Le Fresne - Marie de France

Le Fresne is a piece that blows my mind. I find it crazy to think that twins was something that was unheard of and frowned upon. I think it is also crazy to think that a woman would give up her child just because she had twins and bashed another for having twins. It is still your child and you should love and care for it anyway. It is just so different since nowadays twins are so common and it isn’t unheard of to even have more children than that whether it is triplets, quadruplets, etc.

“For I have judged myself a criminal; I spoke ill of all women, all—for didn’t I say that it’s never been nor have we ourselves ever seen a woman who bore two children unless she had known two men? Now I have two; it’s plain to see, the worst of it’s turned back on me.”

This stood out to me because it shows how karma always comes back to get you. She already negatively judged her neighbor for having twin sons, and now that it is her having twins, she cannot bare the dishonor it would bring. It would make her look bad, like a cheater since she was the one that said “That one woman in a single birth had two separate sons, except where two separate men had put them there.” She would be seen as a hypocrite and judged even more harshly by others. I just cannot believe that she gave up a child to avoid the criticism and a bad reputation.

I found the ending of the piece very interesting. After the mother and father realized that the other woman was their other daughter, they changed the whole plan. The realized that she was actually suitable and noble to marry her lover. They allowed the daughter they kept to divorce the man, allowing true love to happen for this marriage. Le Fresne was actually in love with the man unlike La Coudre. I think that the family felt bad for giving up Le Fresne and now that she returned and was happy and in love, they did not want to take that away from her. This also allowed La Coudre to remain close to home and her parents, which prevents them from losing her completely which is one thing they feared, “God has given us joy rejoiced, before we could double the treachery.” This also shows how Marie de France wrote about realistic love and relationships instead of platonic relationships, arranged marriages which usually did not consist of true love.