In other poems written for her courtly admirers Christine does not hesitate to voice sentiments quite out of keeping with the manners of her patrons. It is thus that she says: "If true honor is to be reapportioned, many do I know who will have but a little share in it, despite their thinking that they have all that wealth, beauty, noble birth, and fine clothes can give, and that therefore they are very princes. But however noble he be in outward show, no man is noble who lends himself to evil deeds or evil words. Thus some there are in whose boasting there is not one word of truth, who will tell you that the fairest ladies in the land have honored them with love. Good Lord! what gentility! How ill it becomes a noble man to lie and tell false tales of women! Such fellows are but villains, pure and simple; and should there be a redistribution of honors, theirs should be cut down." Not infrequently, alas, the pride of learning mars her verse; it is overloaded with pedantic allusions, stiff with learning, and too manifestly the product of a learned head rather than of an overflowing heart. Where these faults appear less, or not at all, is in the poems inspired by genuine feeling for her loved ones; there the real heart of the woman, bravely struggling to bear up and smile before the world, is laid bare to us in sudden glimpses of unpremeditated poetry. It is an old theme, but one of pathos ever fresh, that we find in the following lines: "Je chante par couverture (_i. e._, contenance), Mais mieux pleurassent mes oeil (yeux), Ne nul ne sait le travail Que mon pauvre coeur endure. Pour ce (je) muce (cache) ma douleur Qu'en nul je ne vois pitie. Plus on a cause de pleur (pleurer), Moins on trouve d'amitié. Pour ce plainte ne murmure Ne fais de mon piteux deuil. Ainçois (plutôt) (je) ris quand pleurer veuil (veux), Et sans rime et sans mesure Je chante par couverture." It is, you see, the old _motif_, in melodramatic pathos that of the harlequin Dorkins, who must play his part in the pantomime even though his child lie dying, in tragedy that of Lady Macbeth, who must play the queen by day and suffer the torments of the murderess at night. It is not the novelty but the universality and truth of the idea or sentiment that makes Christine's verses rank as poetry.