and by no other.

This that my brethren report may well be true, and yet I take no shame in
the bruit or "fama." For as in my hot youth I suffered sorrows many from
love, so now I may say, like that Carthaginian queen in Maro, "miseris
succurrere disco." The years of the youth of most women and men are like
a tourney, or jousts courteous, and many fall in the lists of love, and
many carry sorer wounds away from Love's spears, than they wot of who do
but look on from the safe seats and secure pavilions of age. Though all
may seem but a gentle and joyous passage of arms, and the weapons that
they use but arms of courtesy, yet are shrewd blows dealt and wounds
taken which bleed inwardly, perchance through a whole life long. To
medicine these wounds with kind words is, it may be, part of my poor
skill as a healer of souls in my degree, and therefore do the young
resort to Father Norman.

Some confessors there be who laugh within their hearts at these sorrows
of lovers, as if they were mere "nugae" and featherweights: others there
are who wax impatient, holding all love for sin in some degree, and
forgetting that Monseigneur St. Peter himself was a married man, and
doubtless had his own share of trouble and amorous annoy when he was
winning the lady his wife, even as other men. But if I be of any avail
(as they deem) in the healing of hearts, I owe my skill of that surgery
to remembrance of the days of my youth, when I found none to give me
comfort, save what I won from a book that my master had in hand to copy
and adorn, namely, "The Book of One Hundred Ballades, containing Counsel
to a Knight, that he should love loyally"; this counsel offered by
Messire Lyonnet de Coismes, Messire Jehan de Mailly, the Sieur d'Yvry,
and many other good knights that were true lovers. Verily, in sermons of
preachers and lives of holy men I found no such comfort.