Aucassin and Nicolette contains perhaps the most famous expression: it
is the answer Aucassin gives when he is threatened with the pains of
hell, if he makes Nicolette his mistress. A creature wholly of affection
and the senses, he sees on the way to paradise only a feeble company of
aged priests, "clinging day and night to the chapel altars," barefoot or
in patched sandals. With or even without Nicolette, "his sweet mistress
whom he so much loves," he, for his part, is ready to start on the way
to hell, along with "the good scholars," as he says, and the actors, and
the fine horsemen dead in battle, and the men of fashion,* and "the fair
courteous ladies who had two or three chevaliers apiece beside their own
true lords," all gay with music, in their gold and silver and beautiful
furs--"the vair and the grey."

*Parage, peerage--which came to signify all that ambitious youth
affected most on the outside of life, in that old world of the
Troubadours, with whom this term is of frequent recurrence.

But in the House Beautiful the saints too have their place; and the
student of the Renaissance has this advantage over the student of the
emancipation of the human mind in the Reformation, or the French
Revolution, that in tracing the footsteps of humanity to higher levels,
he is not beset at every turn by the inflexibilities and antagonisms of
some well-recognised controversy, with rigidly defined opposites,
exhausting the intelligence and limiting one's sympathies. The
opposition of the professional defenders of a mere system to that more
sincere and general play of the forces of human mind and character,
which I have noted as the secret of Abelard's struggle, is indeed always
powerful. But the incompatibility of souls really "fair" is not
essential; and within the enchanted region of the Renaissance, one needs
not be for ever on one's guard: here there are no fixed parties, no