Andre warns his reader to beware of nuns even as he would beware of prostitutes. He should not make the mistake of supposing that the rules of love apply to farmers, who, like the beasts they tend, give themselves up to lust as Nature prompts. Hard work ought to keep a farmer's thoughts off love; in any event, if farmers were allowed to dabble in an art not natural to them their farms would soon go out of cultivation, to the general loss of the community. If a man should chance to conceive a desire for a farm woman, he should flatter her grossly and then take her, by force if necessary, in the first suitable corner. (Force is often necessary, Andre explainss to soften the inborn shyness of such women.)
Next, Andre enumerates many of the rulings on love by the Countess of Champagne, Queen Eleanor, Ermengarde of Narbonne and others. Some of the problems are futilities of the same order as 'Which half of a woman would you choose?' Others bear some resemblance to the questions dealt with today in 'love knots untied' columns. Should a lady take a new lover when her old lover is overseas? The Countess of Champagne refuses to approve, condoning the man's failure to write by saying that this shows how prudent he is in not risking betrayal of their secret. It is wrong, according to these pretty pundits, to reject a man who has been disfigured in war. A lover's proxy who falls in love with the lady deserves (they say) to be ostracized as having fallen short of knightly standards. They rule that a man is entitled to pretend an affair with another woman in order to test his lady's constancy.
Types of gift which may be accepted by a woman in love, without detriment to her reputation, include a handkerchief, a wreath of gold or silver, a mirror, a purse, a comb, a picture and a washbasin. It is ruled that a lover's ring should be worn on the small finger of the left hand, out of sight (the left hand being liable to fewer shameful contacts).
General rulings on love include these: Every lover pales in the presence of his beloved; there is nothing to prevent one woman being loved by two men, or one man by two women; a man should not love any woman he would be ashamed to marry; love cannot cohabit with avarice or lewdness.
Just as Ovid had second thoughts about The Art of Love and wrote his face-saving The Cure for Love, so Andre at the end plays safe and pretends to cancel the whole thing out. The purpose of reading his book, he says, is to learn how to excite women to love, so that by refraining from doing so, a man may deserve a greater reward in Heaven. God is more pleased with a man who knows how to sin, yet abstains, than with one who never has a chance to sin. This remarkable advice is followed by a conventional churchman's attack on women as being vain, loudmouthed, mendacious and lewd.
Andre, if alive today, could find gainful employment on a Sunday newspaper, delightedly digging up wickedness, showing it off and urging people to put it out of their minds.
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