Love is a thief. Judas was a thief, because he stole money; Rachel was a thief, because she stole her father’s golden idols; Achan was a thief, because at the taking of Jericho he stole a cloak, among other things.1 But love is a greater thief than any of them, for she steals from men their very reason and makes fools of them: amantes, amentes, lovers are out of their minds.2 Amnon, a son of David, fell so in love with his sister Thamar that from sheer love he grew sick and took to his bed.3 Neither food nor drink had any savour for him; his face fell in altogether, so that he looked like a bagpipe with the wind let out; day and night he sighed like an unoiled door; and he was so on fire with love that he could not have walked past a thatched roof without danger of setting it alight. The poet was right indeed:
Bacchus and a woman’s snare
Make fools of many, everywhere.4
In the Gospel three guests were very courteously invited to a supper, and not one of them came. The first said he had bought a farm and must go and see it; he begged to be excused. The second said he had bought five yoke of oxen and must go and try them; he too begged to be excused. The third said he had taken a wife and could not come, but he says nothing about asking to be excused.5 Why? Because, I believe, he was already a fool. Love had taken away his wits.
A young fellow learned that the bride he had set his heart on refused to have him because he had lately broken his leg, and although it had healed, he still limped badly. He was so bold that he went of his own accord to a better surgeon, had the leg broken all over again, and had it set so that afterwards he limped no more. O fool!
Another, of good family, wrote his sweetheart a little letter; and so that it should not arrive empty-handed but bring a present with it, he cut off one of his fingers and sent it sealed up in the letter, as a token of his true and unfeigned love. O fool!
Another, drinking his sweetheart’s health, not only drained a glass of wine to the last drop but chewed up the glass itself, ground it small between his teeth, and gobbled it down as greedily as the finest sugar, so that it tore his bowels, and he parted from his love and his life at one stroke. O fool!
Another stole one of his sweetheart’s gloves, had it chopped up fine and boiled, and ate it in place of tripe, declaring that nothing in all his life had ever tasted better. O fool!
Solomon himself confessed that through his love for foreign women (Moabites and Ammonites, Edomites and Sidonians, and the rest) he had become the greatest of fools: “I am the most foolish of men, and the wisdom of men is not with me.”6
Cut on the same last, cast in the same mould, and crowned with the same fool’s cap was Dulcitius, a governor under the Emperor Diocletian, as Baronius relates.7 Agape, Chionia, and Irene had vowed and offered their virginity to God. Dulcitius burned for them with an unlawful passion, and so one night he broke by force into their house, where they were at that very hour absorbed in devotion and meditation. But he came raging into the kitchen instead, and God so blinded him that he took the kettles and pots for the maidens. He ran at them, threw his arms around them, kissed and hugged them, as if he held his longed-for treasure in his arms. He did not know he was in the kitchen; he thought he was in the bedchamber. He thought he was with his lass, not with the brass;8 and he could hardly make an end of his fondling and kissing, until with soot and grime he looked like a devil come to life. Meanwhile the holy virgins went on with their prayers. When day broke and the dawn gilded the earth, and my handsome Dulcitius (forsooth!) set off for home, everyone he met on the way took him for a fool. Nor did it stop there: they anointed him well with cudgels, until at last he asked his looking-glass for counsel, and the glass, without the least flattery, showed him the truth, that his besotted love had made him a fool before God and the world. O God! If such a miracle happened more often, how many black masks would come off!
Judas: John 12:6. Rachel: Gen. 31:19 (Scripture says only “idols”; “golden” is Abraham’s). Achan: Jos. 7:21, where the spoil is a scarlet garment with silver and gold.↩︎
Amantes, amentes, an old Latin jingle on amare, “to love,” and amens, “out of one’s mind”; compare Terence, Andria 218.↩︎
2 Kings 13 (2 Samuel 13 in modern numbering).↩︎
Bacchus vnd der Weiber Garn / Machen vil zu lauter Narrn: literally, “Bacchus and the net of women make many into downright fools.”↩︎
Luke 14:18–20.↩︎
Prov. 30:2. Abraham quotes it in the past tense, stultissimus fui virorum, et sapientia non fuit mecum; the Vulgate reads Stultissimus sum virorum, et sapientia hominum non est mecum. The words are Agur’s, but Abraham follows the old custom of assigning all Proverbs to Solomon. The foreign wives are from 3 Kings 11:1.↩︎
SS. Agape, Chionia, and Irene were martyred at Thessalonica in 304 under Diocletian. Both Salzburg printings give the reference as “A. 749,” which cannot be Baronius’s year and is probably a misprint. The scene with the pots comes from the legendary Passion of St. Anastasia, and Hrotsvitha of Gandersheim made a comedy of it, Dulcitius, in the tenth century.↩︎
Er glaubte, er seye bey der Anna, nicht bey der Pfanne: “he thought he was with Anna, not with the frying-pan.” None of the three virgins was called Anna; Abraham chose the name for the rhyme.↩︎