"There are divers men who make a great show of loyalty, and pretend to such discretion in the hidden things they hear, that at the end folk come to put faith in them"
About this Quote
Trust, Marie de France warns, is often manufactured before it is earned. Her line sketches a familiar social operator: the person who performs loyalty with such theatrical conviction, and guards secrets with such ostentatious “discretion,” that an audience begins to confuse the act with the attribute. The mechanism is painfully modern: credibility accrues not from a proven record of care, but from the visible rituals of reliability.
The diction does quiet work. “Divers men” isn’t just “various people”; it signals a type that proliferates in courtly ecosystems, where proximity to power is currency and reputation is a weapon. “Make a great show” frames loyalty as spectacle, something staged for onlookers rather than lived in private. Even “hidden things they hear” carries a whiff of eavesdropping and information brokerage: these are people who traffic in intimacy, collecting confidences not to protect them, but to leverage the aura of being trusted.
Marie’s subtext is less moral scolding than structural critique. In a medieval aristocratic world of patronage, gossip, and fragile alliances, loyalty could be counterfeited because the social rewards for seeming faithful were immediate, while the costs of betrayal could be delayed or displaced onto someone else. The line captures a grim feedback loop: the better someone performs discretion, the more secrets they are fed; the more secrets they hold, the more “trustworthy” they appear.
It’s also a poet’s reminder about narrative itself. We believe the characters who seem composed, contained, above the mess. Marie nudges us to notice how easily “faith” is converted from judgment into habit.
The diction does quiet work. “Divers men” isn’t just “various people”; it signals a type that proliferates in courtly ecosystems, where proximity to power is currency and reputation is a weapon. “Make a great show” frames loyalty as spectacle, something staged for onlookers rather than lived in private. Even “hidden things they hear” carries a whiff of eavesdropping and information brokerage: these are people who traffic in intimacy, collecting confidences not to protect them, but to leverage the aura of being trusted.
Marie’s subtext is less moral scolding than structural critique. In a medieval aristocratic world of patronage, gossip, and fragile alliances, loyalty could be counterfeited because the social rewards for seeming faithful were immediate, while the costs of betrayal could be delayed or displaced onto someone else. The line captures a grim feedback loop: the better someone performs discretion, the more secrets they are fed; the more secrets they hold, the more “trustworthy” they appear.
It’s also a poet’s reminder about narrative itself. We believe the characters who seem composed, contained, above the mess. Marie nudges us to notice how easily “faith” is converted from judgment into habit.
Quote Details
| Topic | Fake Friends |
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