Le roman de la rose

table original: "prouffitable" doctrine. What can one know of good who does not know evil, nor what it is to love one's Creator, who does not know how to love his creature?

Plan of this Edition.

In giving this new Edition of the Romance of the Rose, which for nearly two hundred years had not been put to the Press, I believed that I should give it a degree of perfection that it had not yet had until now. I have revised the Text against various Editions and some Manuscripts. I have not, however, overwhelmed myself by the one or the other; I hate too much those pedants original: "Savantas" whose entire knowledge is to compare Manuscripts and collect the faults of Scribes, by means of which they cast uncertainty upon the best Writers of antiquity. This is what all these Variants, compiled with so much labor and so little wit by these semi-scholars, more occupied with Commentaries than with the texts of their Authors, lead to.

However, as there are in some Editions or even in a small number of Manuscripts differences

that are useful or essential for the understanding of this Work, I believed I should not neglect them. I have therefore chosen a known Edition and a Manuscript of consequence to compare them with my Edition and to point out the changes that have been made to this Book.

The revision by Clément Marot has one advantage: it sometimes provides the explanation for certain words that had already grown old, or were no longer used or even understood in the time of Francis I. This is where it can be useful; otherwise, it is less a correction than an alteration of the Romance of the Rose, as we have already noted.

Among all the Manuscripts I have seen, I chose one written for distinguished persons of the Court of France, so as to avoid the changes made to this Romance in the copies written for the various Provinces of the Kingdom. I asked one of my friends to have this Manuscript lent to me by the Monks of St. Germain des Prés, who take pleasure—though they are not obliged to do so—in sharing with people of Letters the immense Treasures they possess.