Marie de France seems to praise the grandness of love in most of her lais by depicting love as something that brings great happiness as well as great suffering. This is a characterisitic seen in most tales about courtly love. Love’s intensity exists in romantic relationships as well as platonic relationships. We see intense love between Sir Cleges and his King even after he has fallen from grace. Cleges’ love for his King demands that he still defend the right and justice in the name of his King in order for the kingdom to represent these moral rights. In class we discussed how the love seen in Laustic is somewhat bland because the lovers have no real barrier between them and their love is orientated towards the physical rather than the abstract idea of love as something beyond the physical. While we discussed the lack of love between the lovers there also seems to be a lack of love between two men of the same court as well as a lack of love for the beautiful. The absence of the love between noble neighbors and of beauty is unusual when compared to other lais.

These two noblemen live as neighbors and are favored by the same king but little is said of their relationship and it could probably assumed that their relationship hardly exists since one of the neighbors is so content to have an affair with his fellow nobleman’s wife. Although, throughout the lais we see several affairs of married individuals we see fee in which a knight or nobleman of one kingdom has a relationship with a fellow knight or nobleman’s wife. Most of the affairs occur far from their home kingdom. In other lais their have been great love between neighbors and fellow individuals with noble blood. For example in Le Fresne by Marie de France  the two neighbors have such a close bond that when one of them has twin sons he basically names his neighbor as his son’s godfather. There is no such strong bond of friendship and love seen in Laustic.

Love between romantic lovers and friends is clearly diminished of status in this text but there is also a lack of appreciation and love for beauty. Beauty is embraced and revered in many of the lais. In Milun this beauty is seen in the swan that the lovers use to exchange letters. The beauty of the nightingale is destroyed in this text when the wife uses it as a way to fulfill her need for an explanation. This in itself is crime against the beauty of the nightingale.