This spiritual love (then as now) puzzled the commonplace, and was misunderstood and regarded with scepticism. Bertran d'Alaman taunted Sordello with his "hypocritical happiness" and "the whole deception of his love," and Granet, in a satirical poem, cast doubt upon his sincerity.
It is very significant to find that Sordello, that typical champion of chaste love, kept up a number of questionable liaisons with all sorts of women. Bertran reproached him with having changed his lady at least a hundred times, and he himself shamelessly confesses:
The jealousies of husbands ne'er amaze me, For in the art of love I do excel, And there's no wife, however chaste she may be Who can resist me if I woo her well. And if her husband hate me I'll not grumble, Because his wife receives me in the night, If mine her kiss, if mine sweet love's delight, His pain and wrath my spirit shall not humble. No husband e'er shall rob me of my pleasure, None can resist me, what I wish I gain, All do I love and never will refrain Spite husbands' wrath to rob them of their treasure.
It may seem strange at first sight that this enthusiastic exponent of pure love should have led such a double life. But Sordello's conduct is not in the least paradoxical; in accordance with the tendency of the period, he carefully distinguished in his own heart between sexuality and love; before the one he lay prostrate, unable to find words enough in self-depreciation, so that he might the more exalt his mistress; but with respect to all other women he was a mere sensualist. We read that although he was "an expert in the treatment of women" in her presence his voice forsook him and he lost all self-control. Petrarch, who--while living with a very earthly woman--extolled all his life long a lofty being whom he called Laura, was akin to Sordello, although he was a far less brutal character. The latter approached the type of the seeker of love, the Don Juan.
In a tenzone between Peirol and the Dauphin of Auvergne, the former maintains that love must die at the moment of its consummation. "I cannot believe," he says, "that a true lover can continue to love after he has received the last favour." (Otto Weininger agrees with this.) But Peirol winds up with the subtle suggestion that though love be dead, a man should always continue to behave as if he were still in love.