out the hair and stuffed it in his mouth. The poet here decidedly makes a concession to his courtly audience, who naturally were delighted to hear a jealous husband likened to a ‘mad dog.’