French prose writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth

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French prose writers of the fourteenth & fifteenth cen t u ries Janet M. Ferrier M.A. (Oxon)

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Publisher: Robert maxwell,

m.c., m.p.

PERGAMON OXFORD FRENCH SERIES General Editors: C. V. James I. C. Thimann

,

French Prose Writers of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries

i

French Prose Writers of the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries by

JANET M. FERRIER

PERGAMON PRESS OXFORD

•

LONDON

TORONTO

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•

EDINBURGH

PARIS

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■

NEW YORK

FRANKFURT

Pergainon Press Ltd., Headington Hill Hall, Oxford 4 & 5 Fitzroy Square, London W.l Pergamon Press (Scotland) Ltd., 2 & 3 Teviot Place, Edinburgh 1 Pergamon Press Inc., 44 - 01 21st Street, Long Island City, New York 11101 Pergamon of Canada Ltd., 6 Adelaide Street East, Toronto, Ontario Pergamon Press S.A.R.L., 24 rue des Ecoles, Paris 5e Pergamon Press GmbH, Kaiserstrasse 75, Frankfurt-am-Main Copyright © 1966 Pergamon Press Ltd. First edition 1966 Library of Congress Catalog Card No. 65-27374

Printed in Great Britain by Shield Press Limited, Amersham, Bucks.

This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise disposed of without the publisher’s consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published. (2329/66)

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Contents Foreword Acknowledgements Introduction THREE WORKS OF INSTRUCTION Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry Le Menagier de Paris Les Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio SOME WORKS OF FICTION Melusine Les Quinze Joyes de Manage and Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles Le Petit Jehan de Saintre THREE MORALISTS Jean Gerson Christine de Pisan Alain Chartier THREE HISTORIANS Jean Froissart Georges Chastellain Philippe de Commynes

vjj vjjj jx 1

3 15

24 37 39

54 70 83 85 98 112

127 129 143 157

EXTRACTS FROM FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES PROSE WRITERS

167

LE CHEVALIER DE LA TOUR LANDRY

169

The Chevalier tells his daughters to cultivate courtesy An anecdote deriding vanity LE MENAGIER DE PARIS The servant problem How to make an omelette

169 170 171 171 172

CONTENTS

LE LIVRE DES DEDUIS

174

Description of the nature and habits of the wolf and the fox LE SONGE DE PESTILENCE

174 176

The vices fight among themselves M&LUSINE

176 178

The Lady of Valbruyant intervenes on behalf of her husband LES QUINZE JOYES DE MARI AGE The wife goes on a pilgrimage

178 181 181

LE PETIT JEHAN DE SAINTR& The procession as Saintre sets off for Avignon Saintre prepares to avenge himself on Damp Abbe GERSON

184 184 185 187

Part of the first sermon of a series on the text Poenitemini et credite evangelio Part of the Traite contre le Roman de la Rose CHRISTINE DE PISAN

187 189 191

Letter to Isabella of Bavaria dedicating to her the Epistre sur le Roman de la Rose Christine recounts to Philosophic the events of her life CHARTIER

191 192 195

Foy discourses on the afflictions of the kingdom of France Chartier describes how he saw the figure of France in a dream FROISSART

195 197 200

The betrothal of Charles VI to Isabella of Bavaria CHASTELLAIN

200 204

The death of Philip the Good

204

COMMYNES

208

Louis XI and Charles the Bold sign the Treaty of Peronne

208

Glossary

211

Index

215 VI

Foreword book is intended primarily for students to serve as an intro¬ duction to the major works in French prose of the later mediaeval period. It is not, and does not claim to be, in any way exhaustive. Any author contemplating a book on such a topic is faced with the alternatives of dealing chronologically with every writer and work that come within his terms of reference or with adopting a more selective method. The former approach, in a book of such a length as this, may well result in little more than a catalogue of names, each followed by a brief and necessarily partial assessment. I have chosen rather to select a number of authors and works within certain cate¬ gories and to deal with these in some detail; this method, it is hoped, will have the effect of revealing something of the characteristics of French prose writing of this period and thus enabling the reader to place these writers within the tradition of French literature as a whole. This

Many of the texts which form the subject of this survey are diffi¬ cult to obtain; some are of rather daunting length. There is, of course, no substitute for the reading of the whole text; but in order that students may have some opportunity of reading at least a little of the works here commented on, Part II of this book consists of fairly lengthy extracts from the authors concerned. My object has been so far as possible to choose passages characteristic of the respective writers, so that readers may be able to form their own iudgement and in some cases at least be led to read the complete works from which the passages are selected.

Acknowledgements I am indebted to the following authors and publishers for per¬ mission to reproduce copyright material from their works: Presses Universitaires de Dijon for the passage from Melusine edited by M. L. Stouff. Editions Gamier Freres for the passage from Les Quinze Joyes de Manage, edited by M. F. Fleuret. Catholic University of America Press for the passage from VAvision Christine, edited by Sister Mary Louis Towner. Librairie Champion for the passage from Le Quadrilogue Invectif, edited by Mile E. Droz and for the passages from Commynes’s Memoires, edited by M. J. Calmette. I also wish to thank any other holders of copyright material which I may have quoted and inadvertently omitted to acknow¬ ledge.

Introduction The fourteenth and fifteenth centuries in France see the emer¬

gence of prose as a dominant literary form. In the previous century the prose versions of the Arthurian romances on the one hand and the chronicles of Joinville on the other show that writers were becoming increasingly aware of the greater suitability of prose for sustained narrative. The interest and vivacity of the content of these works, however, cannot altogether disguise the fact that their authors’ manipulation of the prose form is often clumsy; and their manner of writing as a whole lacks—from a purely aesthetic point of view—variety and flexibility. This is still true of the early works of the following century. It is instructive to note the reasons which writers of this period give to justify their use of prose. The author of Les Limes du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio, in a verse introduction, says that he has chosen prose for his book “pour miex savoir le contenu”. Jean le Bel explains in his prologue that verse is unsatisfactory for the recording of historical events because it lends itself to inaccuracy: Et pourtant que en ces hystoires rimees treuve on plente de bourdes, je veul mectre paine et entente d’escrire par prose ce que j’ay veu et ouy recorder.

Froissart, too, criticizes verse chronicles because “leurs rimmez et leurs canchons controuvees n’ataindent en rien le vraie matere” and announces that he intends to follow the example of Jean le Bel in the interests of historical truth. Prose, then, is valued for strictly utilitarian reasons by these earlier writers; and it is some time before considerations of style

X

INTRODUCTION

begin to preoccupy authors’ minds. Literature and verse remain more or less synonymous terms: the manuals of rhetoric are con¬ cerned with the rules of verse composition and even the great prose writers such as Chartier and Chastellain were chiefly admired by their contemporaries for their highly conventional poetic output. As early as the middle of the thirteenth century Brunetto Latini had attempted to formulate a definition of prose, and this remained the only theoretical pronouncement on the subject for some three hundred years. Brunetto Latini tells his readers that La voie de prose est large et pleniere, si comme est ores la commune parleure des gens; mais li sentiers de rime est plus estrois et plus fors, si comme cil qui est clos et fermez de murs et de paliz, ce est a dire de poins et de numbre et de mesure certaine de quoy on ne peu ne ne doit trespasser.

This definition, at first sight almost entirely negative, is in fact very acute both in characterizing early French prose and in explaining it. The characteristic sentence of Jean le Bel, of Froissart, of the Chevalier de la Tour Landry is one where a series of simple propos¬ itions are linked by conjunctions; it is long but not unduly complex, and often almost entirely lacking in variety or emphasis. It is indeed very like la commune parleure des gens at any period. And it is no doubt because they lack the discipline of the octosyllabic line that writers of the fourteenth century fall into this kind of style. Deprived of the walls and fences that kept them on that narrow and welldefined track, their prose spills over formlessly, since they have not yet learned to create a discipline within the sentence itself. The first prose writers to embrace such a discipline were those, such as Gerson and Chartier, who expressed themselves with equal facility in Latin and who brought to the writing of French the sense of order characteristic of Latin. In their hands, French prose be¬ comes capable of expressing not only shades of meaning but varieties of emphasis; sentences become more complex and more closely knit. In the hands of a master this kind of writing, dignified and ponder¬ ous, is immensely effective for treating of serious topics; it reaches its apogee in the elaborate style of Chastellain, embellished with

INTRODUCTION

XI

every device of rhetoric and where the shape of the sentence exactly follows the movement of the writer’s thought. In the hands of less able practitioners, however, this style has its dangers. Christine de Pisan, though she can be reasonably compre¬ hensible while she is speaking of her own experience, carries her readers into a maze of ever-increasing complexity when she ventures into the realm of abstract thought and argument. This dichotomy is even more noticeable in Antoine de la Sale, whose style is clear and lively when he is describing events that he himself witnessed or where sincere emotion breaks through, but in whose more con¬ ventional passages the reader may often search in vain for the completion of a main clause embedded in ever thicker subordinate accretions. Where the masters of Latin, like Chartier and Chastellain, used their knowledge to bring order to their writing in French, these others, widely read as they are, show that much of their reading is ill-digested; the endless use of exempla is one result of this; the clumsy and over-complicated style they use is another. There seems little doubt that in prose writing, as in architecture, the fifteenth century witnessed a deliberate cult of complication for its own sake. This “Gothic” style is, however, not the only kind of prose writing that the fifteenth century produces. In the nouvelle, where brevity and clarity of structure are the essential qualities of the genre, the style matches the form as a whole: it is a terse manner, in which digression has no place, and owes nothing to Latin models. Commynes, too, the writer who is most sympathetically regarded by the modern world, knew no Latin. This does not mean that his style is invariably free of the faults of his contemporaries; but it is usually clear, and—most important of all—he can vary his technique according to whether he wishes to describe a battle, summarize lengthy negotiations, draw a character-sketch or express his political philosophy in a series of pithy maxims. It is this variety that is the most striking feature of prose style by the end of the fifteenth century. In the course of some hundred and fifty years, the medium has become so flexible that writers are able to use it with equal facility for a wide range of topics. This develop-

Xll

INTRODUCTION

ment of prose as an artistic medium proceeds side by side with the ever-increasing formality and artificiality of verse. The major poets of the sixteenth century in France felt bound to make a clean break with the past by the use of new forms and new modes of expression; but the prose of the period, is, in manner if not in content, a logical development of that of the previous century.

Three Works of Instruction

Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry The reign of Charles V was nostalgically regarded in France by those who had to live through the disastrous years under his successor; for them it was a golden age of peace and prosperity, when the virtues and the arts alike could flourish unrestrained. In the Fiction du Lyon, unfinished at the time of his death in 1406, Deschamps recalled this happy time: En cellui temps s’entr’amerent, Foy et amour s’entreporterent . . . Franchise y estoit maintenucd

Modern scholarship views Charles and his hero du Guesclin with a more critical eye.1 2 Nevertheless his love of literature and his encour¬ agement of writers cannot be denied; and the sixteen years of his reign (1364-80), by creating a temporary lull in the hostilities with England, provided a favourable climate for the production—not of literary masterpieces, for these may be brought forth by the very condition of suffering, like those of Deschamps, or in spite of them, like those of Machaut—but of minor works, by authors whose output was the fruit of their leisure and whose purpose and appeal were utilitarian rather than aesthetic. It is during this period that we find the beginning of that vogue for prose compilations of moral precepts and exhortation, supported by exempla, which was to continue popular well into the succeeding century.

1

2

La Fiction du Lyon, 11. 97-8, hi, Deschamps, Oeuvres (S.A.T.F.), VIII, p. 248. See E. Perroy, The Hundred Years War (London, 1951), pp. 146 ff. 3

4

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

The Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry3 is such a work. It enjoyed considerable popularity throughout the latter part of the Middle Ages: there are eleven manuscripts in French and a manu¬ script translation into English of the reign of Henry VI. Although the book was not published in France until as late as 1514, it was translated and printed by Caxton in 1483 and a German edition followed ten years later. This is remarkable popularity for a book which, if we are to believe its author, was written with a purely domestic audience in mind. The Chevalier de la Tour, a gentleman from Anjou who, as Montaiglon’s researches revealed, fought in several campaigns of the Hundred Years’ War and lived through the reigns of Philip VI of Valois, John II, Charles V and Charles VI, resolved in 1371 to write a book for the edification of his daughters. Two references (pp. 175 and 199) to “le livre que j’ay fait a voz freres” make it clear that a companion volume was at any rate begun; but it has not survived. He writes, as he tells us in his introductory chapter, “pour mes filles aprendre a roumancier”. Huizinga suggests4 that this might be rendered “to teach my daughters the fashionable conventions in love matters”; but if they had hoped that their father would guide them into the intricacies of courtly love as it existed in the literature of the day, they must have been sadly dis¬ appointed. The Chevalier’s daughters, he tells us, were “jeunes et petites ei de sens desgarnies”; this does not prevent him from providing them with a highly austere code of behaviour. Not only must they be regular in their morning prayers, attentive at Mass and generous in almsgiving; they are to be careful, too, not to be flighty and overeager to please, since that often repels a suitor rather than attracts him; they must not be quarrelsome or jealous or nagging; excessive interest in dress and fashion is to be eschewed. Such vanities rank very high in the knight’s list of anathemata. He tells a story of a knight who had three wives; after the death of each his uncle, a holy 3 Le Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry, ed. A. de Montaiglon (Bibliotheque Elzevirienne, Paris, 1854). 4

Huizinga, The Waning of the Middle Ages, Penguin edition (London, p. 126.

1955),

LE CHEVALIER DE LA TOUR LANDRY

5

I hermit, had a vision, telling him of her fate in the next world. The first he saw tried in the balance, and heavily weighted down by the fine clothes that had been her delight; the second escaped with only a hundred years in purgatory because her sin had merely been to commit adultery with a squire; but the third was horribly tortured in hell for her vanity in elaborately dressing her hair and painting her face. In her relations with her husband a wife must be obedient, discreet and respectful and always allow him to have the last word, because II est raison et droit que le seigneur ait les haultes parolles, et n’est que honneur a la bonne femme de l’escouter et de soy tenir en paix et laissier le haut parler a son seigneur. (Chev. de la T., pp. 40-41).

It is perhaps some concession to the youth of his readers that the Chevalier makes it clear that very frequently virtuous behaviour is rewarded and bad conduct punished, not only in the next world, but in this one as well. Thus he tells the story of two sisters, when a knight came seeking a bride. One, thinking in her vanity to show off her figure to advantage, wore only a very thin dress; as a result she looked so cold and miserable that the knight chose the other, more modest sister. The same combination of highmindedness and world¬ ly wisdom is seen in the knight’s advice to his daughters not to attempt to cross verbal swords with those more sophisticated than themselves, for the good reason that they are almost certain to come off a poor second in any such contest: a maxim which he reinforces by several anecdotes. The Chevalier de la Tour wishes his daughters to avoid occasions which may give opportunity for frivolity; for him these include not only dancing and jousts but pilgrimages. He explains that though their conduct may in fact be blameless they will still be targets for gossip and malicious tongues, and gives some practical advice for behaviour if they cannot avoid festivities of this kind: Mais, belles filles, se il advient que vous y ailliez et que vous ne le puissiez refuser bonnement, quant vendra la nuit que l’en sera a dander et a chanter, que pour le peril et la parleiire du monde vous faciez que vous ayiez tousjours de coste vous aucun de voz gens ou de voz parens, car se il advenoit que l’en estaignist voz torches et la clarte, qu’ilz se tenissent pres de vous, non pas pour nulle doubtance de nul mal, maiz pour le peril de mauvais yeulx et de mauvaises langues, qui tousjours

6

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

espient et disent plus de mal qu’il n’y a, et aussy pour plus seiirement garder son honneur contre les jangleurs, qui voulentiers disent le mal et taisent le bien. (Chev. de la T., p. 57.)

All this seems uncompromisingly puritanical; but the Chevalier’s advice to his daughters on the subject of love is even more so. This occurs towards the end of the work, in the form of a debat between the author and his wife on the question: Should a girl ever love par amours? The Chevalier, rather unfairly perhaps, puts the severe words, which eventually win the day, into the mouth of his wife. Thus, after she has expressed herself with some vigour on the fallacy that knights are inspired by the love of a lady to perform heroic deeds (not at all, she says: they do it to gain worldly renown), her husband asks whether a girl may not even fall in love with the man to whom she is betrothed. This, the lady replies, is most undesirable, since it only causes the thoughts to wander in church. It ill becomes a girl to appear too eager; and in any case, she should view with the deepest suspicion any extravagant protestations of love, which will almost certainly not be sincere. She gives a picture of the sighing lover, familiar to us from any literary sources; the “true lover” who, she alleges with approval, will perhaps not breathe a word of his feelings for several years,5 can hardly have filled her daughters with much enthusiasm: Et en oultre gemissent, et souspirent, et font les pensis et les merencolieux, et en oultre font ung faulx regart et font le debonnaire, tant que qui les verroit il cuideroit que ilz fussent esprins d’amour vrayes et loyaulx, mais telles manieres de gens, qui ainsi usent de faire telx faulx semblans, ne sont que deceveurs de dames et de damoiselles . . . Car Ton dit, et je pense qu’il soit vray, que le loyal amant qui est espris de loyal amour, que, des ce qu’il vient devant sa dame, il est si espris et paoureux et doubteux de dire ou faire chose qui lui desplaise, que il n’est mie si hardi de dire ne descouvrir un seul mot, et, se il avme bien, je pense qu’il sera .iij. ans ou .iiij. avant que il lui ose dire de descouvrir. (Chev. de la T., p. 251.)

As Huizinga has pointed out,6 this passage in the Chevalier’s book shows us an interesting contrast between the realities of conduct and morals in the fourteenth century and literary conventions as we

6

A little later the lady admits that she herself once had an admirer whom she had dismissed, telling him that love did not count as true until it had continued for seven and a half years; otherwise it was only “un pou de temptacion”. Huizinga, op. tit., p. 127.

LE CHEVALIER DE LA TOUR LANDRY

7

see them in, for example, the Voir-Dit of Guillaume de Machaut. Even though we may regard his advice as a counsel of perfection, it is nevertheless obvious that for this father at least—and we have no reason to suppose that he was anything but typical of his class—the ideal of conduct is a chaste and austere one having nothing to do with that of courtly love. Ele provides us, too, with another glimpse of standards different from our own which we are perhaps apt to lose sight of in a purely literary study of the fourteenth century. Some critics, including Huizinga, have expressed surprise at the scandalous tone of some of the anecdotes that appear in this handbook for the family circle. What seems even more shocking to modern taste is the note of brutality on which so many of the stories end. A greedy wife so enrages her husband that he puts out her eye: a husband, goaded by his wife’s nagging, breaks her nose; a woman and a monk, found making love, are put together in a sack and drowned; a rope-maker, whose wife had deceived him with a prior, kills them both. All these examples are provided to show the disasters that unbridled desires may bring in their train, but it is obvious that the Chevalier de la Tour approves of these acts of brutality and violence, for after recounting the story of Jacob’s daughter he tells of the daughter of the King of Greece, who also brought about disaster through her thoughtless conduct, and ends with these words: Aaonc il fist prendre sa fille par qui le mal avoit este, si la fist despecier d’espees par menues pieces, et depuis dist devant tous qu’il estoit bien raison qu’elle feust ainsi despeciee, par qui tant de bonnes gens avoient este mors et occis. (Chev. de la T., p. 118.)

In order to write a book so filled with good advice and moral warnings, the Chevalier de la Tour had to collect many exempla. In the introductory chapter to his book he tells us how he set about this formidable task of compilation: . . . trouvay enmy ma voie deux prestres et deux clers que je avoye, et leur diz que je vouloye faire un livre et un exemplaire pour mes filles aprandre a roumancier et entendre comment elles se doyvent gouverner et le bien du mal desserrer. Si leur fiz mettre avant et traire des livres que je avoye, comme la Bible, Gestes des Roys et croniques et France, et de Grece, et d’Angleterre, et de maintes autres estranges terres; et chascun livre je fis lire, et la ou je trouvay bon exemple pour extraire, je le fis prendre pour faire ce livre. (Chev. de la T., p. 4.)

8

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

This passage is most interesting in showing how, for the fourteenth century, the literature of past ages was valued chiefly for providing an inexhaustible stock of anecdotes which could be used to add weight and emphasis to any moral warning or exhortation the author cared to make. No doubt the Chevalier’s four research secretaries were already adept at finding such examples to drive home the points of their sermons; but it must be confessed that, for the modern reader at least, their contributions have not added to the interest of the work. Eve provides them with material for no fewer than eight chapters, for her sin is subdivided into nine parts; the vanity of doing one’s hair in public is illustrated by the story of Beersheba, for David’s sin and Uriah’s death are both attributed to her habit of tiring her hair at the window; Tobias, Job and St. Eustace all teach us to be patient under tribulation; mothers may learn from Rachel and from Queen Elizabeth of Hungary to be grateful to God. These improving tales, gathered from the Bible, the Fathers, the Golden Legend, the Gesta Romanorum and other such sources, recur with monotonous regularity in the sermons and didactic literature of the Middle Ages; if the Chevalier de la Tour had relied only on the researches of his clerics his book would have been of little interest. But fortunately he had a contribution of his own to make, and he supplements these pious commonplaces with a fund of anecdotes and reminiscences of events in which he has taken part, or which he has heard of at first hand. Although one result of this division of labour is to make the book occasionally chaotic and repetitive in construction,7 it nevertheless gains enormously in vivacity and human

7

Thus Chap. XI urges seemly behaviour as Mass; Chaps. XII-XIV consist of anecdotes from recent history and the Chevalier’s own experience, to prove that it is better for a girl to be quiet than flighty; Chap. XV warns of the dangers of jealousy and Chap. XVI advises ladies not to indulge in snacks while their husbands are away; Chaps. XVII and XVIII warn against jealousy and nagging; Chaps. XIX and XX exhort to obedience and almsgiving; Chap. XXI deprecates over-anxiety to be in the fore¬ front of fashion; Chaps. XXII-XXIV show the inadvisability of trying to outwit in conversation those livelier than ourselves; Chap. XXV warns of the dangers of dancing; Chap. XXVI declares that fine dress should be worn to honour God on Sundays, rather than for secular occasions; Chap. XXVII quotes St. Bernard’s rebuke to his sister for her worldJiness; and Chap. XXVIII returns to the topic of seemly behaviour at Mass.

LE CHEVALIER DE LA TOUR LANDRY

9

interest from these highly personal and original contributions. Very often, after he has cited some improving anecdote, provided no doubt by his clerks, he adds a story from his own experience, or one that he has heard his father tell, and in these he shows an accurate memory and a gift for selecting significant detail that make these glimpses of life in the fourteenth century immediately vivid to us. He tells his daughters, for example, to beware of flatterers. There is no exemplum from literary sources here; instead he first recalls how a lady he had known had lost her son in battle and how she was deceived with false hopes by a courtier who did not wish to be the bearer of sad tidings. Then he remembers how he once saw the Duke of Normandy practise archery: Si comme ]e due vint en cellui pare, par esbat si demanda a un des chevaliers un arc pour traire, et quant il ot trait, il y en eut .ij. ou .iij. qui distrent: “Monseigneur a bien trait.—Sainte Marie, fist un, comme il a trait royde.—Ha, fist l’autre, je ne voulsisse pas estre arme et il m’eust fery.” Sy commencierent a le moult louer de son trait, mais, a dire verite, ce n’estoit que flatterie, car il tray le pire de touz. (Chev. de la T,p. 150.)

Here he has given us the precise tones of the toadies’ fulsome flattery, and a picture of himself, a little apart from the group, observing with detachment what a very poor shot the Duke really was. Towards the end of the book he shows equal skill in the recreation of experi¬ ence in a different context. He has been urging the necessity of practising austerity and asceticism even while living in the world; and he illustrates this theme by telling of a lady whose reputation for piety and almsgiving had been well known in his youth. She died when the Chevalier de la Tour was 9, and he tells his readers: La bonne dame morut en un lieu qu’elle tenoit en douaire, qui estoit de monseigneur mon pere, et, quand elle fust morte, nous y venismes demourer, mes suers et moi, qui estions encore petis. Et fut depecie le lit ou elle morut; si fut trouvee dedans une haire . . . (Chev. de la T., p. 276.)

Afterwards he recounts in detail the lady’s daily programme of prayer and good works; but nothing strikes the reader with quite the force of the discovery of her hair-shirt, glimpsed by a child and never forgotten.

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

10

Left to himself, without the aid of his priests and the results of their researches, the knight reveals himself a born story-teller. This is not to say that he has sophisticated tricks of style, or very subtle skill in the technique of narration. But he does possess the gift, lacking in many a more polished stylist, of accurate observation of human behaviour and speech and the power to choose those details that will make his story instantly alive to the reader. It is perhaps worth quoting one further example of this flair for story-telling, taken this time not from his own experience, but evidently from an oral rather than a literary source. A knight, he says, returned home from overseas and went to see his two nieces; he had brought a fine dress for each of them. When he called on the first, she retired to her room and spent so long at her toilet, wishing to appear beautiful when she greeted him, that he grew tired of waiting and went to see the other one: . . . et, des ce que il hucha et que celle sceust que c’estoit son oncle, qui long temps avoit est6 hors, celle par son esbat se estoit prise a faire pain de fourment et avoit les mains toutes pasteuses; mais en l’estat oil elle estoit saillist au dehors, les bras tenduz, et lui dist: “Mon tres chier seigneur et oncle, en l’estat ou je ouy nouvelles de vous je sui venue vous veoir. Si me le pardonnez; car la grant joye que j’ay de vostre venue me l’a fait faire.” Le chevalier resgarda la maniere et en eut grant joye, et l’ama et prisa moult plus que l’autre, et lui donna les .ij. robes queil avoit achetees pour elle et pour sa soeur. (Chev. de la T., p. 204.)

This story is made absorbing for the reader not only because it so accurately depicts two contrasting personalities, but in the photo¬ graphic clarity of the action, as the girl comes eagerly forward with her dough-covered hands outstretched and bursts into excited speech. It must be confessed, however, that this gift for story-telling is not matched by a comparable felicity of expression; though in the examples quoted the interest of the matter may at first blind the reader to the many short-comings of the Chevalier de la Tour’s style. He tells us, in that slightly apologetic phrase encountered so often in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that he has written his book in prose “pour abregier et mieulx entendre”; but it is evident that he at first intended to cast it in a different and much more conventional mould. The opening paragraph is entirely in the

LE CHEVALIER DE LA TOUR LANDRY

11

taste of the period, with the author, as he tells us, “tout morne et tout pensiz” sitting in his garden in April. He goes on: A4ais un pou me resjouy du son et du chant que je ouy de ces oysillons sauvaiges qui chantoyent en leurz \angaiges, le merle, la mauvis et la mesange, qui au printemps rendoient louanges, qui estoient gaiz et envoisiez. Ce doulz chant me fit envoisier et mon cuer sy esjoir que lors il me va souvenir du temps passe de ma jeunesce, comment amour et grant destresce m’avoient en ycellui temps tenu en son service, ou je fu mainte heure liez et autre dolant, si comme elle fait a maint amm(. Mes tous mes maulx me guerredowna pour ce que belle et bonne me donna, qui de honneur et de tout b ien sqavoit et de bel maint lew et de bonnes moeurs, et des bonnes estoit la mcillour, se me sembloit, et la deur. En elle tout me deli toys ; car en cellui temps je faisoye chansons, laiz et rondeaux, balades et virelayz, et chans nouveaux, le mieulz que je savoy e. Mais la mort qui tous guerroye, la prist, dont mainte doulewr en ay receu et mainte tristowr. Si a plus de XX ans que j’en ay este triste et dolenr. Car le vray cuer de loyal amour, jamais a nul temps ne a nul jour, bonne amour ne publiera et tous diz lui en souviendra. (Chev. de la T., pp. 1-2.)

Two things are immediately apparent about this opening: first, that it is in verse, and secondly that it bears no relation whatever to anything that follows. Indeed, the conventional allusion to the “belle et bonne” lady who was his consolation comes oddly from one who was later in the same work to make such a fulminating attack on the practice of “aimer par amours”. Perhaps this was the beginning of some quite different literary enterprise, in which the Chevalier could get no further than the initial mise-en-scene; but he prudently uses it by making it, however irrelevantly, the beginning of his hand¬ book for his daughters, writing it as prose but without removing the rhymes or even lengthening the octosyllables that separate them. Whatever the reason for his choice, the rest of the Chevalier’s book is in prose8 and a curiously formless and diffuse prose it is. Lacking the discipline of the octosyllabic line, sentences spill from 8 I have found only one other example of vestigial rhymes in the text. This is in a passage where those who are continually turning their heads in church are likened to animals of which this movement is characteristic: En disant voz heures a la messe ou aillewrr, ne sambles pas a tortue ne a grue; celles semblent a la grue et a la tortwe qui tournent le visaige et la teste par dessus et qui vertillent de la teste comme une belette. Aiez regart et manzere ferme comme le limiere, qui est une beste qui regarde devant soy sans tourner la teste ne ca ne la. (p. 24.) It seems obvious that the Chevalier has here lifted a passage wholesale from a verse bestiary.

12

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

his pen in an uninterrupted stream. Despite their excessive length they are different from the immensely complex periods of the following century, when, as Rasmussen has suggested, complication was valued as an aesthetic end in itself.9 The Chevalier’s prose is cast in an endless series of simple propositions linked by conjunc¬ tions : the modern editor inserts punctuation, but in many cases the stops could be put in different places without altering the sense. These concatenated multiple sentences make the prose unemphatic and reasonably easy to read. It is conversational in tone and can be effective enough, as we have seen, where the author wishes to do no more than tell a story; though where the subject matter is not in itself interesting the effect is often tedious. Occasionally, perhaps in those parts which are entirely the work of the learned clerks, there is an attempt, even with such poor resources, and without altering this technique of a chain of multiple sentences, to obtain some kind of rhetorical effect. This is done by the simple method of repeating some word or phrase after each conjunction, with the object of creating an impression of increasing solemnity; but the author—if it is indeed his own work—lacks the power to bring his sentence to a climax, and after this rhetorical development it usually falls away to a merely halting conclusion. Here, for example, is a passage telling how Eve increased her sin by attempting to excuse it: (Eve) excusa et dist que le serpent lui avoit fait fa ire et conseillie. Dont elle cuida allegier son pechie pour chargier autruy. Dont il sembla que Dieu s’en courroupa plus que devant, pour ce que Dieux lui respondist que dont de la en avant en seroit la bataille entre elle et l’ennemy, pour ce qu’elle crut contre luy et qu’elle vouloit estre pareille a Dieu, et pour ce qu’elle passa son commandement, et pour ce qu’elle creut plus l’ennemy que lui qui l’avoit faicte, et pour ce qu’elle deceut son seigneur par son fol conseil et que elle s’esfor?a de excuser son meffaict et son pechie, et pour cestes causes Dieu ordonna la bataille entre homme et femme et l’ennemy. (Chev. de la T., p. 96.)

But this primitive style, barely competent to deal with simple narration, is utterly inadequate to the demands made by the ex¬ pression of abstract thought or the development of an argument. The author is almost incapable of constructing a complex sentence; in other words, he lacks that ability to show the relation between one 9 J. Rasmussen, La Prose Narrative Franfaise du XV? Siecle (Copenhagen, 1958), pp. 45-6.

LE CHEVALIER DE LA TOUR LANDRY

13

part of his thought and the next, which is essential to any reasoned prose. He might perhaps have succeeded within the narrow confines of the octosyllable; but when these barriers are removed and he attempts to marshall an argument—as in the following passage, where he wishes to show the inadvisability of a man’s marrying above his social station—he wanders in ever-increasing confusion: Quand de ma semblance, il me semble que ceux qui pregnent leur grant dame a femme et font de leur dame leur subjiette, je pense que c’est grant pitie de mettre en servaige si noble chose et de si haultaine comme sa grant dame d’honneur, par laquelle il peust venir tant de honneur et de vaillance; car, de ce qu’il 1’a espousee il est sire de celle qui souloit estre dame, et a present est sire et sera appelle seigneur, et sera en grant crainte de faillir et desobeir, mais ce sera tantost passe. (Chev. de la T., p. 223.)

We see him stumbling with repeated attempts to expound his views —“Quant de ma semblance, il me semble . . . ie pense . . .”—and finally losing himself in a welter of repetition: “Il est sire . . . et a present est sire, et sera . . . et sera . . . mais ce sera . . .” It is clear that the author’s mastery of prose is quite insufficient to permit him to grapple with the expression of even so simple an argument as this. The Chevalier de la Tour, it is plain, is not a distinguished figure in the literary world; he is concerned, not to create a work of art, but to produce a manual of conduct for his daughters, and it is character¬ istic of this essentially amateur attitude towards his writing that he should have begun with an opening that contains almost every cliche of the May-morning convention. His originality in deciding after all to attempt the more difficult and unusual medium of prose is what we might expect from an author who added experiences and reminiscences of his own to the commonplace and familiar exempla supplied by his assistants. His prose is no doubt typical of his time, and written much as he spoke it. Its inadequacy to deal with abstract topics goes perhaps some way towards explaining why moralists and vernacular preachers of the fourteenth century so greatly favoured theexemplumas a method of exhortation; fora concatenated style serves well enough for simple narrative of this kind. Preachers have always recognized that their hearers find it easier to understand and remember a moral story than to grasp a moral argument; but at this stage of French prose, where it is so difficult for writers to

14

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

express a causal relationship between two propositions, it is natural that the exemplum should preponderate. The Livre du Chevalier de la Tour Landry is usually cited in manuals of literary history as valuable chiefly in providing an in¬ sight into the mores of the landed gentry of the fourteenth century, and it is strictly true that its intrinsic literary value is not very great. Nevertheless, it is a significant landmark in the literary development of the later Middle Ages in France. Here both the possibilities and the limitations of the prose of the day are displayed, and all the more significantly for the critic, because the book is not the work of a brilliant stylist, or indeed of a primarily literary figure.

Le Menagier de Paris The book of the Menagier de Paris1 was written some twenty years later than that of the Chevalier de la Tour, probably between 1392 and 1394. It is at first sight not dissimilar, being also written with a specifically domestic audience in mind, and the work of another gifted and cultured amateur rather than a man of letters. In the Prologue to his book, the author explains how he has come to write it. Himself an elderly man, he had married a girl of only 15 who, conscious of her inexperience and shortcomings as a housewife, begged him, when she made mistakes, not to rebuke her publicly but to tell her each evening what she had done wrong. Her husband thinks of a much better idea; he will compile a book, destined to cover every aspect of household management, to which she can refer when she wishes and by means of which she can become a skilled and attentive wife, not only to himself but, since she is bound to outlive him, to some future husband. This compendium is planned in some detail, and unlike the Chevalier de la Tour the Menagier adheres strictly to his scheme, though he was obliged to leave the work unfinished. The book is divided into three main sections, or distinctions, each of which contains several chapters, or articles; the first distinction is to deal with “la salvacion de fame et la paix du mary,” the second is “pour le prouffit du mesnage acroistre”, while the third is concerned with “jeux et esbatements”. The first section begins conventionally enough—for the salvation of the soul was a familiar theme—with advice on prayer, seemly behaviour at Mass and how to make a good confession, with a 1 Le Menagier de Paris, ed. J. Pichon for the Societe des Bibliophiles Fran?ais. (Paris, 1846, 2 vols.) 15

16

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

detailed list of the seven deadly sins and their subdivisions and a corresponding list of the cardinal virtues, together with exhortations to be chaste, faithful and obedient, all reinforced with exempla from the Scriptures and other sources. It then goes on to show how a wife may comfort her husband in all manner of ways, from getting rid of the flies and fleas that infest his apartments and clothing to jealously guarding his secrets and influencing his conduct in various subtle ways. The character of the author that emerges from this advice is kindly, sympathetic to the weakness of youth, no less upright than that of the Chevalier de la Tour but far less austere. He reveals this genial personality, for instance, in his comment on the story of Griselda. Like Chaucer, he follows Petrarch’s Latin version of Boccaccio’s story, and his version, like the Clerk’s Tale, includes Petrarch’s explanation that this story is intended not to teach husbands to try their wives in any such inhuman way as Walter did, but to show us all how to “Receyven al in gree that God us sent”. Chaucer goes on to add his ribald Envoy at the end of the Clerk’s Tale, where he makes it clear that in his view any wife is more than a match for any husband: Be ay of chere as light as leef on linde, And lat him care, and wepe, and wringe, and waille!

But the Menagier is writing for his own young wife, and is most anxious not to be misunderstood: Et je qui seulement pour vous endoctriner Pay mise cy, ne l’y ay pas mise pour l’applicquer a vous, ne pour ce que je veuille de vous telle obeissance, car je n’en suis mie digne, et aussi je ne suis mie marquis ne ne vous ay prise bergiere ne je ne suis si fol, si oultrecuidie, ne si jeune de sens, que je ne doie bien savoir que ce n’appartient pas a moy de vous faire tels assaulx, ne essais ou semblables. . . . Ne autrement en quelque maniere ne vous veuil je point essaier, car a moy souffist bien l’espreuve ja faicte par la bonne renommee de vos predecesseurs et de vous, avecques ce que je sens et voy a l’ueil et congnois par vraie experience. Et me excuse se l’histoire parle de trop grant cruaulte, a mon advis, plus que raison. Et croy que ce ne fust oncques vray, mais Phistore est telle et ne la doy pas corriger ne faire autre, car plus sage que moy la compila et intitula. {Men. de Paris, I, pp. 125-6.)

The Chevalier de la Tour, wrhen he spoke of the necessity for wives to obey their husbands, had told with approval the story of the merchant’s wife who immediately jumped on the table when her

LE MENAGIER DE PARIS

17

husband said, Sal sur la table,” though he was really asking for salt. The Menagier s attitude is more liberal; and he is unusual for his period, too, in being able to view the exemplum he cites with an objective and critical eye. The conduct of Walter horrifies him by its inhumanity, and whereas the Chevalier had not hesitated to regale his daughters with tales of awful punishments and scenes of violence the Menagier feels it necessary to apologise for the “trop grant cruaulte of Petrarch’s story, and is anxious that his wife should not think that men behave in this way, for “ce ne fust oncques vray.” The remainder of the book is a painstaking and encyclopaedic guide to every aspect of the housewife’s task.2 It begins with gar¬ dening notes arranged according to the months of the year, and including such information as how to be rid of caterpillars, or to have out-of-season roses by preserving them in cold storage. The author tnen goes on to deal with the question of hiring servants, advising his wife to take up their references scrupulously and to fix their wages in advance. He tells her how to arrange her own day and that of her servants and gives a list of the principal butchers and poulter¬ ers in Paris, and notes on the best cuts of beef. He provides specimen menus for feast days and fast days and lists of quantities required for wedding-feasts, and gives recipes for soups and sauces, roasts and pasties, omelettes and entremets. He is able to give information not only about rat-poison but about one proved effective against wolves, and tells his wife how to remove stains from clothing, how to prevent her soup from burning and how to make three pints of ink: Pour faire trois pintes d’encre, prenez des galles et de gomme de chascun deux onces, couperose trois onces; et soient les galles cassees et raises - The third Distinction, as listed in the table of contents at the beginning of the work, was to have had three articles: Le ie article est tout de demandes d’esbatemens qui par le sort des dez, par rocs et par roys sont averees et respondues par estrange maniere. Le deuxiesme article est de savoir nourrir et faire voler l’esprivier. Le tiers article est d’aucunes autres demandes qui regardent compte et nombre et sont subtils a trouver et a derimer. In fact, only the second, dealing with hawking, is extant. Pichon suggests that the author may have died without completing his work, and that the article on hawking, the only one finished, was incorporated in the text by his executors.

18

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

tremper trois jours, puis mises boulir en trois quartes d’eaue de pluye ou de mare coye. Et quant ils auront assez boulu et tant que l’eau sera esboulie pres de la moitie, c’est assavoir qu’il n’y ait mais que trois pintes, lors le convient oster du feu, et mettre la couperose et gomme, et remuer tant qu’il soit froit, et lors mettre en lieu froit et moite. Et nota que quant elle passe trois sepmaines, elle empire. {Men. de Paris, II, p. 265.)

The Mdnagier de Paris thus provides unique and highly valuable documentation for the social history of the end of the fourteenth century. But the book has a place in the literary history of the period too. The author has drawn extensively on earlier sources. For the practical information of the second part he is much indebted to the work of Charles V’s cook, Taillevent, written some twenty-five years earlier; and the exempla of the first book show him to be familiar not only with the Bible and the Fathers, but also with Petrarch, the Roman de la Rose, the Roman des Sept Sages, the Jeu des Echecs Moralise of Jacques de Cessoles and many other classical and con¬ temporary texts. But the Menagier is not a mere transcriber3 and in those parts of his book where he is drawing on his own experience we find powers of acute observation and skill in presentation that in another age might have made of him a successful writer of realistic novels of manners. A glimpse of this talent for realistic presentation is seen in the section where the author warns his young wife of the difficulties she 3 He has an unusually detached and critical attitude towards his sources. Thus in the section on removing stains, he adds a sceptical footnote: Pour oster tache de robe de soie, satin, camelot, drap de Damas ou autre, trempez et lavez la tache en vertjus et la tache s’en yra, et mesmes se la robe est destainte, si revendra elle en sa couleur {ce que je ne croy pas)” (II, p. 66). Again, he cannot quite believe what he has heard of the lavishness of the Duke of Berry’s table, but is honest enough to admit afterwards that he was wrong: “Les gens de Monseigneur de Berry dient que aux dimenches et grans festes, il leur convient trois beufs, trente moutons, huit-vins douzaines de perdris, et connins a l’avenant, mais je m’en doubte.— Avere depuis” (II, p. 85). Yet another example, with a lengthier annotation, occurs where he finds an essential ingredient missing from the recipe for une vinaigrette: “Une vinaigrette: . . . et faites tout boulir, et doit estre brune. (Brune. Comment sera-elle brune, s’il n’y a du pain halle?) Item, je croy qu’elle doit estre liant, car je la treuve ou chapitre des potages lians, cy-devant; et par ces deux raisons, je croy qu’il y convient du pain harle pour lier et tenir brune” (II, p. 164).

LE MIiNAGIER DE PARIS

19

bound to encounter in the hiring and control of servants These he explains, may broadly speaking be divided into three categories: casual labour, paid by the day, such as porters for carrying heavy loads, or those doing seasonal work on the land; skilled workers hired for specific tasks, such as dress-makers or pastry-cooks, who receive piece-rates; and resident servants who have a weekly wage. This account of the difficulties of an employer is presented with the greatest skill. It is not merely that the Menagier, in the series of adjectives at the beginning, has summed up with some acuity the characteristics of the uncouth labourer who knows his services to be in demand: IS

Et ccuix sont communement ennuyeux, rudes et de diverses responses: ogans, haultains, fors a apier, pres de dire injures et reprouches se 1 en ne les paie a leur gre quant la besongne est faicte. {Men. de Paris P- 540

1 he scene that follows, where the ingratiating manner of the man anxious to be given work gives place to aggressive demands for further payment when he has done it, shows the author to be capable of seizing upon and transcribing the tones of ordinary conversation. His ability in this kind of observation of human behaviour is no less considerable than his wisdom in discerning the motives for the labourer’s conduct and its probable effects. The Menagier’s powers as a realistic writer are even more clearly shown in the story he tells of the wife who brought her erring hus¬ band back to her bed and board by kindness and without harsh words. The Chevalier de la Tour had recounted an anecdote broadly similar in intention, which he says he had learned from “une mienne tante, qui le me compta plusieurs fois”.4 but there seems no reason to doubt the Menagier’s assertion that the story as he recounts it had been told him by his father. It concerns Jehanne la Quentine, the wife of a citizen of Paris called Thomas Quentin, who discovered that her husband was in the habit of visiting the house of a poor girl who made what living she could by spinning woollen yarn, and sometimes spending the night there. After this state of affairs has 4 Chevalier de la Tour, p. 37.

20

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

continued for some time, Jehanne finds out where the girl lives and goes to visit her: Et vint en l’hostel et trouva la povre fille qui n’avoit aucune garnison quelconque, ne de busche, ne de lart, ne de chandelle, ne de huille, ne de charbon, ne de rien, fors un lit et une couverture, son touret et bien pou d’autre mesnage. {Men. de Paris, II. p. 237.)

She makes no reproaches to her husband’s humble mistress; on the contrary, after insisting that for the sake of the reputation of them both the girl and herself ought to keep the whole affair as secret as possible, she adds, “Car puisqu’ainsi est qu’il vous aime, mon intention est de vous amer, secourir et aidier.” She then points out that her husband has been accustomed to material comforts all his life, and is bound to miss them in the girl’s home, and says, “J’ai plus chier que vous et moy le gardions en sante que je seule le gardasse malade.” With renewed injunctions to preserve the greatest secrecy, she then reveals her plan: Je vous envoieray une grant paelle pour garnison de buche pour le chauffer, un couverture selon son estat, cuevrechiefs, linges nettes; et quant je vous envoieray sales. {Men. de Paris, II, p. 238.')

luy souvent laver les pies, bon lit de duvet, draps et orilliers, chausses et robedes nettes, si m’envoiez les

Confronted with a lady at once so forthright and so thoughtful, the girl is, not surprisingly, overwhelmed into silence and submission; we are only told “Ainsi fu promis et jure”. Accordingly, when next Thomas visits his mistress: II ot les piez laves et fut tres bien couchie en lit de duvet, en grans draps delies pendans d’une part et d’autre, tres bien couvert, mieulx qu’il n’avoit accoustume, et l’endemain eust robelinge blanche, chausses nettes et beaux soullers tous frais. {Men. de Paris, II, pp. 238-9.)

He is astounded at these new and unexplained luxuries, and after hearing Mass as is his custom, he returns and accuses her of having come by them by dishonest or shameful means. After this her dislike of subterfuge (fCsi n’ot loy de mentir”) outweighs her promise to Jehanne and she tells him the truth. Thomas returns home “tout honteux et plus pensif que devant”; neither he nor his wife says anything about the matter, but he stays at home that night, and next morning goes to confession as well as to Mass. Thus fortified, he

LE MENAGIER DE PARIS

21

visus the girl and pays her handsomely, then goes back to his wife, vowing never to look at another woman: Et ainsi le retrahi sa femme par subtillite et moult humblement et cordieusement l’aima depuis. (Men. de Paris, II, p. 239.) ’ ' C°r

The similarities between this story and the typical noiwelle of the fifteenth century are only of the most superficial kind.5 It is true that we have here the three familiar stock characters of husband, wife and mistress. But they are not the perfunctorily drawn types of the nouvelle-, on the contrary, each emerges from the story as a wellobserved personality, drawn in the round: the wife who gains her ends sagement, non pas par maistrise ne par haultesse’ without uttering a single harsh word; the humble girl, who plays a passive role between these two who are so much her social superiors; and the lather stupid husband, wishing no ill to either woman, belatedly coming to his senses and acting exactly as his wife knew he would. The material background, too, is drawn with as effective a realism as the characters. The Menagier wastes no time in giving a detailed account of the girl’s poverty, but makes it moving enough in the few phrases he uses to indicate her lack of fuel, light, food and furniture. The same care for brevity and practical detail which makes his recipe for an omelette aux fines herbes a model of clarity infuses the lady’s instructions about the changing of linen and tells us how he slept “en lit de duvet, en grans draps delies pendans d’une part et d’autre, tres bien couvert”.6 It will be clear irom the extracts already quoted that the Alenagier’s prose is much more varied and flexible than that of the Chevalier de la Tour; although he is writing only some twenty years later, his style is that of a much more sophisticated writer. Where he is giving ^ Vide infra, p. 63. It is instructive to compare the story of Jehanne la Quentine with the version of the same anecdote that occurs in the Heptameron (8th story of the 4th day), where the heroine becomes “une bourgeoise de Tours” and the poor girl “une mestayere”. In Marguerite de Navarre’s rendering there are no proper names and no direct speech; there is little description of the girl’s home and the husband does not accuse her of coming by the extra comforts dishonestly. In other words, Afarguerite de NAvarre uses none of the devices by which the Menagier has made his story so effective; it has become stylized and pared down to conform to the conventional nouvelle pattern. F.F.P.W.

2

22

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

instructions for household duties he is clear and practical; but he can compose a whole passage, such as the one about servants, with telling effect, and manipulate sentences of some complexity. These gifts of expression are seen to best advantage where the author is drawing on his own experience and describing some event he has taken part in or witnessed. Thus, when he is speaking of fidelity, he remarks that we may learn it from animals; and instead of providing some well-worn exemplum from a Bestiary, he tells of something he saw when he visited Niort some months after the battle there: Par Dieu, je vy a Nyort un chien vieil qui gisoit sur la fosse oil son maistre avoit est6 enterre qui avoit est6 tue des Anglais, et y fut mene monseigneur de Berry et grant nombre de chevaliers pour veoir la merveille de la loyaultd et de l’amour du chien qui jour et nuit ne se partoit de dessus la fosse oil estoit son maistre que les Anglais avoient tu6. Et luy fist monseigneur de Berry donner dix frans qui furent baillds a un voisin pour lui querir a mengier toute sa vie. (Men. de Paris, II, p. 93-)

Here we have none of the dreary concatenation characteristic of the Chevalier de la Tour, but a long sentence closely knit and at the same time perfectly clear and effective. The author is capable, too, of developing a theme along rhetorical lines, and producing a passage all the more striking because of the contrast between the elaboration of the development and the unpretentious domesticity of the theme. Here again, in this picture of the comforts of home and the joy of having an attentive and loving wife, he shows unusual powers of expression: Aux hommes est la cure et soing des besongnes de dehors, et en doivent les maris soignier, aler venir et racourir de 9a et de 14, par pluie, par vens, par neges, par gresles, une fois moulli6, autre fois sec, une fois suant, autre fois tremblant, mal peu, mal herbergii, mal chaufifc, mal couchi6. Et tout ne luy fait mal pour ce qu’il est reconforte de l’esperance qu’il a aux cures que la femme prendra de luy 4 son retour, aux aises, aux joies, et aux plaisirs qu’elle luy fera ou fera faire devant elle; d’estre deschaux 4 bon feu, d’estre lavd les pids, avoir chausses et soulers frais, bien peu, bien abeuvrd, bien servi, bien seignouri, bien couchie, en beaux draps et cueuvrechiefs blancs, bien couvert de bonnes fourrures et assouvi des autres joies et esbatemens, privetes, amours et secrets dont je me tais. Et l’endemain, robes, linges et vestemens nouveaulx. (Men. de Paris, I, pp. 168-9.)

Pichon suggested in the Introduction to his edition that the Menagicr was perhaps a lawyer who had been attached to the army

LE MENAGIER DE PARIS

23

in some advisory capacity, and that this would account for the skill with which he expresses himself; and it is true that we find him using many of those quasi-legal pleonastic doublets that were to become so prevalent in the prose of the following century. But at its best his style is as tree from the over-complexity of the fifteenth century as from the interminable chain-sequences of the Chevalier de la Tour. It is significant that the most satisfactory passages are those where the author is not using any source but his own experience; it is the dearth of new and original material in the later Middle Ages that leads to the sterile convolutions of fifteenth-century prose, since it was only in this way that authors working over familiar themes could demonstrate their originality. It should not be supposed, however, that the Menagier de Paris has produced a literary masterpiece. This, indeed, was scarcely his intention. He lacked social aspirations and advised his wife not to try to mix with those above her station nor to attempt to cook elaborate dishes unsuitable for a bourgeois table, and the same modesty seems to inform his writing. The choice of exempla he has made show him to be widely read, but, unlike the Chevalier, he is concerned neither with academic themes like that of “aimer par amours” nor with literary conventions such as the May morning. His book abounds in “human interest”, all the more absorbing in an age when fiction is to so great an extent bound by convention and the chronicles concen¬ trate their attention on action and external trappings rather than on the motives for action. At the same time, the author’s own interest in his subject-matter and his freedom from literary restraint lend a zest and flexibility to his prose, since his powers of realistic obser¬ vation both of scene and of behaviour are matched by the unaffected naturalism of his manner.

Les Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio

The Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio1 is a much more ambitious work than either of those so far considered in this chapter, aimed at a wider audience and written with more conscious literary pretentions. Though begun not long after the middle of the four¬ teenth century, it was probably completed about 1376-7. It was a very popular work in the later Middle Ages and into the sixteenth century: there are thirty-two manuscripts and several reprintings of the first edition of i486, and it is often quoted by other writers. Whether it was originally conceived as one book or two, it falls into two quite separate parts. The Lime des Deduis is a textbook on the various aspects of hunting as practised in the fourteenth century. The author provides information on every kind of animal, from deer and boars to rabbits and squirrels, and tells how they may best be caught; there is a section on maladies of hounds and their remedies, another on forestry in relation to hunting; there are detailed accounts of the techniques of archery and of falconry and a “jugement” on the relative merits of hunting and hawking. The Songe de Pestilence, evidently written some years later, is on an entirely different topic. It is an allegorical work, depicting the ills that have befallen the three estates in France and showing how these social evils may be overcome; it ends in a prophetic dream in which the author sees the beginning of the Hundred Years War, the Black Death and the subsequent campaigns of du Guesclin, who with his master Charles V is shown as restoring France’s vanished glory. 1 Les Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio, ed. Gunnar Tilander (Societd des Anciens Textes, Paris, 1932, 2 vols.). 24

LE ROY MODUS ET LA ROYNE RATIO

25

I w o elements link these texts dealing with such disparate topics. One is a concern for social justice and moral rectitude in public and private affairs, and the second the idea of King Modus and Queen Ratio, on which the whole work is built. We learn in the Lime des Dednis the significance of these personages: Le non de Modus, qui est en latin, est a dire en franchois “maniere”, et le non de Ratio, qui est latin est a dire en franchois “raison”; si di que ces deus peuent bien estre conjoins ensembles, quer bonne maniere ne puet sans raison estre, ne raison sans bonne maniere, et pour ce sont conjoins ensemblez par mariage. Et pour ce que il ont si grant vertu que nulle chose qui bonne soit ne puet estre fait sans eulz, comme dist est u commencement de cest livre, ai je fait de Bonne Maniere roi couronne, c’est a dire Modus, et aussi ai je fait roine de Ratio, c’est a dire Raison. (Modus et Ratio, I, p. 268.)

That is to say, Modus tells us the right way to do things, and Ratio helps us to understand why we must do them thus and gives us the ability to carry out the instructions of Modus. In the Deduis the technical information is all supplied by Modus, and is given in the form of a dialogue, chiefly between him and the apprentice. This intelligent pupil asks such questions as “Comment et par quel maniere l’en ordene le bon deduit qui est apele real” (I, p. 104) or “Comment Ten doit le cerf destourner” (I, p. 27) and Modus supplies the answers in some detail. Ratio plays her part by providing, from time to time, elaborate excursions into the symbolic significance of the various animals and birds that are the hunter’s quarry. The branches of the stag’s antlers not only represent the ten command¬ ments, but also the ten fingers of the priest as he elevates the Host; the stag thus provides a mirror of the Law and the Faith, just as the clergy used to be called “mirreurs du monde”. By contrast, the wild boar sets forth the ten commandments of the law of Antichrist. These, and the similarity between the boar and hardened sinners, are developed with some ingenuity. The boar, for example, has “tous jours la teste en terre,” like those preoccupied with earthly considerations; “il se toulle voulentiers dans la boe” like those with a false sense of values; and “ses pi6s devant et derriere font la pigache” like modish people whose shoes have excessively long points. (Modus et Ratio, I, pp. 145-9).

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FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

A critic has pointed out2 that one man could scarcely have been an expert in so many different branches of the art of the chase, and suggests that the author of the Livre des Deduis collected his infor¬ mation from earlier treatises, now for the most part lost, dealing with particular aspects of hunting and hawking. These were generally in verse and, like our text, in dialogue form. Indeed, the author himself refers to “un livre bien ancien” to which he has had recourse; but he has added other material of his own which enlivens the merely factual element. The material proper to the author includes the allegorical and symbolic interpretations by Ratio—though these recall the bestiaries of an earlier generation—and the verse Debat des Chiens et des Oiseaux, a conventional exercise in the genre, the subject discussed being the relative merits of hawking and hunting. Apart from the Prologue and this Debat, the author has chosen to write in prose, as he explains, “pour miex savoir le contenu.” Like the Chevalier de la Tour and many other prose-writers of the four¬ teenth century, the style he most favours is a series of simple propo¬ sitions linked by co-ordinating conjunctions; and like the Chevalier he finds it adequate enough when he is dealing with simple narrative, or giving information or instruction, such as how best to catch sparrows in flight, or the natural habitat of the wild goat: Cherveul est de telle nature que il ne demeure pas volentiers en pais ou il ait fourmiz, quar il a la char si sensible que il vuide le pals ou les fourmis demeurent. Et aussi het a demourer en pals eiveuz et demeure volentiers en haut pals sec, et se vit des bourjons des espines et des ronches. Et la seison ou il a meilleur venoison, c’est depuis la mi-mai jusques a la mi-juing. (Modus et Ratio, I, pp. 67-8.)

But as soon as the author moves from the realm of facts into that of ideas, this primitive technique ceases to be adequate, since with it he cannot express cause and effect, or any except the most simple relationship between one statement and another. Though this author does not, as a matter of fact, become nearly so involved and obscure as the Chevalier de la Tour when he attempts a more abstract theme, his powers of organizing his sentence are clearly not altogether equal to the task: 2 F. Remigereau, Questions relatives au “Livre du Roy Modus et de la Reine Ratio,” Melanges de Litterature d'Histoire et de Philologie offerts a Paul Laumonier (Paris, 1935), pp. 57-8.

LE ROY MODUS ET LA ROYNE RATIO

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A demoustrer comme les dis commandemens de la loi y sont comprins: homme doit bien savoir quiex sont les dix commendemens, que Dieu commanda a homme expressement de les garder et que il les me'ist en sa teste pour le garant de sa vie pardurable et pour la defiance de tous ses aversaires. Ainsi est il demoustre u cerf, quer le cerf a dis branches en ses comes, ne plus selon le mestier de venerie ne li en peust on donner, si comme il est dist en cest livre, et ches dis branches li donna Dieu et mist en la teste pour le garant de sa vie et pour soi deffendre de tous ses adversaries; et ainsi ches dis branches demoustrent les dis commendemens de la loi. (Alodus et Ratio I, p. 117.)

Perhaps this is why, when the author of the Livre des Deduis wishes to discuss a theme admittedly not highly abstract, namely whether it is better to hunt with hounds or with hawks, his discussion takes the form of a debat, and it is in verse. He thus avoids his difficulties twice over; much of the argument is presented by means of narrative and conversation; and his language is disciplined by the length and rhyme of the octosyllable. The Songe de Pestilence is quite different from the Livre des Deduis both in content and in the much more grandiose scale on which it is conceived. The two works are linked by the concept of the two ideal monarchs, Modus and Ratio; but whereas in the earlier book they are rather dimly and perfunctorily conceived, they dominate the later one. The author looks back to a golden age when they reigned among men; as he explains in the verse prologue to both works, society cannot hope to prosper without them: Ne pape, ne roy, ne prelas Ne peuent rien fere en nul cas Se n’est de la puissant vertus De Ratio et de Modus. Si est toute chevalerie Destruite, perdue et honnie Se par Ratio et Modus Ne sont en leur fes soustenus. (Modus et Ratio, I, p. $.)

The story, developed at great length and with some complexity, shows these two ideal sovereigns’ attempt to reclaim the three estates of France from their allegiance to Satan and his ministers. At the beginning the author describes how he saw Modus and Ratio addressing the three estates and reproaching them for their falling away. Ratio begs God to summon Satan and reproach him for leading men away from the true path; God bids her take “Mon

28

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

sergant Diligence” and send him to hell for this purpose, properly armed with a “Commission” set out in due legal form. Ratio, explaining that her own function is an intermediary one, between man’s soul, his spiritual essence, and his heart, or human affection, herself pronounces the indictment of Satan. After summarizing the doctrine of the atonement, she explains that in her care of souls she is assisted by Vente, Humilite and Charite', but Satan “est si her et a tant d’aliances u monde par les mariages qu’il a fais” that he snatches away many souls. His schools, where “sciences infernales” are taught, have been inspected by Maistre Jehan Sapience, who found them hotbeds of heresy. Satan, significantly enough, proves an adept in the art of legal evasion; he refuses to look at Diligence's “commission” and when it is read in court, raises legal objections to its validity and demands fifteen days’ adjournment, and to be heard before the Son of God himself. God agrees, because justice must be done even to Satan. During these fifteen days Sapience, Prudence and Providence are sent out to interview the three estates and to see what has become of Verite, Charite and Humilite. They visit respectively Clergy, Nobility and People, and find frivolity, materialism and dissipation have replaced the virtues they seek. When the court reassembles. Ratio and Satan engage in a lengthy legal battle, each answering the other s arguments in detail and with considerable theological acumen. Christ now bids the jury, composed of various virtues, to give their verdict. Sapience is their spokesman and, as is only to be expected, pronounces for Ratio and against Satan. The Court then adjourns for a year, at the end of which time the Holy Ghost will pronounce final judgement. Ratio and Modus return to their city of Esperance, Satan to Hell, and the World and the Flesh to Adaliferne, the home of Orgueil, King of the vices. There follows a long military campaign between the virtues and the vices. Ratio’s knights are all successful in a series of single combats with champions from the other side. On the way home a new complication arises: Fausse Amour has fallen in love with Ratio, and composed a Chant Royal in her honour. Envie pours scorn on such a passion, but in vain. Meanwhile a truce is arranged to allow each side to gather its forces. Modus sends the

LE ROY MODUS ET LA ROYNE RATIO

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Archeveque de Bonne Foi to Rome to ask the Pope for help. He sends a number of friars to preach a mission to the three estates, but Orgueil regards this as a violation of the truce and as a counter¬ measure Satan is persuaded to send out some of his religieux. But this is scarcely necessary, so successful has been the propaganda campaign of Vaine Gloire and Convoitise: clergy, nobles, rich bour¬ geois and lawyers are all corrupted; only the peasants are not tempted because they are satisfied with their lot: Nous sommes povres laboureux, qui nous vivon sus nos bras et avon asses paine et mechief, ne n’uson point de Convoitise, et le Monde nous destruitj et si ne congnoisson point Vaine Gloire. Et quant nous sommes venus a l’ostel et nous venon du labour, nous avon de la poree de chous et de bon pain bis atout sa cosse et une pieche de lart et de bon aus ruians bien moussus. Nous sommes p)uz a ese asses que n’est le roi. (Modus et Ratio II, p. 131.)

As the appointed day for the battle draws near, each side collects its forces. Fausse Amour is successful in persuading Orgueil to let him spy out the other camp, though this is only a pretext for seeing Ratio again. Disguised as a pilgrim, he reaches Esperance and eventu¬ ally gains Ratio’s presence. She recognizes him as an enemy but pretends to believe his tale of loyalty to her, and leads him on to reveal the true state ol affairs at Alaliferne. He comes to her room at night, but Ratio raises the alarm and her servants seize him, put him into a tub and lower him out of the window, where he remains suspended half-way down. Here Modus finds him and, vastly amused, first gives him a ducking and then hands him over to Abstinence, who feeds him on bread and water. Orgueil now assembles his forces; thousands of vices are drawn up in batallions. The leaders of Modus’s army are such personages as Franc Courage, Blanc Delis and the like. He tells them that since they are so outnumbered they will not attempt open combat, but demoralize the enemy by bringing provisions to the hungry forces, who cannot live off the countryside. This ruse is successful: the vices soon begin to fight amongst themselves for the supplies and the starving people of the three estates follow suit. Hand-to-hand fighting ensues, but though it seems that Modus and his army have carried the day, Satan intervenes and seizes and destroys Modus’s fortress of Bonne Foi, while at Esperance all is destroyed save Ratio’s castle.

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FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

But now the time is fulfilled, and the scene changes; the author sees a vision of the abode of the Holy Spirit. Modus and Ratio, the seven virtues and the twelve symbolic beasts are there, and Modus recapitulates his case against the World, the Flesh and the Devil, to whom the three estates have now gone over. The Holy Spirit, pronouncing judgement, recalls that this struggle began in the Garden of Eden, and goes on to tell of God’s saving work through Christ. Then the punishments are announced: the World is to suffer pestilence and war; the Flesh is to undergo death by pestilence, and the Devil must suffer an intensification of the pains of hell. The author then asks a learned clerk to interpret his vision. The interpre¬ tation is twofold. The first meaning is theological: the seven virtues are attributes of God, but since God created man in his image, they must also be human attributes. It is Ratio that enables men to understand God and strive for these virtues; by rejecting her the three estates have been lost to Faith, Hope and Morality. The clerk then proceeds to the second, or astrological interpretation, which involves an exposition of Plato’s, Alexander’s and Ptolemy’s views of the universe. The twelve beasts of the vision are those of the zodiac, and the seven mirrors the planets, which interpret and influence human affairs. After a discourse on this influence, for good and ill, the clerk explains that at present the planets foretell the appearance of the plague and many other ills, beginning on the after¬ noon of the 20th. March, 1345. Because France has fallen away from her high destiny, a period of particular trial is in store: Avendra u roialme de France, depuis Fan de grace 1341 jusques a Fan de grace 1362, plus de merveilles, d’oppression et de pestilences que il n’avint u roialme de France puis le premier roi crestien. (Modus et Ratio, II, p. 203.)

Finally the clerk makes a prophecy. He sees three trees which will bear flowers and leaves, but no fruit; these represent |the three sons of Philip the Fair, who brought life, joy and peace to the kingdom, but left no heirs. The next three kings (Philip VI of Valois, John II and Charles V) will bear fruit, but no flowers or leaves: all will come to tragic or violent ends. The clerk asks the author not to reveal the prophecy concerning the last-named king; but now that the clerk

LE ROY MODUS ET LA ROYNE RATIO

31

is dead and the author has seen the prophecy fulfilled, he will reveal it. There follows an account of the campaigns of du Guesclin, referred to as 1 Aigle de 1 Occident”, by whose valour and military skill Charles and his kingdom were saved. The author foresees peace and prosperity for the king, and ends with a section in verse in which the king is exhorted to keep an eye on his entourage, and the duties and responsibilities of kings are outlined. This last part of the work, dealing with dreams and prophecies and their interpretations, is of little interest today: though in the author’s eyes it was clearly the climax to which all the rest of the book tended. The story of the conflict between Modus and Ratio on the one hand and Satan and his minions on the other, however, deserves to be dealt with in some detail, since its literary merits have been neglected or underrated.3 It is true that it contains all those elements dear to the later Middle Ages and repugnant to modern taste: allegorical figures, moral discourses, legal and theological argument and catalogues of the units of armed forces. Yet within this conven¬ tional framework the author moves with ease and skill. He fully engages the reader’s interest in the complex interplay of the forces of good and evil and often succeeds in investing these arid materials with warmth and life. Modus and Ratio, although they are the principal figures in the story, themselves remain rather flat and colourless personalities, as those personifying good in allegories so often do. But the evil characters are painted in lively colours, from Satan, whom we first meet hard at work in Hell— . . . qui souffloit le feu sous une chaudiere plaine d’iaue, ou estoit l’ame d’un usurier . . . Quant Sathan out oi parler Diligence, il commencha a fronchir, et les dens richinier, et dist a Diligence comment il estoit si hardi de lui faire ajournement en sa meson. (Modus et Ratio, II, p. 15.)

—to Orgueil, who is highly displeased when he learns, at the dinnertable, that his champions have been defeated by those of Modus: 3 Remigereau op. cit., p. 87, while admiring the Livre des Deduis dismisses the Songe de Pestilence as “une oeuvre froide, toute de tete, avec des conceptions qui ne sont plus les notres, et souvent d’une bizarrerie qui deroute,” and suggests that it merits study only from a psychological point of view, as showing the mentality of a clerical writer of the four¬ teenth century.

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FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

Et quant il fu servi de son premier mes, y le prist et le geta hors de la table et mist les mains au coste, et dist tout haut: “Je ne mengeray jam£s chose qui bien me face tant que je aie destruit le roi Modus,” et commencha a richignier et a roulier de travers et a gaindre et soufler comme un sanglier.” (Modus et Ratio, II, p. 113.)

There are not many creatures of flesh and blood in this long story, but where the author has introduced them, he observes them with a satirical eye; his concern with the general debasement of moral standards is evidently grounded in considerable experience of human conduct, and the observations here are as accurate as those on animal behaviour in the earlier volume. When, for example, Sapience, in the course of his investigation of the clergy, visits the house of a parish priest, he finds the priest at the tavern and a young woman in possession. She tells him her name is Alison, “et sui nieche au frere du prestre”; when he asks who the children are whom he sees about the house, she has an equally ready answer: “Ils sont tous mes freres et mes seurs.” The author makes no comment on this inter¬ change, either direcdy or through the mouth of Sapience: the pres¬ ence of the priest’s mistress and the glib explanation of her status, evidently a situation familiar to the parish, are left to speak for them¬ selves. A little later, we find Providence visiting the witch Aalis du Creux, to whom he has been sent for information by Mabire du Clos, herself a witch. At first, though he speaks to her in the most flattering terms, she will not divulge any secrets; but Providence soon finds a way to elicit them: “A” fait dame Aalis, “ce n’est mis a moi que vous devds avoir conseil. Al£s ailleurs! Qui vous a dit tieux paroles se moque de vous, mon doulz enfant. Je ne saroie conseil donner.” “A” fait Providence, “ne lessiez mie a moi conseillier! Veci dis sous que je vous donne.” “De quoi voulds vous que je vous donne conseil?” fait dame Aalis. (Modus et Ratio, II, p. 55.)

Once again, there is no comment on this conversation. With a restraint unusual in this period when authors generally lose no opportunity of moralizing, the dialogue is left to convey its own message and gains in effect from this reticence. The story that takes up the greater part of the Songe de Pestilence is, as will be seen, rich in incident, and these episodes, woven to¬ gether into a reasonably coherent narrative, offer a great variety of tone. The reader is taken from the sublime scenes where God him-

LE ROY MODUS ET LA ROYNE RATIO

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self is judging the world and where passionate speeches are made, such as that where Sapience tells of the three estates’ neglect of Truth, Charity and Humility, to the farcical interludes with Fausse Amour, where even Modus is shown in ribald mood: “Que esche la?” dist le roi. “Avies vous si grant devocion a ma feme que vous y esti£s venu en pelerinage? Vous aves fait grant penitanche, et pour ce vous faut avoir le baing.” Doncques li geta une damoiselle de l’iaue sus la teste, si commenchierent a rire et a eulz moquier de lui et li dire de grans rampones. (Modus et Ratio, II, p. 139.)

This variety of tone is matched by a remarkable flexibility of style. The sections of narrative and action are told in a plain manner, with a good deal of dialogue, which, like that already quoted, is lifelike in effect. But even here, if the occasion demands it, the author’s prose can be both exciting and moving. In the description of how the demoralized forces of the vices begin to fight among themselves for the food supplied by Modus, the author shows him¬ self a master in the art of filling a wide canvas with a scene of violent action and producing an increasingly confusing and grotesque effect. But the author can do more than this: he is able to vary his manner in such a way as to parody some styles of writing current in his day. Thus when Fausse Amour confides to Envie how he has fallen in love with Ratio, he does so in the most exaggerated manner of the writer in the courtly tradition: Quant je la vi, son regart me vint ferir u cuer tellement que l’emprainte de son doulz visage demoura en mon cuer, aussi comme l’empreinte du seel fait en la chire. Et se je estoie l’un de ses trois chevaliers a jouster contre vous, il n’i a chelui de vous trois que je ne meisse par terre. (Modus et Ratio, II, p. 103.)

This affected and precious style of speech, found again in the Chant Royal which follows, and the whole ludicrous episode of Fausse Amour's wooing of Ratio, provide a more telling argument against the practice of courtly love and its manifestations than all the moralizings of the Chevalier de la Tour. But the author can turn his powers of mimicry in the stylistic field to solemn effects as well. The “Commission” by which Satan is summoned to appear before the Court of Heaven is a carefully detailed pastiche of a real legal document:

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FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

A tous les condampnes des legions infernaus qui ches presentes lettres verront ou orront: Nous, le Roy des Chieux, Empereeur et Createur de tout le monde, avons donne et donnons plain pouair et mandement especial a nostre ame sergant Diligence de aller par tout le monde sous le szodeacre faire ajournements, un ou pluseurs, dont il sera requiz, et assigner jour ou jours par devant nous ou nos deputes; et pour faire tous exples de justice . . . mandons et commandons a tous que a lui entendent et obeissent et li donnent conseil, confort et aide, se mestier en a et il les en requiert. En tesmoing de chen, a la requeste de nostre fille Ratio, li avon donne chez lettres pendantes, selleez de nostre grant seel, qui furent faites en l’incarnation de nostre Filz mil CCCXLII, le tiers jour de mai. Le Roy des Chieux Empereeur. (Modus et Ratio, II, p. 24.)

Again, when the Pope, at the suggestion of Bonne Foi, sends a number of monks to preach a mission urging the three estates to repent, we are given a sample of their sermons; and this is in the oratorical style of the preachers of the day: Entre vous clers, et entre vous, nobles, et entre vous, gens de labour, qui tenez la foi catholique, qui deves amer, doubter vostre Createur et dev6s garder ses commandemens, et en ce fesant devez estre aussi comme le Pere et le Filz et le Saint Esperit, qui sont une meisme sustance et volente; aussi doivent estre les clers, les nobles, les gens de labour une sustance volentaire en la deite, en l’umeinnete confermee u Saint Espirit. (Modus et Ratio, II, p. 120.)

A century later, such a quasi-legal style as that of the first example or a rhetorical one like the second is all too familiar, and many prose writers seem unable to write in any other way; but the author of the Songe de Pestilence is evidently an accomplished writer, and for him these are only two of the many stylistic effects that he is able to produce according to the demands of his story. His allegorical figures, especially those on the side of Orgueil, are often much more than mere abstractions. Some are presented to us in a few telling phrases, such as Tendrour, who rides in Sloth’s batallion, and “qui de sa condicion a le cuer mol et flebe a faire bien, et est trop diliquatif.” But the principal figures have a style of speech that befits and reveals their character. When, for example, Orgueil is asking the advice of his counsellors, Paresse cannot be troubled to form any opinions of his own, but contents himself with agreeing with the last speaker, while Jeunesse launches into an impulsive speech urging immediate action regardless of the consequences; and Flaterie is concerned only with obsequious praise of his master.

LE ROY MODUS ET LA ROYNE RATIO

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These examples make it obvious that the sentence-structure in the Songe is far different from that of the Lime des Deduis. It is not only that the author is able to produce the stylistic effect—comic, pompous, sublime, grotesque—that he wishes; the form of his sentences is much more complex, and even in the passages of straightforward narrative, there is much less evidence of the con¬ catenated style than in the earlier work. This contrast in style between the two parts of the work suggests, despite suggestions to the contrary by the editor of the text4 that they are the work of two different authors; the two parts seem indeed to have been regarded as separable in the later Middle Ages, and the five reprintings of the first edition of i486 give only the first part of the work. It is likely that the considerable vogue enjoyed by Les Limes du Roi Modus et de la Royne Ratio was largely due to the encyclopaedic nature of the Lime des Deduis, which provided a compendium of information on every aspect of hunting, and is often quoted by other authors. But the Songe de Pestilence has a literary value beyond the author’s immediate intention of providing a flattering account, in the form of a prophecy, of the reign of Charles V and the campaign of du Guesclin. He is not dealing with private problems of behaviour, as are the Chevalier de la Tour and the Menagier de Paris in their different ways, but his intention is no less didactic then theirs. Deeply concerned with the religious and moral issues of his day, he provides a commentary on the questions of social justice to which they give rise; and at the same time shows himself highly skilled in the literary craftmanship of his day. The variety and flexibility of his style, which he can adapt to the changing requirements of his narra¬ tive, and the life with which he invests the figures of his allegory, show him to be a writer not only intent on conveying a message which he feels to be vital, but able to modify the literary fashions of his day to suit his own ends. It is in this, and not merely in the longer and more ambitious form that his work takes, that he shows himself a professional writer, where the other two are no more than gifted amateurs. 4

Tilander, op. cit.. Introduction, I, pp. 1-liv.

Some Works of Fiction

Melusine The works considered in the preceding chapter are didactic in the most obvious sense, the Chevalier de la Tour Landry imparting moral teaching, the Menagier de Paris practical information as well, while the Limes du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio deals both with practical problems of the chase and, in the Songe, with wider moral and religious questions. But the literature of the later years of the fourteenth century shows a fondness for didacticism that finds its way—as it had in the Roman de la Rose—into the most unlikely contexts. Melusine,1 written by Jean d’Arras in 1392, provides an interesting and curious example of this late mediaeval taste. It is the only known work of this author, who was a bookbinder by profession. He wrote, as he tells us, at the command of the Duchess of Bar and her brother the Duke of Berry, for whose sumptuous library he had produced many fine bindings.2 Melusine is a fairy tale which, in addition to its many fantastic and supernatural elements, tells the tragic story of a happy marriage destroyed by the husband’s lack of trust; but at the same time it claims to trace the history of the fort¬ ress of Lusignan; it recounts the strategy and tactics of many battles both on land and sea; it gives exact geographical details of Cyprus and of various countries of Eastern Europe; and it both praises learning and imparts, through the mouth of the heroine, moral exhortation and instruction in Christian duty. These apparently disparate elements are so closely woven into the fabric of the story that it would be difficult to disentangle them without detriment to 1 Melusine, Roman du XI Ve siecle, par Jean d’Arras, ed. Louis Stouff (Publications de l’Universite de Dijon, 1932). 2 See L. Stouff, Essai sur Melusine (Publications de l’Universite de Dijon, 1930), PP- 21-2. 39

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FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

the whole; didacticism and fiction have here been fused. Jean d’Arras, however, does not admit that Melusine is a work of fiction. He declares in the introduction to his book that the existence of fairies, witches and other supernatural beings is well authenticated, and that the events he is about to recount are true, since it is well known that “la noble et puissant forteresse de Lusignan en Poictou fu fondee par une faee”. In the course of the narrative he refers many times to the “vraye cronique” and the “vraye histoire” which he is following closely; but it has not been possible to identify any such written source for the events he recounts.3 Writing at the command of his illustrious patron and with the professed object of showing how the family of Lusignan came to rule over Cyprus, Bohemia and Luxembourg, he could doubtless hardly do otherwise than vouch for the absolute veracity of his story, however unlikely it may seem; for, as he declares, Humain entendement est contraint de dire que les jugemens de Dieu sont abisme sans fons et sans rive, et sont ses choses merveilleuses, et en tant de formes et manieres diverses, et en tant de pays, selon leur diverse nature, espandues, que, sauf meilleur jugement, je cuide qu’onques homme. se Adam non, n’ot parfaicte congnoissance des euvres invisibles de Dieu. (Melusine, p. 3.)

Melusine was the daughter of Elinas, King of Scotland, and of the fairy Presine. When a fairy marries a mortal, there is usually some ban prescribed in their relationship, a time when the fairy must always be alone; to contravene this brings disaster. The happy marriages of Melusine and of her mother are both brought to an untimely end in this way. When Elinas breaks his promise and thoughtlessly goes to see his wife with her new-born children Presine has to go into exile with her three daughters. When they are old enough to understand something of what has happened, Melu¬ sine, with mistaken loyalty, persuades her sisters to join her in imprisoning their father for ever in a mountain in Northumberland. Far from being grateful. Presine is very angry and pronounces a curse on each of them; Melusine’s fate is to be turned into a serpent from the waist down every Saturday. If her husband ever sees her in this form she will receive everlasting punishment and be doomed J Ibid., pp. 43 ff.

MELUSINE

41

to haunt her family. In due course, at a fountain in the midst of a forest in Poitou, Melusine meets Raimondin, nephew of the Count of Poitiers. He is fleeing through the forest, having accidentally killed his uncle in the course of a boar hunt. To his great surprise the mysterious lady addresses him by name and knows his whole history and that of his family. She tells him how to avoid suspicion of the murder and orders things so well that he falls in love with her, and they are married with great ceremony and lavish feasting, that cause uni¬ versal astonishment. Melusine proves to be an ideal wife for the feudal lord. She builds a magnificent fortress at Lusignan and other castles and strongholds throughout Poitou. She has nine sons, all well-made but each with some strange physical flaw: Urien, the eldest, has one eye red and the other blue and phenomenally large ears; Guyon, the third son, has his eyes set unevenly in his head; Antoine has the mark of a lion’s paw on his left cheek; Gieffroy, the sixth, who turns out to be the most formidable of them all, has a tooth that protrudes for more than an inch from his mouth; Fromont has a furry patch on his nose. These sons grow to manhood and determine to seek adventure by helping reigning monarchs or nobles to repel invasion of their terri¬ tories. Urien and Guyon go to drive out the Saracens, first from the kingdom of Cyprus and then from that of Armenia; by a happy chance the king of each of these lands has a daughter who is his sole heir and whom with his dying breath he gives in marriage, together with his lands, to one of the champions from Lusignan. Antoine and Regnault, Melusine’s fourth and fifth sons, are no less adventurous and no less fortunate. They learn that Chrestienne, Duchess of Lux¬ embourg since the death of her father, has refused the hand of the neighbouring King of Alsace, who has invaded her country to try to force her into marriage; they decide that this is just the kind of adventure they need. They defeat the King, but treat him so honour¬ ably that he soon becomes their ally. The barons of Luxembourg offer Antoine the hand of Chrestienne. Regnault proceeds further east, having learned that the King of Bohemia is besieged by Sara¬ cens in his capital city of Prague. The reader is hardly surprised to

42

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learn that he too has an only daughter, Aiglentine, or that he too is conveniently killed in battle so that Regnault, having repulsed the invaders, marries the princess and reigns in his stead. Meanwhile Gieffroy au Grant Dent has grown up to be the most fearsome of all the brothers. His adventures, undertaken impulsively and carried out with a kind of boisterous cruelty, are quite different from those of his brothers, for he specializes in the killing of giants and, after subduing a rebellion in Ireland and helping Urien and Guyon, again threatened by Saracens, he successfully despatches one in his father’s country. Until this point, all has been happiness and success for Melusine; she and Raimondin have seen their sons grow up to be monarchs all over Europe, and at home Melusine has busied herself with building castles and founding abbeys. Raimondin, loving and trusting her, has always unquestioningly respected her wish to be alone on Saturdays. But one Saturday his brother the Count of Forez calls, and, when he is told that Melusine cannot be disturbed that day, suggests to Raimondin that she has a lover, or some other guilty secret. Raimondin spies on her and sees her in a bath, a serpent from the waist down, splashing the water with her tail. At once Raimondin realizes that by betraying her trust he has destroyed his own happiness and loosed a terrible doom on the whole family. Gieffroy, returning in triumph with the head of his giant, learns with rage that his brother Fromont has become a monk, and burns down the monastery with all its inmates. Raimondin in horror blames Melusine for the disaster, and for the fact that each of her sons bears some supernatural flaw. Too late he repents his harsh words and begs her forgiveness; she gives some final instruc¬ tions about the family, promises always to watch over them and flies out of the window in the guise of a winged serpent. At times of distress, before the impending death of the lord of Lusignan, she lands on the Tour Poitevine of her own fortress, and her voice can be heard in lamentation. In the course of his pursuit of a giant in Northumberland, Gieffroy comes upon the tomb of his grandfather Elinas, and so learns of his supernatural lineage. He and Raimondin are reconciled; each in turn makes a penitential pilgrimage to Rome, and Raimondin makes over

MELUSINE

43

his lands to Gieffroy and ends his days as a holy hermit at Mont¬ serrat in Spain. This fantastic story contains elements borrowed from chansons de geste and Arthurian romance, as well as from local legends.4 But the events occur in no imaginary country; it is set in France, with epi¬ sodes taking place in Germany, Bohemia, Luxembourg, Cyprus and Spain, and contains much exact geographical description of the Poitou region, as well as providing a history of the origins of Lusignan and of many other cities and fortresses in this part of France: Elle fist faire le chastel et bourg de Partenay, si fort et si bel que sans comparoison. Puis fonda a la Rochelle les tours de la garde de la mer et le chastel, et commenga une partie de la ville. Et avoit une tour grosse, a trois lieues prez, que Julius Cesar fist faire. Et l’appelloit l’en pour lors la Tour Aigle . . . Celle tour fist la dame avironner de grosses tours et de fors murs, et le fist nommer le Chastel Aiglon. Et depuis ediffia Pons en Poictou et Sainctes, qui pour lors fu nommee Linges. Puis fist Talement et Tallemondoiz, et moult d’autres villes et forteresses. (.Melusine, p. 79.)

In the same way, Jean d’Arras’s account of the expedition to Cyprus provides him with an opportunity to give much detailed information concerning the geography of the island and the strategic importance of Limasol and Famagusta; and when the unhappy Raimondin makes his way to Montserrat, the steep mountainside, in which the caves of the hermits are to be found at ever increasing altitudes, is meticulously described. This real and factual background for a story of the supernatural amounts to more, however, than the provision of topographical details. Raimondin is a feudal lord who is able, thanks to M61usine’s clairvoyance, to lay claim to the lands in Brittany usurped from his father, and he is concerned both with his rights and with his respon¬ sibilities. Throughout the story no occasion is omitted to recount the rendering of homage, the taking of counsel or the supplying of mutual aid. In the same way, the many battles that occur are pains¬ takingly set down, from the overall strategy by which they are planned to the verbal challenges that precede the single combats. Jean D’Arras, writing at the command of the Duke of Berry and under the patronage of both the King of France and the House of 4 Ibid., pp. 17-19

44

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

Luxembourg, is concerned, in recounting the heroic deeds of Melusine’s husband and sons, to give an impressive genealogy to his patrons.5 But he also wishes his book to be a means of instruction. No doubt, as Stouff suggests,6 all the practical details of feudal war¬ fare and organization, and the description of feasts and ceremonial that enliven the more peaceful interludes of the story, are there to serve as a means of instructing the princes of the noble houses for whom Jean d’ Arras writes in the principles of correct behaviour in the society in which they would move. In the same way, some sixty years later, Antoine de la Sale used the teachings of Madame des Belles Cousines to recall his own instructions to his former pupil, to whom Le Petit Jehan de Saintre was dedicated. But in addition to the geographical and historical details that are more or less germane to his theme, the author seizes every opportu¬ nity to provide both exhortation and instruction on a variety of topics. He sees knowledge, as comprehended in the liberal arts, as the proper interest of gentlemen, to be pursued not with any ulterior or material purpose, but as an end in itself: Et ainsi je croy que cuer de noble estrattion qui a la science des nobles vertus des ars dessuz diz ou cuer, qu’il n’en sauroit meserrer si tost que cil qui auroit aprins les ars par avarice de vouloir enrichir, par dissi¬ militude de complaire aux princes, et non monstrer le vif du droit, car rudesse de nature ne se puet bonnement appliquer a la nature nourrie en noblesse. (Melusine, p. 17.)

Raimondin’s uncle, the Count of Poitiers, and the Count’s son Bernard are models of what learned gentlemen should be, the father “ly plus saiges d’astronomie qui fust a son temps ne depuis Aristote” and the son so well versed in Greek that when Melusine decides to call her fortress Lusignan, he is able immediately to point out the etymological felicity of her choice. It is from Melusine herself, however, that her sons receive moral and religious instruction,, which Jean d’Arras no doubt intended to take root in the minds of his readers. When her two sons are about to leave La Rochelle for their expedition against the Saracens in Cyprus, Melusine draws them aside, and first gives them a ring which will protect them from harm, but only provided that “Vous

MELUSINE

45

userez de loyaute, sans penser ne faire tricherie, ne mauvaitie”. She then proceeds, rather in the manner of Polonius, to give her sons some rules of conduct by which their lives are to be guided now that they are going forth into the world. They are to be assiduous in hearing Mass daily and must strive to be true champions of the church. They must be ready to succour widows and orphans, honouring all ladies and helping maidens unjustly disinherited; w hile seeking the company of those of gentle birth they are to be humbles et humains” to men of every degree; and must be ready with practical and financial aid whenever it is needed, while avoiding foie largesce”. They are to make no promises that they cannot fulfil, and to carry out without delay those that they do make. These are counsels applicable to all Christians; but because her sons are likely to hold positions of especial responsibility, Melusine adds some words of advice on the arts of government: Gouvernez voz gens selon la nature dont ilz sont. S’ilz sont rebelles, gardez que vous seignorissiez, sans rien laissier passer de vostre droit de seignourie. Et soiez tousjours sur vostre garde, tant que la puissance soit vostre, car, se vous vous laissez sourmarchier, il vous fauldroit gouvemer a leur voulente. Mais toutesfoiz gardez vous que quelx qu’ils soient, durs ou debonnaires, que vous ne leur alevez nouvelle coustume qui soit desraisonnable. Prenez sur eux vostre droit, sans eulx taillier oultre raison, ne alevez coustumes inraisonnables, car, se peuple est povre, le seigneur est mendiz. (Melusine, p. 86.)

They should beware of flatterers and those who slander others, and regard the advice of exiles and refugees with some reserve, since it is unlikely to be objective. Above all, they must be on their guard against pride, lest it make them unjust in their dealings with their subjects, or so self-satisfied that they under-estimate the power of their enemies. Lastly, in matters of war, she urges them to be gener¬ ous but firm to a defeated enemy, and—here Jean d’Arras is no doubt thinking of France’s own experiences during the war with England—to avoid lengthy truces, car en longs traictiez gist aucunes foiz grant decepcion et grant perte pour la plus puissant partie, car les saiges reculent pour plus loing sailler. (Melusine, p. 87.)

Before Antoine and Regnault set out for Luxembourg, they too receive a valedictory sermon. The subsequent adventures of her sons show how they put their

46

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

mother’s advice into practice. When Urien makes a state visit to his kingdom in Cyprus, he orders his officials to carry out justice without fear or favour, to great and small alike, on pain of severe punishment. When Antoine conquers the King of Alsace and has him at his mercy, he behaves with the utmost generosity, returning to the King the four thousand prisoners that had been taken; but he explains that he cannot return the booty to him, because it is shared among his comrades-in-arms. Although the leaders of enemy forces are ruthlessly pursued and usually brutally killed, and any survivors hanged, the brothers are careful to treat women with the utmost consideration; when Chrestienne thanks Antoine and Regnault for rescuing herself and her country from invasion they refuse to accept any reward for themselves or their forces; and even Gieffroy, who is described as proud and cruel, promises the lady of Valbruyant when she intervenes on her husband’s behalf that she and her children will come to no harm and that her husband will be allowed to explain his actions. Gieffroy’s brutality and sacrilege in the destruction of the monastery are recounted with evident disapprobation; they are recognized as part of the working-out of the curse, and can be expiated only by a pilgrimage to Rome. Jean d’Arras’s love of moral teaching is shown, too, in the prover¬ bial sayings that occur in the course of the narrative or enliven the conversation of his characters. When Antoine causes some indigna¬ tion in the ranks of his followers by staging a practice alarm during the night while they are still on French soil, he retorts, Quand vous faictes faire un habit nouveau, ne le faictes vous pas essayer, savoir se il y a qu’amender? (Melusine, p. 157.)

When it is learned that three Irish knights are refusing with a great show of defiance to pay their dues to Raimondin, Gieffroy exclaims, Par mon chief, grant vent chiet pour pou de pluie. (Melusine, p. 198.)

Urien, informed that the Saracens greatly outnumber the Christian force, replies that their cause is just and that: Se ilz sont moult et nous pou, plus point un grain de poivre que dix sestiers de froment. La victoire ne gist pas en grant multitude de peuple, mais en bon gouvernement. (Melusine, p. 99.)

Stouff lists some fifty of such pithy generalizations.7 The incidents 7 Ibid., pp. 151-4.

MELUSINE

47

in which these sententiae are imbedded are in a sense exempla which illustrate their validity; just as the actions of Melusine’s sons, performed in obedience to their mother’s words of advice, show the excellence of that advice. Nothing could illustrate more clearly the late fourteenth-century taste for didacticism than the incorporation ot moral teaching of such a kind in this story of the supernatural and the working out of a mother’s curse on her innocent daughter. The supernatural element, however, is evident only at the be¬ ginning and the end of the book. Melusine’s magic powers enable her to greet Raimondin by name at their first meeting and to tell him that she knows not only of his own predicament but, later, the whole story of his father’s banishment from Brittany at the hands of a traitor. Raimondin’s mysterious bride causes much speculation at the court of Poitou by her unheralded appearance in the district, the lavishness of her hospitality at the wedding and the speed and efficiency with which Lusignan is built and fortified: Ne nulz horns ne savoit dont cilz ouvriers venoient, ne dont ilz estoient . . . Et sachiez que le conte de Poictiers et tuit ly noble et les menuz peuples du pays, furent tous esbahiz comment si grant ouvraige povoit estre en si pou de temps faiz ne achevez. (Melusine, p. 46.)

Her aim, however, is not to indulge in a dazzling display of super¬ natural accomplishments, but to be the model wife of a feudal lord, furthering his interests, bearing him many sons, and bringing them up to be patterns of chivalry. The central portion of the book shows her playing this role, and the interest of the narrative shifts from the heroine herself to the exploits of her sons. But once Raimondin has discovered her secret, forcing a spyhole in the door of her private chamber and discovering her in her bewitched form, the whole tone of the story changes, to become sombre and full of horror; it is no longer the triumphant clash of arms or the shouts of feasting that sound in the reader’s ears, but the dismal cry of Melusine herself as she flies around her own castle, a certain harbinger of disaster: La serpente se monstra sur les murs, si que tous la povoient veoir, et ala tout autour par trois foiz. Et puis se mist sur la Tour Poictevine, et la faisoit si griefz plains et si griefs souspirs qu’il sembloit proprement a ceulx qui la estoient que ce feust la voix d’une dame . . . Gieffroy et Thierry en orent grant pitie, car ilz savoient bien que c’estoit leur mere, et commencerent a plourer moult tendrement. Et quant elle les appercoit plourer, si les encline et gecte un si horrible et si doulereux cry qu’il

48

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

sembla proprement a tous ceulx qui l’ouirent que la forteresse fondist en abisme. (Melusine, p. 288.)

Enthralling as is the story he has to tell, it must be admitted that Jean d’Arras is often a lazy and a perfunctory writer, as well as suffering from the stylistic weaknesses common to other writers of this period. He has little power to organize the material of his story into a coherent whole. The link-passages, to which mediaeval prose writers so often resort to warn their readers of a shift from one scene and set of characters to another, occur with monotonous frequency throughout the story, as do formulae and cliches such as “que c’estoit pitie a veoir” or “ainsi comme vous orrez cy apres en la vraye histoire’’. Phrases that the author evidently considers effective are repeated verbatim, so that in the course of the account of the wedding festivities we are twice told S esmerveilloient tuit dont tant de biens et de richesces povoit venir. {Melusine, pp. 39, 41.)

During the expedition to Cyprus, it is remarked many times by the admiring allies of Urien and Guyon that Ccs gens sont dignes de conquester tout le monde {Melusine, pp. 93 97, et passim),

while Hermine, Florie and Chrestienne each refers to herself in almost identical terms as “povre orpheline”. Lengthy passages of narrative, as in the Chevalier de la Tour, consist of nothing more than a series of simple statements linked by conjunctions: Et la fut l’arcevesque . . . Et lors vint Uriens . . . et le roy prist la couionne et lui assist sur la teste et Uriens l’en remercie. Lors appelle le roy tous les barons . . . Et lors fu la messe commencee et apres se assistrent au disner. Puis commenga la feste . . . et quant temps fu, 1 espousee fu couchiee et puis se coucha Uriens et beney l’arcevesque le lit. Et lors s’en party chascuns . . . Et le landemain vindrent au roy . . . et fu la messe commenciee et y fu la royne admenee et fu adextree par Guyon. {Melusine, p. 122.)

Jean d’Arras is content to leave a good deal to the reader: over and over again he says, “Que vous feroye je long compte?” or “Je ne vous vueil pas longuement tenir en ceste matiere”, and we are left with the briefest of outlines, to fill in for ourselves the details of such scenes as the funeral of Count Aymery, killed by Raimondin while hunting, the wedding of Raimondin and Melusine, or the triumphal entry of Urien and Guyon into Famagusta. Yet he is capable on occasion

MELUSINE

49

of writing of a different order altogether from this stringing together of a series of ready-made formulae. Although the major part of Melusine is concerned with the warlike exploits first of Raimondin and then of the heroine’s sons, these by no means all conform to the same pattern. Raimondin’s excursion to Brittany involves fighting in wooded country, where his forces are waylaid by an ambush; the battles undertaken by Urien and Guyon are for the most part naval ones and contain exciting sequences such as that where a contrary wind drives the fireship launched by the Saracens back against their own ship; while the greater part of Gieffroy’s punitive expedition to Ireland is taken up with guerilla fighting in wild and mountainous country. The brothers, too, are well differentiated in personality: Urien and Guyon are conventionally drawn, ruthless towards the enemy Saracens but acknowledging the bravery of the Sultan, courteous towards their allies and especially towatds the princesses; Antoine is a paragon of military efficiency, insistent that his troops’ discipline must be exemplary when they pass through the city of Cologne, but exceptionally generous towards his defeated adversary the King of Alsace. The character of Gieffroy is in sharp contrast. Whereas Urien and Guyon and later Antoine and Regnault seek their parents’ consent to set off on their adventures and have the benefit of their mother’s advice, Gieffroy rushes off in a rage when he hears of the recalcitrant knights in Ireland, and has no sooner returned from subduing them than he learns of the depravations of a giant in his father’s territory. His fury is immediate: Et comment diable, dist Gieffroy, mes deux freres et moy avons taut fait que nous avons treu du soudant de Damas et de ses complices, et ce mastin puant, qui est tout seul, tendroit le pays de mon pere en patiz! Par mon chief, mal le pensa, car il lui coustera moult cher, car ja n’y lerra autre gage que la vie. (Melusine, p. 239.)

Gieffroy is consistently foul-mouthed and brutal; his senseless burning of the monastery is completely in character, and it is not until after his mother’s departure and his father’s retirement to Montserrat that he realizes the enormity of his actions and turns into a responsible ruler. The characters of Jean d’Arras often reveal their personalities and their emotions through their speech; the work contains many

50

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

passages of dialogue that show a vivacity unusual for this period. It is true that on formal occasions the characters address each other with ceremonious and elaborate courtesy; but this should perhaps not be dismissed as an entirely literary and artificial convention, accompanied as it is by gestures of kneeling or bowing, or of giving precedence, that are of an equal formality. Huizinga has drawn attention8 9 to the value that society in the later Middle Ages placed on these outward forms. Jean d’Arras sometimes lowers the emo¬ tional tone of his narrative by introducing a too literary speech at a moment of high tension, such as that where a squire, wishing to tell Chrestienne that the Lusignan brothers had at last come to her rescue, leans from the window and exclaims Mademoiselle, venez veoir honneur en son siege royal et en sa haulte majestd; venez veoir le dieu d’armes en sa prop re figure . . . venez veoir la fleur pe toute noblesce et de toute courtoisie. (Melusine, p. I62.)9

But such pedantic orations are comparatively few, and Jean d’Arras shows real skill in the reporting of lively and realistic conversation. When Raimondin, bewildered and dismayed by his inadvertent killing of his uncle, comes upon Melusine at the fountain, she runs after him, seizes the reins of his horse and addresses him, at first in a mocking rebuke for his discourtesy in ignoring the presence of ladies and then with some asperity when he does not reply but ap¬ pears to be in a trance. Finally, she jerks his hand and he wakes with a start, ready to draw his sword; she bursts into laughter and asks, Sire vassaulx, a qui voulez vous commencier la bataille? Voz ennemis ne sont pas cy present. Beau sire, je suis de vostre partie. (Melusine, p. 24.)

A little later, Raimondin tells his kinsman. Count Bertrand, of his impending marriage. When Bertrand asks for details, Raimondin explains that he cannot supply them, and the count jovially expresses his astonishment: Par foy, dist ly contes, veez cy merveilles. Raimondin se marie et ne scet quelle famme il prent ne de quel lignaige. (Melusine, p. 36.)

The rhythms of normal speech appear to be preserved in these brief 8 See Huizinga, op. cit., pp. 50-4. 9 Cf. Stouff, op. cit., pp. 25-6.

MELUSINE

51

and telling exchanges, which the author can also use with pathetic as well as comic effect. When the Captain of Rhodes learns of the wounding of the King of Cyprus he abruptly questions the messenger “Comment, que dictes vous? Est le roy malsain? N’en savez-vous plus?” Raimondin, after he has allowed his brother to infect him with suspicion and spied on Melusine, turns upon him with re¬ vulsion and anger: Par Dieu, se je creoie mon cuer, je vous feroye mourir de male mort, mais raison naturelle le me deffent, pour ce que vous estes mon frere. Alez vous ent, ostez vous hors de devant mes yeulx. Que tous les menistres d’enfer vous puissent convoier et martierer de vij. tourmens infernaulx. (Melusine, p. 242.)

Jean d’Arras is capable on occasion, too, of writing lively descrip¬ tive passages. The single combats between Melusine’s sons and the champions they encounter are told with a variety of brutal detail that may well not be to the taste of readers today; but there are occasional scenes in the interludes between the battles where colour, light and sound are observed with great precision. After Antoine and Regnault have engaged the troops of the King of Alsace, the author describes the field of battle, with the bright morning sun glancing off the gold and silver helmets and the bright colours of banners and pennants, while the neighing, riderless horses gallop with trailing reins about the field and the cries of the wounded mingle with the sound of the trumpets. A little later, the Duke of Bavaria sends a squire to find out what sort of forces the Poitevin knights have brought with them. Antoine’s troops, it will be remembered, are exceptionally welldisciplined, and in this lull between engagements they are all usefully employed: the cooks are at work, the horses are being exercised, some of the troops are engaged in physical training, while others are doing target practice; the observer perceives at once that morale is high and that “ilz ne sont pas apprentiz de leur mestier”. More unusual scenes also occur in this strange story, notably the climax of the whole narrative, when Raimondin makes his spy-hole and discovers Melusine. Made suspicious by his brother, he had expected to surprise her with a lover. What he found was entirely unexpected: Voit Melusigne en la cuve, qui estoit jusques au nombril en figure de

52

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

femme et pignoit ses cheveulx, et du nombril en aval estoit en forme de la queue d’un serpent, aussi grosse comine une tonne ou on met harenc, et longue durement, et debatoit de sa coue l’eaue tellement qu’elle la faisoit saillir jusques a la voulte de la chambre. (Melusine, p. 242.)

Here the effect of the description, vivid as it is, is immensely en¬ hanced because Jean d’Arras associates so closely the picture of the bewitched Melusine splashing the water to the ceiling with Raimondin’s immediate realization of his betrayal of his wife and the disasters that are bound to ensue. The description is not an extrane¬ ous piece of ornamentation, but closely integrated with the story itself. A similar technique is used in a striking passage near the end of the book. Gieffroy, absolved and penitent, has found his father’s refuge at Montserrat and climbs up the mountain to visit him at his hermitage. There he must wait until his father has heard Mass; and as Gieffroy stands there Jean d’Arras tells us not only of the terri¬ fying mountain scene but also of the effect which it produces upon Gieffroy, formerly so rash and blasphemous: Et endementiers Gieffroy regarda contremont les grans fallizes qui sont haultes et droictes, et voit les trois autres hermitaiges par dessus lui, et la chappelle Saint Michiel qui est le ve hermitaige. Et puis regarde contreval, et se donne grant merveille comment oncques horns osa premierement la prendre habitacion. Et lui sembloit de l’eglise et de 1’abbaye que ce ne soient que petites selles. (Melusine, p. 278.)

Such descriptions, however, occur all too rarely in the course of the narrative. Jean d’Arras had a long and complicated story to tell, and he may well have had little time to spare for such embellishments; the frequent reiteration of such phrases as “Que vous feroye je longues paroles?” suggests that he was anxious not to appear unduly prolix or to waste his reader’s time with extraneous material. Jean d’Arras ends his book, as mediaeval writers often did, by excusing himself for the imperfections of his writing and declaring that he has done the best he can with the talents at his command. His weaknesses as a writer are obvious enough—difficulty in organi¬ zing his bulky and varied material, reliance on cliches and formula; which can be depended upon to produce an equally automatic response in the reader, a flat and unemphatic style in many of the narrative passages. He has a zeal characteristic of his period for

MELUSINE

53

imparting knowledge, whether moral, geographical, genealogical or mi itary. He did not claim to be writing fiction, invoking constantly an apocryphal “vraye cronique”; but his undoubted gifts, which are striking enough to outweigh these weaknesses, are essentially those ot the novelist: an ability to create unusual and credible characters and to invoke sympathy for their dilemma; an ear for the rhythms o normal conversation; and a power, on occasion, both to describe scenes and events with a discerning eye and, more important and more unusual, to relate these scenes to the thoughts and emotions of the characters concerned in them. Melusine must be acknowledged to have made some small contribution to the slow evolution of the novel as we know it.

F.F.P.W.

3

Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage and Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles In the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles and the Quinze Joyes de Manage we find—for perhaps the first time in the history of French prose— works that are exclusively and unashamedly aimed at the entertain¬ ment of the reader, with no thought of his edification. Here there is no parade of erudition, no use of exempla, no attempt to ascribe a moral interpretation to the events recorded. Both works are intended only to amuse, and both take as their theme the comedy inherent in the relationships of men and women. They share a long literary pedigree: that of the copious writings devoted to the cause of anti¬ feminism. Woman had been shown as fickle, extravagant, faithless and vain in turn by the fabliaux, by Matheolus “le bigame” whose marriage to a widow soured his nature, cut short his career and resulted in the interminable Lamentations, by Eustache Deschamps in his Miroir de Mariage and by many other imitators.1 The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, a collection of short stories emanating from the court of Burgundy, and the Quinze Joyes de Mariage2 both illustrate and develop this theme; but they do so in no abstract or theoretical terms: each work is concerned to show how women react in a variety of given situations and their interest is in the development and resolution of such situations. The author of the Quinze Joyes is unknown, as he wished to be. The enigme or acrostic by which he has titillated the curiosity of succeeding generations of readers has never been satisfactorily 1 See Werner Soderhjelm, La Nouvelle Franfaise au XVe. siecle (Paris, I9i0)i pp. 35-9. 2 Les Quinze Joyes de Mariage, Preface, bibliographic et glossaire par Fernand Fleuret (Classiques Gamier, Paris, no date). 54

LES QUINZE JOYES DE MARIAGE

55

solved.3 His identity, however, matters little. He appears to have been a secular priest, and to have written in the first half of the fif¬ teenth century. What is certain is that he was a shrewd and experi¬ enced observer of the vagaries of human nature and particularly of women, with a quick ear for the nuances of dialogue and a sharp eye for significant details of dress and behaviour. The form of the work is unique. It is a pastiche of a devotional work, the Fifteen Joys of the Virgin, and presents, as its original did, a number of subjects for contemplation; in this case the various' misfortunes that can befall a married man. A recurrent image links the pieces that of the unhappy husband caught in the net of matrimony from which he tries vainly to escape—and a quasiliturgical tone is imparted by the almost invariable repetition of the final words of each section: “La nasse oil il sera tousjours, et finera miseraolement ses jours.” But here the analogy with a work of devotion ends. In each of thejoyes the author describes and develops at some length some aspect of married life and shows how the wife’s concern is to achieve her own ends and to ignore or to controvert those of her husband. Thus the first tells of the wife’s extravagance and love ol new clothes, which bring her husband to bankruptcy; the third deals with the birth of the first child and the attendant trials of the husband; the sixth describes how the husband brings some business acquaintances home for a meal, and she shames him by refusing to provide one, or even to tell him where to find clean linen for them. The eleventh and fifteenth sections are more elabor¬ ately developed: the former describes how a young man may be tricked into marriage with a girl pregnant by someone else, and the latter how a wife, surprised in flagrante delicto by her husband, succeeds, with the connivance of her mother, her maid and her friends, in convincing him that he has been mistaken. These vignettes of married life are not recounted in a conventional narrative manner. The reader is told, for example, 3 The arguments are summarized by Fleuret in his edition. The recent attempt by Jean Misrahi to revive the theory that the work was written by Antoine de la Sale is effectively dismissed by Rasmussen, op. cit., p. 14, n. 1.

56

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS La quinte joye de mariage, si est quand le bon homme qui est marie, par les grans travaulx et paines qu’il a endurees et portees longuement, est mort et las, et est sa jeunesse fort resfredie: et a l’aventure il a femme de plus grant lignde qu’il n’est, ou plus jeune. (QuinzeJoyes,p. 55.)

The author then proceeds to develop the idea thus contained in the opening paragraph, extracting every possible savour from the situation and considering it in all its variations. The third Joye, recounting the trials the husband has to endure when his wife has her first child, shows him first shielding her from the slightest exertion, indulging her every whim and receiving no thanks for his pains. As the time of the birth approaches, his house is filled with women, relatives and friends of his wife, who sit at his fireside and eat and drink lavishly at his expense. If he fails to supply them with anything they want, they are quick to suggest to his wife that he is lacking in proper affection: —Par mon serement, fait l’autre des commeres, si mon mary le me faisoit ainsi, je ameroye mieux qu’il n’eust oeil en teste.—Ma commere, fait l’autre, ne lui acoustumez pas ainsi a vous lesser mectre sous les piez; car il vous en feroit autant ou pis l’annee a venir a voz autres acouchemens. (Quinze Joyes, pp. 31-2.)

His work keeps him away from the house all day, in all kinds of weather; when he returns wet, tired, hungry and anxious about his wife, no one does anything for his comfort, and he is given only bad news: the invalid refuses to eat. She promises to try a little food only if he will prepare it himself. This he does, burning himself in the process; for his own meal there is only a little cold meat that the women did not want. Next morning the wife declares that she has hardly slept at all, and upbraids him for putting her to shame before her friends and neighbours by the poverty of the household, her lack of clothes and the fact that she is worn out by her domestic cares. Determined to be a martyr, she refuses the new dress with which he attempts to placate her, and declares that housework and childbearing are making her old before her time. His reasonable words about their financial state are at last met with tears and complaints of a headache, and one of the attendant women is quick to emphasize his cruelty and lack of consideration for a wife who needs sympathy and rest. Women have in fact, taken over the house, and the husband, lucky if he is allowed inside, is worn out keeping

LES QUINZE JOYES DE MARIAGE

57

them supplied with food and drink, listening to make sure the baby is not crying, raising the money for new clothes for his wife, and making do with last year’s coat for himself. The trivialities of daily domestic life provide the author with plenty of material for the elaboration of similar themes. When the wife insists on going on a pilgrimage, her husband is exhausted by the demands she makes upon him, from buying her holy souvenirs at the shrine to picking cherries for her at the wayside. His financial straits are such that when business takes him from home, he is a laughing-stock with his old-fashioned clothes and broken-down horse, his servant wearing a second-hand coat several sizes too large for him. This, it will be seen, is not comedy of a very high order, but it is of universal appeal and much of it is as amusing to us as it was to the original readers. The style in which the work is written accurately matches the humdrum tone of these common misfortunes: it is unpretentious and conversational,4 discursive, and with a frequent repetition of some phrase or catch-word that exactly reproduces the tone of the gossip: a Vaventure, Dieu sfait, dont je me tais, or, used ironically, qui est grant pitie. Sometimes this repetition is of a con¬ junction, and has its effect in a breathless and increasingly ludicrous piling up of detail: Or est-il bien venu, et lui fault ouyr la changzon de l’enfant; or faut estre en dangier de la nourrice; or dira la dame dorenavant que oncques puis que el eut enfant el ne fut saine; or fault penser de soy acquiter des despenses qu’il a faites; or lui faut restraindre son estat, et croistre celui de sa femme; or conviendra qu’il se passe d’une robe en ung an. (Quinze Joyes, p. 43.)

It is noticeable, however, that these colloquial repetitions become markedly less frequent later in the book, where the situations explored—such as that of the husband who, after thirty years of marriage, protests at the extravagance of his sons, and finds that they and his wife conspire to shut him away from his friends, declaring that he has lost his reason (IX), or that of the man tricked into 4 Cf. Rasmussen, op. cit., p. 95: “Le ton employe pour presenter ces tranches de vie . . . est celui d’un causeur, c’est-a-dire, insinuant et familier, bavard meme par endroits. Le caractere parle se revele aussi dans le mouvement sautillant et capricieux, enfin dans les courtes phrases bris6es, les saillies vives et les toumures pittoresques.”

58

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

marriage with a girl already pregnant (XI)—are both more complex and more sombre than those of the earlier Joyes. The same increas¬ ingly literary tendency is shown by the incidence of similes in the text. Many of the Joyes (I, II, III, VI, VII, VIII, IX) contain none at all, but there are, for example, two in the tenth Joye, three in the twelfth and four in the fourteenth, an interesting discussion of the endless unhappiness and jealousy which result when a man, at first inconsolable after the death of his young wife, is persuaded by his friends to marry an experienced widow. These similes, however, conform to the general domestic tone of the work by drawing on everyday objects or experience for their comparisons: domestic animals— Or considerez si c’est bien fait, mettre deux choses contraires ensemble? C’est ad comparer a ce que Pen met en ung sac ung chat et ung chien: ilz auront tousjours guerre liens jusqu’a la fin. {Quinze Joyes, p. 166.)

—sport and entertainment, or eating and drinking— Apres lesquelz plaisirs, la dame prant autant de plesirs en l’esbat de son mary comme un tasteur de vins d’un petit rippope, apres ung bon hypocras ou pineau. Car quant aucunes fois celui qui a grand soif boit d’un petit rippope ou fuste, pour la soif qu’il a, il le treuve un mauvais desboit, et qui le vouldroit croire, il n’en bevroit plus si en deffaut d’autre meilleur n’estoit. {Quinze Joyes, p. 60.)

Reading the Quinze Joyes, then, is like listening to a malicious, amusing, rather vulgar gossip; and this elfect is increased by the author’s habit—again more often encountered in the earlier pieces— ol adding some explanatory parenthetic remark from time to time. His object in this is to ensure that his irony is not taken seriously, that the wife’s selfishness or deceit is fully recognized; and the sensation that the reader receives is precisely that of the knowing nudge that such a gossip often uses to drive his point home: Elle lui dit qu’il lui est ung pou amende devers le jour, mes que elle ne dormit de toute la nuit; combien que elle a bien dormi. (Quinze Joyes, P- 37-) _ Sire, fait-elle, je suy corrocee, car l’enfant est trop malade (lequel en effect est tout sain); il est, fait-elle, si chault que c’est merveilles. {Quinze Joyes, p. no.)

One of the oddities of the Quinze Joyes is that it is written in the present tense, with occasional excursions into the future. This, as Rasmussen has pointed out3 is because the author’s intention is to 5 Rasmussen, op. cit., p. 6i.

LES QUINZE JOYES DE MARIAGE

59

represent a universal phenomenon and not a unique occurrence. It is for this reason, too, that the characters are never given names. To be named would be to convey a particularity; the figures of the Quinze Joyes remain “le mari”, “la femme,” “la commere”, and so achieve not only anonymity but universality.6 The author, is in fact, not so much a narrator as a commentator, and possesses a skill not unlike that of the radio commentator of our own day, in selecting precisely the vivid detail of dress or behaviour or the significant gesture that will bring the scene he is describing three-dimensionally before our eyes. When the husband has been trying to reason with his newly-delivered wife, one of her “matrones” finally comes in and puts an end to the conversation by rebuking him for troubling the invalid at such a time; and the author adds, “Lors elle tire la courtine” —and so conjures up the whole scene of the sick-room and the bedhangings which could so conveniently be drawn to screen the occupant from further argument. When the husband of the fifteenth Joye is brooding over his wife’s infidelity, we are told how he toys with his food, cannot swallow it, taps on the table with his knife and finally goes out restlessly into the garden—a perfect picture of a man unwilling to believe the catastrophe that has befallen him, and unable to settle to anything. In the sixth Joye when he brings visitors home and finds nothing ready, he asks why she has ignored the message he sent: —Sire, fait-el, vous commandez tant de choses d’unes et d’aultres que l’en ne scet auxquelles entendre.—Saincte Marie! fait-il en se gratant la teste, vous m’avez fait le plus grand desplesir du monde. {Quinze Joyes, p. 86.)

His bewilderment, which increases as he discovers no food ready, no fresh linen for the visitors’ beds and the keys mislaid, is perfectly epitomized by this picture of him, scratching his head and ejaculating “Saincte Marie!”. In the final section, which is one of the longest and most detailed, the wife, discovered with her lover, seeks the help first of her mother, 6 The only exception is the maid in the fifth Joye who acts as intermediary between her mistress and her lover. She is called Jehanne, a name so commonplace as to do little to convey any individuality to the character.

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FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

who in turn summons all her women neighbours and friends. The author provides a timeless picture of such garrulous busybodies as he describes how they flock to the house, to sit round the fire in winter, or “sur le jonc” in fine weather, et la premiere chose qu’ilz font, sans dire Pater ne Ave Maria, elles bevront du meilleur tres bien, en actendant que l’autre amende, et Dieu scet s’elles font bon guet devers matin, pour corner Anglois de quinze lieues. (Quinze Joyes, p. 174.)

As these women proceed to make their plans to lay the husband’s fears at rest, their cynical disregard for truth and honour is revealed entirely by the tone of their conversation. The wife, we are told, may not give them an accurate account of what has happened; or she may very well do so, because most of her friends will have had similar experiences and be well able to give her advice in the light of these. When they come to tell the husband to disregard the evidence of his own eyes, it is typical of their cynicism that each lie they tell is preceded by an oath—“par Nostre Dame du Puy”, “par mon screment”, “par le sacrement Dieu”, “par ma foy”, “sur le jugement de mon ame”; they thus add perjury to their other sins and demon¬ strate the familiar tendency of the habitual liar, to reinforce his untruths with protestations of his complete sincerity. These gestures and habits of speech, like the sentiments of which they are the external manifestations, are timeless and universal, and it is perhaps this kind of essential realism, which strikes a chord of recognition even today, that is the author’s most significant character¬ istic. At the same time, the Quinze Joyes de Manage remains very much a work of its epoch, and not only in the sense that it takes its place in the copious anti-feminist literature of the day. It is true that the characters are without names; but they are firmly placed in the social life of their day and the work, in addition to its universal appeal, has an historical value in the light it sheds on social and economic conditions in the fifteenth century and their impact on the lives of individuals. Girls were married so young that it is not alto¬ gether surprising that they found themselves unable to respond to the demands marriage made upon them. So we find in the first Joye, where the wife is complaining that at a recent gathering all the

LES QUINZE JOYES DE MARIAGE

61

other women were better dressed than she was, that she pathetically declares, Et avoie encore la robe de mes nopces, laquelle est bien usee et bien courte, pour ce que je suis creue depuis qu’elle fut faite. {Quinze Joyes, p. 12.)

The real miseries of an unhappy marriage in a society in which divorce did not exist are brought home to the reader in the tenth J°ye, where the author describes the doubtful and limited benefits of a legal separation: Le juge par jugement les separe, et leur deffent a grousses paines qu llz se tiennent chastement en continence. Mais veez-cy qu’il en avient: l’un ou 1’autre, ou tous deux, se maintiennent follement, et font leur voulentez ou il leur plaist . . . Or est 1’homme, de quelque estat qu’il soit, gaste et affole en ce monde, et la femme aussi: ilz ne se povent plus marier la vie durant de l’un ou de l’autre; s’ils ont grans possessions et sont de grant lieu, leur nom est perdu, et mourront sans heritiers. {Quinze Joyes, pp. 131-2.)

The tensions and hasards of living in a feudal society are seen in the effect that they have upon family life: bankruptcy is punished by excommunication, which in turn means the loss of civil rights (I); failure to comply with a summons to arms by the king or the feudal overlord means loss of the land held in fief from him (XIII); the chances of the Hundred Years War bring their own problems of evacuation and the disruption of family life (XII): Pour eschiver qu’il ne soit pas prins il se retrait en ung chasteau. Mais il va et vien de nuict en sa maison, parmy les bois et a tastons, parmy les haies et bussons, tant qu’il est tout rompu et depiece; et vient veoir son mesnage, et la dame crie et tense et fi met sus tout le mal et le meschief, aussi bien comme s’il deust faire la paix entre les deux rois de France et d’Angleterre, et dit que elle ne demourra pas liens. Et convient au bon homme charroier sa femme et ses enfans a grant haste en chasteau ou a la ville; et Dieu scet la peine qu’il a de monter et de remonter la dame et les enfans, de trousser et naguer, et de loger quant ilz sont en la forteresse . . . Et convient qu’il trote maintenant de jour, maintenant de nuit, k pie ou a cheval, selon l’estat dont il est, puis cza puis la, pour querir de la vitaille. {Quinze Joyes, pp. 151-2.)

All in all, the picture of contemporary life that the author paints is a gloomy one. It seems likely, however, that it is also one that is true to life, and mirrors the experiences of many individuals who felt the impact of wars and the economic consequences of the whole legal, ecclesiastical and social system of the later Middle Ages upon their personal lives.

62

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

The author of the Quinze Joyes de Manage is no moralist. He writes as a detached observer of the matrimonial scene, in which he can never become personally involved, “Pour ce que il a pleu a Dieu me mettre en autre servage”; and he remarks in his conclusion that he could have found just as much material to condemn men rather than women had he been so minded. What he has given us is some¬ thing much more valuable and unusual than a moral treatise: a study of human nature, admittedly a rather pessimistic one, in which financial and emotional crises play a large part, and where details of background and external events peculiar to his period serve only to emphasize the universality of the behaviour of the human figures in this scene. The collection of stories known as the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles1 emanates from the Court of Burgundy in the middle of the fifteenth century; they purport to be stories told by different members of the court circle and the Duke himself, the Count of St. Pol and many other eminent figures have individual stories ascribed to them. This attribution, however, is clearly at best a pale imitation of the frame¬ work of the Decameron, in which Boccaccio made each of his noble refugees from the plague tell a story in turn; and at worst a joke, in for example, the attribution of a particularly obscene story to the eminently moral Antoine de la Sale. The stories are sufficiently uniform in both content and style for us to assume that they are in fact the work of one writer. This unknown author shares with that of the Quinze Joyes a contempt for women and an interest in the kind of situation that women’s fickleness, cunning or promiscuity can produce. But the tone of the works is quite different. The author of the Quinze Joyes shows us, in contrast to the scheming, selfish and extravagant wife, a husband who, though he errs perhaps on the side of naivete, has the virtues of patience and humility, and whose only concern is his wife’s well-being and happiness. In the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles on the other hand, no one has any virtues, and of those characters that are not cynical, vicious and heartless, the best that can be said 7 Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, 6ditdes par Pierre Champion (Documents artistiques du XVe. si£cle, V, Paris, 1928).

LES CENT NOUVELLES NOUVELLES

63

is that they are stupid. Where the author of the Quinze Joyes, having postulated some particular situation, proceeds to explore it in depth, displaying considerable psychological insight in the process, the nouvelle-'Niix.Qr is interested, not in the characters involved, but only in the development of the situation itself, and in its resolution in some logical but unexpected way. It is to this final twist that the whole narrative is directed, and the ingenuity of the author is devoted to its perfection.8 He constructs these situations out of the juxtaposition of various familiar stock characters. Women fall, as far as he is concerned, roughly into two classes: those—the greater number—who are faith¬ less, cunning and willing to go to any lengths to achieve their ends; and those who are so unsophisticated, through youth or a lowly social status, that they fall a ready prey to any man who wants to seduce them. Married men are, on the whole, either seducers or cuckolds; bachelors have as their chief aim in life the conquest of married women; and monks and priests are anxious only to take advantage of their privileged position to make similar conquests. From these ingredients a large number of situations may be con¬ structed; and it is because the ingredients are always so familiar and repetitive that the savour of each story is to be found in the piquancy of the final twist. Thus, for example, in Nouvelle XIV, we read of a supposedly holy hermit, who in order to seduce the daugh¬ ter of a poor woman, made her believe that a voice from heaven had foretold that the girl would have a son who should be Pope. He had his way and the girl had a child; but it was a daughter. In Nouvelle XIX, a merchant whose work frequently takes him abroad finds on returning home after a voyage that his wife has given birth to a child too young to be his. She tells him that this child’s birth followed on her swallowing some snow; he pretends to believe this, brings up the child, and when he is old enough takes him on one of his business journeys, when he sells him into slavery at Alexandria. On his return home, he tells his wife that in the hot sun of the tropics, her 8 Soderhjelm, op. cit., p. 116, has pointed out that it is this concentration upon the unexpected outcome of the situation, rather than upon the psychology of the characters involved, that most sharply distinguishes the French work from that of Boccaccio.

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FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

son, being begotten of snow, had melted away. Nouvelle LXXVIII tells how a gentleman who had spent much time in military service abroad, found on his return that his wife was living in a much more splendid way than she could have afforded to by honest means. Determined to find out her secret, he arranged to take the place of the priest so that he could hear her confession, and so learned of her affairs with a squire, a knight and a priest. Outraged, he revealed his identity, whereupon she declared that she had recognized him from the first, and that he was himself the squire, the knight and the priest, since the first two were normal steps in his career and he had disguised himself as the third. These stories, almost all of which are variations on a familiar theme, are not original. They are taken from various sources: the plots recur in the fabliaux, in the Facetiae of Poggio and in other collections, both European and Oriental. But in every case, the author of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles leaves his mark upon the story, by paring it down to the essential elements, by moulding the characters to conform to a few well-recognized conventional patterns, and by always laying his chief emphasis upon the surprise ending.9 Moreover, despite the fact that he is using second-hand material, the author always insists that the story he is telling is true, and that it happened recently. The words nagueres, n'a pas long temps, il est vray comme VEuvangile, n'a pas cent ans d’huy are to be found at the beginning of every story, and occasionally the author insists at greater length on the very recent nature of the events he is about to recount: La chose est si fresche et si nouvellement advenue dont je veil fournir ma nouvelle que je ne puis ne tailler, ne roigner, ne mettre, ne oster. (Nouvelle XXV.)

To give still further force to this convention of verisimilitude, a precise location is almost always given for the story that will follow. It took place, we are assured, es marches de Picardie, en la bonne et doulce conte de saint Pol, en la duche de Brabant, sur les metes de Normandie, or in some other place likely to be familiar to the reader. 9 See Soderhjelm, op. cit., pp. 117-19; Rasmussen, op. cit., pp. 60-1; Janet M. Ferrier, Forerunners of the French Novel (Manchester, 1954), pp. 40-52.

LES CENT NOUVELLES NOUVELLES

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As the substance of the story is almost always scandalous, this con¬ ventional documentation of the events recorded no doubt added extra savour to the telling. On the other hand, the people in the stories are hardly ever named; and the six nouvelles in which named characters do occur (Nos. V, XXIV, XXVI, LXII, LXIII, LXIX) depart sufficiently from the normal pattern to suggest that they are perhaps true stories about real people. The author occasionally suggests that the reason for this anonymity is his own discretion, in view of the scandalous nature of the story; but the truth is that the figures that play their part in the situations of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles are so highly conven¬ tional and possess so little individuality that to name them would be to introduce a false note of particularity.10 What is important is not their personality but their social position and still more the relation in which they stand to the other characters in the story. We find, accordingly, that the nouvelliste’s world is inhabited by, for example, Ung gentilhomme, chevalier de ce royaume, tresvertueux et de grant renommee, grand voyageur et aux armes trespreux, qui devint amoureux d’une tresbelle damoiselle. (Nouvelle XXXV.) Un gentil compaignon sergent de roy, lequel estoit marie a une bonne et loyale femme. (Nouvelle LIX.) Ung bon simple laboureur marie avec une femme belle et en grand point. (Nouvelle LXXIII.) Une gente femme mariee qui amoit plus beaucoup le clerc ou coustre de l’eglise parochial dont elle estoit paroisienne que son mary. (Nouvelle XCIII.) Ung bon frere prescheur, qui entre les autres ses voisines choisit une tresbelle femmelette jeune et en bon point. (Nouvelle XCV.)

The adjectives that qualify these personages are, it will be seen, conventional and perfunctory; they are also always complimentary ones. Some critics have suggested that the author’s intention here is ironical,11 since the subsequent actions of the characters do little to confirm the favourable impression created at the beginning by the assurance that they are bon, gentil or loyal. These adjectives, however, recur with so little alteration in almost all the stories that 10 In Nouvelle XCI, where the husband is reproaching his wife for her shameless behaviour, and it is natural for him to address her by name, the author does not trouble to give her any specific name, but makes the hus¬ band begin, “Or 9a, Jehanne ou Betriz, ainsi qu’il l’appeloit.” 11 See Pietro Toldo, Contributo alia Studio della Novella Francesa del XV e XVI Secolo (Rome, 1895), p. 7; Rasmussen, op. cit., p. 133.

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FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

this is at best a vestigial irony; it indicates rather the degree ot cynicism that the author recognizes in himself and presupposes in the reader. The author of the Quinze Joyes used the equivalent of a nudge when he added in parenthesis that some statement of the wife was not in fact true; the author of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles needs no more than a knowing wink, as he states that a priest is bon or a wife loyale; he and the reader know perfectly well that they are unlikely to prove so. Only where the situation depends upon some especial characteristic is a more detailed description of the character given, and even then it is kept concise and confined to essentials. Thus, for example, in Nouvelle XXXVII we are told that the hus¬ band of the story is both learned and jealous, so that his favourite reading was in such writers as Juvenal and Matheolus, who deal at length with feminine guile: Nostre jaloux les avoit tousjours entre ses mains, et n’en estoit pas mains assotte qu’un follastre de sa massue; toutesfoiz lysoit, tousjours estudioit, et d’iceulx livres fist ung petit extrait pour luy.

Again, in Nouvelle XX, where the point of the story depends on both the prosperity and the stupidity of the young man, the author describes him as Ung jeune filz orphenin, qui bien riche et puissant demoura puis le trespas de son pere et sa mere, et jasoit qu’il fust lourd, tres peu sachant, et encores mal plaisant, si avoit il une industrie de bien garder le sien et conduire sa marchandise.

The structure of the nouvelle shows little individual variation. The author begins with an introduction which is usually a master¬ piece of conciseness and economy of detail, in which, after the spurious indication of time and place, he sets the scene by presenting the principal characters and indicating their relationship to each other. It is from these elements that the situation is constructed, and the body of the story consists of the development of this situa¬ tion, usually in two episodes; the situation is then resolved in some logical but quite unexpected fashion, bringing about the discomfiture of one of the characters. The story of the hermit already referred to (Nouvelle XIV) will serve to illustrate this technique: Introduction: Assez pres d’un gros et bon village assis sur la riviere d’Ouches avoit et encores a une montaigne oil ung hermite tel que Dieu

LES CENT NOUVELLES NOUVELLES

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scet faisoit sa residence, lequel, soubz umbre du doulx manteau d’ypocrisie . . . regarda qu entre aultres femmes et belles filles ses voisines, la plus digne d’estre aimee et desiree estoit la fille a une simple femme vefve, tresdevote et bien aumosniere. First Episode: Having found where the poor woman lives, the hermit goes to her house at night, finds a hole in the wall, inserts through it a long hollow pipe, and speaking through this announces that he is an angel, come to tell her that her daughter must be taken to the holy hermit, and that the child born of their union will be Pope one day. In the morning the woman tells the news to her daughter, and they hasten up the mountain to the hermit’s dwelling. Second Episode: The hermit listens to their story, then, with every show of piety, urges them not to act rashly, but to see what the next night brings. After the “Angel” has spoken his message three times the hermit agrees that the girl shall be left with him. Unexpected ending: Et en ce temps pendant la fille acoucha, qui a la bonne heure d’une belle fille se delivra, dont elle fut tresesmerveillee et courroucee, et sa tressimple mere et les voisines aussi, qui attendoient vrayement le saint Pere advenir recevoir.

The Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, then, provide an example of a strikingly formal narrative pattern. The external trappings of realism —the details of meals, clothes, journeys, the minutiae of everyday life—should not blind us to the extreme artificiality of the genre. The characters are puppets, conventionally drawn and motivated by such basic urges as greed, lust and jealousy; and the situations in which they appear not only show little variation in themselves, but are for the most part constructed according to a formula that permits of little deviation, and in which the only element of surprise is that of the unexpected ending. These stories are, in fact, in many ways similar to the detective story of our own day, for here, too, there is usually little depth of characterization, and the ending, which should not be predictable, is nevertheless the inevitable outcome of the facts of the situation with which the reader has been presented earlier. Both are literary forms enjoying considerable popularity, and both present the reader with an escape into an artificial world remote from the actual problems of real people. Within these limitations, however, the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles are excellent examples of their kind. One of the author’s favourite expressions is pour abregier; for him, brevity is all, and to achieve this end he includes only details of character and behaviour that are relevant, and only gestures that are significant. When the heroine o f

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Nouvelle XXIII is trying to attract the attention of her husband’s

clerk, she brings her sewing into the room where he is trying to work and pesters him with her restlessness: Une foiz le boutoit du coste en escripvant, une aultre foiz luy ruoit des pierrettes qui brouilloient ce qu’il faisoit et luy falloit recommancer. Ung aultre iour retournoit ceste feste et luy ostoit papier et parchemin, tant qu’il failloit qu’il cessast l’euvre.

When the “Conseiller” of Nouvelle XVII has been repulsed by his maidservant, he wakes early one morning and, hearing her at work downstairs, resolves to try again: 11 sault tout doucement hors de son lit, a tout son couvrechef de nuyt, et prent sa robe longue et ses bottines —formal attire which is all the more incongruous because the maid later makes him put on her cap and grind the flour while she wakes his wife, who finds him in this ludicrous state and both reproaches and mocks him. If, on the other hand, no such details are essential for the development of the story within the limits of the genre, they are never introduced for their own sake. Much use is made, too, of dialogue, since this is a quicker and more direct way of indicating character and motive than any amount of description.12 These conversations are lively and seem to reproduce the cadences of the spoken tongue. Often the unexpected ending occurs in the form of a retort, and gains force and piquancy by this means. Nouvelle VIII, for example, tells how a young man, having seduced the daughter of the house where he is lodging and made her pregnant, goes back to his home in Picardy. The girl’s mother, seeing her condition and learning that the young man from Picardy is responsible for it, sends her after him, and she arrives on his wedding day. He arranges to see her next day and that night the bride insists upon a full explanation. When he has told her, she exclaims: “Par mon serment! elle monstra bien qu’elle estoit beste. Le charreton de nostre maison a couche avecques moy plus de quarante nuiz, mais vous n’avez garde que j’en deisse oncques ung seul mot a ma mere. Je m’en suis bien gardee. — Voire, dit il, de par le deable! dame, estes 12 Rasmussen draws attention, op. cit., p. 66, to the use of the “style indirect libre” which is used to good effect because remarks so made are attributed to the author, “mais la coloration particuliere que donne le choix des mots laisse deviner derriere la narration la presence des personnages qui ont reellement tenu les propos.”

LES CENT NOUVELLES NOUVELLES

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vous telle? Le gibet y ait part! Or allez a vostre charreton, si vous voulez, car je n’av cure de vous!” Si se leva tout a coup et s’en vint rendre a celle qu’il engrossa, et abandonna l’autre.

The greater part of the literature of the fifteenth century in France has a moral or didactic purpose. Stories are told, not for their intrinsic interest, but for the lessons we may learn from them; and for Chastellain even the significance of historical events lies similarly in the degree in which they demonstrate eternal truths rather than in their relevance to a contemporary political context. At the same time, authors seize on any opportunity to display their erudition, often with little heed to its relevance, so that Antoine de la Sale was content to delay the development of the relationship between Le Petit Jehan de Saintre and Madame des Belles Cousines while she expatiated upon the seven deadly sins or the qualities of a good knight, with many references to classical and patristic writing. In the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles we find nothing of all this; the story and its protagonists are stripped to the bare essentials of the situation, pour abregier. The author’s view of humanity is a detached and disenchanted one, and he manipulates his puppets to make ever more complicated and unusual patterns. Like the contemporary writers of lyric verse, who delighted in endless elaboration of rhyme and verse pattern as an end in itself, the nouvelle-writer—and presumably his reader too—is interested almost exclusively in technique. He writes only for entertainment, as did the author of the Quinze Joyes. But whereas the latter raises laughter by the exactness of his observation of human behaviour, the nouvelliste’s comic device is a more intellectual one: he relies on producing a denouement at once logical and unexpected out of the elements of the situation he has laid before the reader. There is no condemnation of the machinations of the unscrupulous and no sympathy for their victims. Whereas the Quinze Joyes show us a real if gloomily ob¬ served world, the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles show us one completely artificial whose inhabitants only exist to provide the reader with brittle and cynical amusement.

Le Petit Jehan de Saintre Antoine de la Sale is one of the most interesting and picturesque figures of the fifteenth-century literary scene. He is unique in not having begun to write until he was 52, and he produced the greater part of his output after he was 65; Le Petit Jehan de Saintre,1 his masterpiece, was completed when he was over 70, although he probably began it many years earlier, and is known to have revised it many times. Antoine de la Sale, indeed, did not consider himself as primarily a man of letters, and his works often contain apologies for the imperfections of his writing: Attendu que ne suis saige ne aussy clerc . . . qui suis et ay tousjours este rude et de tresgros engin en maintiengs, en fais et en diz. (Saintre, p. 4x8.)

His earlier career had been an active one that allowed him little time for literary activity. He was born in 1385, the illegitimate son of a girl from Pi'ovence and a soldier of fortune whom Froissart described as an expert in scaling the walls of beleaguered cities. His father died when Antoine was 5, and in 1399 he entered the service of Louis II of Anjou as a page. He was to continue to serve the house of Anjou for nearly fifty years, and made himself invaluable in many capacities to three of its rulers in succession. In his youth he took part in the Papal wai's in Italy, and in the crusade to North Africa under John of Portugal in 14155 and later made several ambassadorial journeys, south to Messina, Rome and Naples and north to Brussels and Ghent. He took advantage of these travels to visit interesting and remote places; thus in 1407, with a number of 1 Le Petit Jehan de Saintre, ed. P. Champion and F. Desonay (Editions du Trianon, Paris, 1926). 70

LE PETIT JEHAN DE SAINTR^

71

other adventurous young men, he visited the volcanic Lipari islands, when they climbed the volcano and looked inside the crater, met some wild and terrifying natives and were caught in a storm on the return journey. Again, in 1420 he made an expedition to the socalled cave of the Sybil in the Apennine mountains, and investigated the legends associated with the place. By 1427 he was again in France, and two years later was made Governor of Arles. He was an expert in the organization of tournaments on a large scale, and took an important part in arranging those to celebrate the betrothal and marriage of Margaret of Anjou to Henry VI of England. In the intervals between these various activities, Antoine was at the court of Anjou in Provence. In 1434, Louis III was succeeded by Rene—le bon Roi Rene as his contemporaries called him—and the following year Antoine became gouverneur to Rene’s son, the Duke of Calabria. This post lasted for ten years, until the pupil was 19 and the tutor 60; Antoine’s task was not so much to give his pupil academic instruction, as help to equip him for the responsibilities of government by teaching him genealogy and giving him the benefit of his diplomatic experience. Some of Antoine’s teaching of his pupil is set down in his first book. La Salade,2 so called, as he tells us, because it contains an assortment of good things, just as a salad has a variety of ingredients. In 1445, he reluctantly left this congenial household, where arts and letters flourished under royal patronage; with a pension which he considered to be an inadequate reward for such long and faithful service, he came north to enter the service of Louis of Luxembourg, Count of St. Pol, as tutor to his three sons, and as expert adviser on the organization of tournaments.3 Both the climate and the moral atmosphere of the Burgundian court were very different from those of Anjou, and St. Pol, proud, treacherous, notoriously dissolute, a master in striking contrast to the good Rene. It was during this period of his life, while living at Chatelet-surOise, that Antoine composed his literary works; here, for the first 2 La Salade, ed. F. Desonay (Bibliotheque de la Faculte de Philosophic et Lettres de l’Universite de Liege, 1935). 3 For a detailed account of Antoine’s career, see F. Desonay, Antoine de la Sale, Aventureux et Pedagogue (Liege, 1940).

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time he had leisure—too much of it, perhaps, since he often tells us that he has undertaken his writing in order to avoid idleness. He revised La Salade, and composed a second educational treatise, La Sale.4 The title is at once a pun upon his name and an opportunity for a rather clumsy allegorical exercise. Its many exempla, culled usually at second-hand from classical and patristic sources, are so arranged as to symbolize a room: the chapters on Prudence, Devo¬ tion, Moderation and Religion form the foundation. Justice, Pity, Humanity and Discipline the walls, and so on. In addition, he wrote, revised and rewrote Le Petit Jehan de Saintre, composed the Reconfort de Madame du Fresnep a letter of condolence to a lady whose son had died in infancy, and, before his death in 1460, put his encyclo¬ paedic knowledge of tournaments at the disposal of Jacques of Luxembourg, his pupils’ uncle, in the Traite des Anciens Tournois et Faits d’Armes.6 Of these works, Le Petit Jehan de Saintre is the most ambitious and the most original. Saintre was an historical character who had lived some hundred years before the time of writing, but the book is in no real sense a biography. It provides at once an account of the training and the exploits of an ideal knight, and the story of his relationship with a woman much older than himself, who took him up, trained and financed him and finally betrayed him. The story begins by describing how this lady, Madame des Belles Cousines, noticed Saintre, at that time a page of 13 in the royal household, and determined to tease this pretty boy. She orders him to join her and her ladies in her room, and there she asks him what lady he loves “par amours”. Bewildered and embarrassed, he at first replies that he loves his mother and his sister, and then, at a second meeting that he has done his best to avoid, more confused than ever, causes the ladies much amusement by naming a playmate, Matheline de Coucy. Madame des Belles Cousines then tells him the kind of lady he La Sale, ed. F. Desonay (Bibliotheque de la Faculte de Philosophic et Lettres de l’Universite de Liege, 1941).

5

Du Reconfort de Madame du Fresne, ed. J. Neve in Antoine de la Salle, sa vie et ses ouvrages (Brussels, 1903).

6

Le Traicte des Anciens Tournois et Faictz d’Armes, ed. B. Prost in Traites du Duel Judiciaire (Paris, 1872).

LE PETIT JEHAN DE SAINTRE

73

ought to love, describing herself in fairly obvious terms, and asks him whether, in the light of this information, he will not choose a lady. Still modest and bashful, he replies, “J’aroye aussi chier morir, que de moy offrir et estre reffuse et puis estre mocquie et farse”, so that she is obliged openly to suggest herself as his lady. Saintre accepts this proposition and agrees to the lady’s suggestion that their relationship should be kept a secret. Madame des Belles Cousines now sets herself the task of advancing Saintre at court, first by persuading the king to make him varlet tranchant and then, by judicious and discreet recommendations, securing his continuance in the royal favour. At the same time she makes him lavish but always secret gifts of money, so that he is able to have splendid clothes and horses, and at their frequent clandestine meetings instructs him in such matters as Christian doctrine, the importance of not being unduly attached to worldly goods, and the value of historical know¬ ledge in knightly education. By the time he is 21, thanks to his lady, Saintre is a paragon of virtue, an expert in the technique of single combat and the possessor of clothes, jewels and horses that arouse the admiration of the king himself. The time has now come for Saintre to prove his valour, and this he does in a series of combats, each more impressive than the last, until he leads a successful crusade to Prussia. By this time he is at the height of his reputation, but he himself feels something lacking. Every one of his triumphs, he reflects, has been secretly arranged by his lady; and he determines to prove his love for her by organizing an expedition for himself. She is not at all pleased at this sign of independence, but reluctantly pins her emprise on his shoulder as he sets olf with four other knights and five squires. Deprived of responsibility for her protege and depressed at evidence that he has a mind of his own, Madame des Belles Cousines goes off to the country where she rapidly consoles herself with the local abbot, a jovial and vulgar monk in every way the antithesis of Saintre. When the latter returns to court ready to lay his successes at his lady’s feet, he finds her gone and, pursuing her to the country, eventually finds her out hunting with Damp Abbe. To his consterna¬ tion she will hardly speak to him, and when at dinner that night the

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Abbe makes slighting remarks about knights she does everything to encourage her new lover. The Abbe challenges Saintre to a wrestling bout and overcomes him easily at this ignoble sport. In revenge Saintre invites Belles Cousines and the Abbe to dine with him the next day and persuades the monk to try on a fine suit of armour. He is so pleased with himself in this warlike array that he declares himself willing to fight any comer, and is dismayed when Saintre instantly accepts the challenge. He soon has Damp Abbe at his mercy, but, recalling what he has learned of the virtue of leniency, gives him only a superficial wound and leaves him and the lady in confusion, first removing Belles Cousines’s blue girdle, since she is not fit to wear this symbol of loyalty. In due course the king summons Belles Cousines back to court. One day Saintre offers to tell a story to the assembled courtiers and, without naming her, gives an account of Belles Cousines’s disloyalty and then asks the ladies to pronounce judgement. She herself is unwilling to speak and, when he insists, declares that the knight, whoever he was, was “tres mal gracieux” to deprive the lady of her girdle. Thereupon Saintre produces it and says, “Madame, je ne le vueil plus estre ce tresmal gracieux.” Et devant la royne et tous, gracieusement, a un genoul, il la lui mist en son giron. (Saintre, p. 415.)

This bald account of the events of Le Petit Jehan de Saintre gives little idea of the qualities of this remarkable book. In it are to be found the fruits of Antoine de la Sale’s long and varied experience: his knowledge of how young boys behaved; his familiarity with the niceties of heraldry and of procedure at tournaments; reminiscences of his days as “gouverneur” to be found in the moral discourses on the seven deadly sins, the ten commandments and points of doctrine, all reinforced by exempla, many of which he copied almost verbatim from La Salade and before that from Simon de Hesdin’s translation of Valerius Maximus. Antoine had turned to literature late in life and his didactic habits were still so deeply ingrained that the narra¬ tive is frequently interrupted by lengthy disquisitions. Thus before Saintre embarks on his first combat there is a long account, with much technical detail, of the rules governing contests of this type;

LE PETIT JEHAN DE SAINTRE

75

when an ambitious tournament lasting for four weeks is arranged against English knights at Calais we are told of the coats of arms and battle-cries of all the knights during the jousts that took place for three days of each week; when Saintre rises to be Chamberlain to the King, he recalls how Belles Cousines had taught him not to be filled with false pride at holding high office; when he is about to engage the formidable Polish champion Loysellench, she urges him to trust in virtue and not in strength of arms, for God alone can give the victory. The tempo of the narrative is frequently slowed down by these digressions which, while not altogether irrelevant, distract the reader’s attention from the development of Saintre’s character and his relationship with Madame des Belles Cousines, which are the true substance of the story. This technique—or rather lack of technique—is well illustrated at the beginning of the story. The opening passage has much in common with the terse and factual introduction characteristic of the nouvelle and presents the reader without waste of words to the characters of the story and their background: Au temps du roy Jehan de France, filz ainsne du roy Philippe de Valois, estoit en sa cour le seigneur de Pouilly en Thouraine, qui en son hostel avoit un tresgracieux et debonnaire josvencel nomme Jehan, et ainsne filz au seigneur de Saintre, aussy en Thouraine, Lequel josvencel, par sa debonnaire te, vint en grace au roy, et tellement que il le voult avoir; et car il estoit encores bien josne, le ordonna a estre son paige, et seullement apres lui chevauchier . . . En cellui temps, en la court de la royne Bonne de Boesme, femme dudit roy Jehan, avoit une assez josne dame vesve, qui de Belles Cou¬ sines estoit ... La quelle dame oncques puis le trespas de feu mon¬ seigneur son mary ... a mary ne se voult accompaignier. (Saintre, pp. 11—12.)

Unfortunately the mention of Belles Cousines’s fidelity to the memory of her dead husband leads Antoine into a digression on famous widows of antiquity; but he soon returns to his story and paints a lively picture of Saintre looking down from the gallery at the tennis-players below and being accosted by Belles Cousines, who asks him why such a gallant as he is not squiring the ladies, and so sweeps him into her apartment: Madame, assis sur les piez du petit lit, le fist entre elle et ses femmes venir; et lors prist la foy et de lui dire de toutes ses demandes la veritd. Mais le povre josvencel, qui ne pensoit pas ad ce ou Madame vouloit

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venir, sy lui promist; et ce faisant penssoit: “Las! et que ay je fait? Mais que sera ce cy?” (Saintre, p. 18.)

Madame, amid much laughter from her ladies, presses him with her teasing questions, while he is struck quite dumb and can do nothing “fors de entortiller le pendant de sa sainture entour ses dois”. This scene, so well observed both psychologically and in its external detail, shows to what heights Antoine de la Sale can rise when he is writing from experience of human nature. We find here, as else¬ where in his writing where the real interest of the matter breaks through his preconceived ideas of the correct way to write, a lively realism and an unusual felicity of expression. These natural talents, however, are held in severe check, and Belles Cousines has soon embarked on one of her interminable pieces of didacticism. We scarcely discover any more evidence of the vivacity of which Antoine has shown himself capable until the final episodes of the work, when Damp Abbe makes his appearance. Here, with a clerical opportunist leading a woman to forget her vows of fidelity, the situations and the protagonists are those of the nouvelle, and the unexpected discomfi¬ ture of Belles Cousines clearly owes much to the shorter genre. Antoine de la Sale, however, adds to the technical skill of the nouvelle-writer the element that the latter most conspicuously lacked: an interest in human beings and the motives of their be¬ haviour. The portrait of Madame des Belles Cousines herself is a complex one. Some early critics accepted the apparent courtliness of her behaviour in the early part of the book at its face value, and consequently found her conduct in the concluding portion incon¬ sistent.7 Closer examination of the story and its implications, however, makes it clear enough that the core of her character is the same from beginning to end.8 She is merciless in her early teasing of the young Saintre and relentless in her determination to have the affections of this boy, so much younger than she, for herself; she clearly enjoys indulging her sense of power by moulding Saintre’s character and secretly supplying him with the means to become an 7 See G. Paris, La Poesie au Moyen Age, deuxieme serie (Paris, 1895), pp. 222-3 j E. Grossart, Antoine de la Sale, sa vie et ses oeuvres (Paris, 1902); J. Neve, op. cit. 8 See F. Desonay, Revue du XVIe siicle 14 (1927) 219 ff.

LE PETIT JEHAN DE SAINTRE

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outstanding figure at court, and her fury knows no bounds when she discovers that he has decided on his own initiative to go on an expedition. Damp Abbe’s flattering attentions find her at her most vulnerable, after she has retired to the country in a fit of pique, and she rapidly becomes so infatuated with him that when Saintre returns and finds her out hunting with her new admirer she, who had been so stern a mentor in the niceties of courteous behaviour, scarcely turns her head to greet him. Unable to believe that she can have meant to give so discourteous a reply, he pursues her and again addresses her, asking how he has offended; but he is no more suc¬ cessful than before: Madame, qui desplaisir prenoit en sa compaignie et en tous ces parlers, lui dist: “Savez-vous aultre chansson chanter que ceste? Se ne la savez, or vous taisiez!” (Saintre, p. 375.)

Although it is in his portrait of the lady that Antoine de la Sale shows most psychological insight, Saintre, too, is more than the mere cipher that Madame des Belles Cousines would be glad to make him. We see him, under her tutelage, developing from the shy boy to a man who embodies all the knightly virtues. He is always courteous and merciful to his adversaries: after his first victory over the Aragonese champion Enguerrant,a man much older than himself, Saintre refuses to accept Enguerrant’s axe, which is his due as victor; he even offers Enguerrant the victor’s prize of a bracelet, and when it is refused presents it to Enguerrant’s wife. He is so modest that he does not send the news of this victory to the French court officially, through heralds, but lets it be known through private letters. His successes on the field of battle and the tumultuous welcome that he always receives at court do not turn his head: he remains humble, especially when he is alone with his mistress. Antoine de la Sale’s purpose in creating this portrait of a perfect knight—much of which he had closely imitated from the Chronique de Jacques de Lalaing—is twofold: on the one hand he clearly wishes to remind the Duke of Calabria, to whom the work is dedicated, of his own earlier teaching; but on the other he is concerned to em¬ phasize the contrast between Saintre and Damp Abbe in order to make the situation of the final episode more striking and amusing.

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The Abbe, of bourgeois stock, skilful at such common sports as wrestling and jumping, sensual, fond of food and drink, impulsive and boastful, is in every way the antithesis of his rival. It is significant that when Saintre finally has the monk at his mercy, it is the recoll¬ ection of certain texts of Scripture taught him by Belles Cousines, counselling the merciful treatment of a fallen enemy, that cause Saintre to let his victim go with no more than a superficial wound. This links the final episode with what has gone before; it makes the original instruction by the lady something more than mere didacti¬ cism, and it adds, in the manner of the nouvelle, to the piquancy of the situation, by making Saintre’s action the logical consequence of his early training. The story of Le Petit Jehan de Saintre is a long one and, if the plot is not unduly complicated, it nevertheless offers problems of narra¬ tive procedure to which Antoine’s technique is not always equal. His method of narration is chronological and he excels in the creation of individual scenes and episodes. Such a technique serves well enough where the canvas is a restricted one, as it is at the beginning of the work, when Belles Cousines undertakes Saintre’s education, and again at the end when the interest is concentrated on the inter¬ play of the three principal characters. But as soon as the scene widens and becomes more thickly peopled the action grows corres¬ pondingly complex and Antoine de la Sale finds difficulty, as many contemporary chroniclers did in similar circumstances, in moving from one place or group of people to another. He solves this problem, as they did, by using transitional sentences to link one episode to the next. His are often unusually elaborate, providing a brief summary both of what has gone before and of what will follow:9 Et cy me tairay aucun peu de Madame et de ses femmes, pour revenir au petit Saintre. {Saintre, p. 80.) Et a tant me tairay cy ung peu a parler des ris et des jeux que Madame et ses femmes en faisaient; et viens a parler comment il emploia ces soixante escus. {Saintre, p. 93.) Et atant laisseray cy a parler de leurs parfaictes joyes, et diray de 1 avancement de Saintre et de la compaignie du premier dit Bourciquault. {Saintre, p. 200.)

9 Cf. Rasmussen, op. cit., pp. 72-3.

LE PETIT JEHAN DE SAINTRE

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Et atant laisseray cy a parler de eulx; et diray des aultres nouvelles armes que Saintre fist a l’encontre du seigneur de Loyssellench, baron de Poullaine . . . lesquelles armes furent a Paris devant le roy, la royne, Madame et les aultres seigneurs et dames sans nombre. (Saintre, p. 203.)

The same difficulty in organizing his material is to be seen in the many descriptions that occur throughout the work. One of the chief pleasures for the reader of Le Petit Jehan de Saintre is the picture that Antoine de la Sale gives of the sumptuousness of court life and the splendour and colour of tournaments. He shows a delight in rich colours and fine stuffs; the physical appearance of Saintre at different points in his career, and especially when his mistress is supplying him with money to buy clothes, is brought vividly before our eyes: Et les .XII. escus, vous les emploierez en ung pourpoint de damas ou de saptin cramoisy, et deux paires de fines chausses, les unes de fine escarlatte, et les autres de fine brunette de St. Lo, qui seront toutes brodees au long et par dehors des coulleurs et devise que la bourse est. (.Saintrej p. 79.)

Or again: Sur son chief portoit ung tresbel chappel, ou estoient trois belles plumes en fag:on d’ostrisse, faictes de tresriches broderies nervees de petis dyamans, rubis, balais et aultres pierreries, naissans d’un tresriche et tresbel affiquet, ou estoit ung tresgros ballaiz et trois tresgrosses perles; luy et son destrier houssez d’un saptin cramoisy, tous couverts de branlans de fin or esmailliez de rouge cler. (Saintre, p. 178.)

But although these descriptions, because of their colour and the mention of precious stones and rich stuffs, impress the imagination, there is little real art in their composition. Each of them is only a catalogue, and one catalogue is very like the next. It is possible that La Sale himself was aware of the tedium of too many such accounts; for we find, as often as one of these descriptions, a brief indication of the splendid scene which pour abregier he will not describe: De vins, de viandes, et de diverses faqons, ne fault point escripre; car chascun le doit pensser . . . Des bonnes chieres que elles, Madame et les aultres dames et damoiselles luy firent, ne fault point demander; car n’y avoit celle qui s’en peut cesser. (Saintre, p. 225.)

These direct appeals to the reader’s imagination are not without their effect; for the fancy has already been stimulated by the accounts of fine stuffs and jewels. Moreover, for La Sale’s contemporaries, it was no doubt true that every man could think of it for himself: the routine of a court dinner-party must have been familiar enough. But this method shows a weakness in Antoine’s writing. He can tell us

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what clothes Saintre wore, or what knights made their way into the lists, because that is a simple matter of a catalogue; but a scene is more complicated, demanding efforts of co-ordination and compo¬ sition; and it is usually the scenes that we are left to picture for ourselves. A variation of this technique is, however, used frequently with what may well be a conscious literary motive. During the early part of the work, the chief interest is Madame des Belles Cousines’s training of Saintre; all the initiative, all the encouragement, all the money for clothes and horses come from her. It is necessary to emphasize this as much as possible, so as to prepare for the irony of the final episode, when she reaches her downfall through neglect of the very principles she had inculcated so carefully, and at the hand of her pupil himself. The gradual rise of Saintre from an obscure page to the leading knight at court is made known to the court by his periodic appearance in new clothes, or his giving of presents to the queen and her ladies, or of a banquet to everybody. In each case the thought behind it all is that of Madame des Belles Cousines; the reader knows this although, thanks to the lady’s elaborate security measures, the court does not. What Antoine de la Sale does in order to bring home this fact is not to describe these events as the court saw them, but to give us the lady’s detailed plans as she relates them to Saintre at one of their secret meetings. The feast of the peacock, for instance, provides the occasion for Saintre to make his public vow never to remove the gold bracelet from his arm until he finds a knight who can overcome him in single combat. Belles Cousines tells Saintre whom he is to invite to the feast, how the emprise is to be called out by the herald, what prizes are to be given, how he is to make his vow, and how he is not himself to put the bracelet on his arm, but to bring it to her so that she may fix it on in private. In this way, the author makes sure that we know exactly what will happen; and we also know that every detail originated in the lady’s mind. Of the actual events, we are given no more than the briefest summary: Le jour enssievant, qui fut le derrain jour d’apvril, aussy tost qu’il fut jour, Saintre de avoir queux et viandes de diverses fa?ons; et, pour abregier, fist le soupper et le bancquet, comme Madame avoit dit. (Saintre, p. 126.)

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This device, which occurs several times in the work, is more effective in showing Belles Cousines’s power and her capacity for organization than if the author had given us a direct description of the banquet and then told the reader that it was done in accordance with her instructions. This is one of the means by which Antoine de la Sale underlines the situation of the story and its piquancy; at the same time it shows his ability to discipline his obvious love of material richness in order to integrate the externals of his story with the characters of the persons involved. The fact, upon which he repeatedly insists, that Antoine de la Sale was not a professional writer accounts for both the strength and the weakness of Le Petit Jehan de Saintre. His prose is often cumber¬ some, larded with quasi-legal formulae that seem oddly out of place in the ardent love-scenes between the hero and his lady; his sentences can be so long and complex that the reader becomes lost in a seem¬ ingly endless sequence of subordinate clauses; his language, like his taste for jousting and the trappings of chivalry, is old-fashioned.10 His own professional interests, in moral instruction and in heraldry and the procedure at tournaments, often obtrude at excessive length and hold up the flow of the narrative. At the same time, in those passages where he is writing from personal observation and experience, and where the interest of the matter overrides his con¬ cern about the manner of saying it, his style is free of literary con¬ vention and glows with life and colour. Despite the moralizings of Belles Cousines, the overlong catalogues of blasons and the blow by blow accounts of Saintre’s combats, Le Petit Jehan de Saintre provides the reader with both a picture of court life in general and, more particularly, with three unforgettable portraits. It is true that the episode of Belles Cousines and Damp Abbe is in the same anti¬ feminist and anti-clerical tradition as inspired the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles. But the same preoccupation with moral values that causes Antoine to slow down the narrative with pedantic homilies has also enabled him to make the characters of his story into living, three-dimensional personages, far removed from the conventional 10 See W. P. Shepard, The Syntax of Antoine de la Sale, Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, XX (3) (1905), pp. 435-501.

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lay-figures of the nouvelle. Ironically enough, this author, at first sight so conservative in both taste and style, has given us the first roman de moeurs in French literature.

Thi 'ee Moralists

Jean Gerson (1363-1428) The popular notion of the ecclesiastical philosopher of the Middle Ages, as devoting his intellectual powers to the elaboration of abstract conjectures having little relation to daily life, has no more striking refutation than the figure ol Jean Gerson. Coming from a peasant family in Champagne, and proceeding by way of the Faculties of Arts and Theology at the University of Paris of which he was to become Chancellor in 1395s he took a leading part in the attempts to end the Great Schism, and particularly in the deliberations of the Council of Constance. From the time that he became Almoner to the Duke of Burgundy in 1393, he was a close observer of the internal disputes which ravaged France, and he preached frequently to the Court of Charles VI and to Charles himself during that monarch’s intervals of lucidity. At the same time he was, from 1402, the parish priest of St. Jean-en-Greve, in addition to being Dean of the Colleg¬ iate church of St. Donatien at Bruges, a post he had held since 1393. Amid all these public responsibilities he found time to write treatises on a variety of topics, to take part in the dispute of the Roman de la Rose and to compose two devotional works for his own sisters. There is, accordingly, hardly any facet of life in the late fourteenth century and early fifteenth century in France on which Gerson did not make some impact. His statesmanlike preoccupations arising out of the Schism and his theories on tyrranicide and the nature of kingship are perhaps the topics which made him most widely known and respected in both ecclesiastical and lay diplomacy throughout Europe; but his writings and sermons show him to be no less urgently concerned with the morals of the Court of Isabella of Bavaria, or with the sufferings of the people of Paris as a result of epidemic or civil war; and most of all, as an experienced confessor, 85 F.F.P.W.

4

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with the problems of the individual soul in its relation to God. Gerson’s output, in both French and Latin, is so vast and varied and he touched, in the course of his career, upon so many of the problems of his day, that it is impossible in a study of this length to do anything like justice to his work as a whole. As M. Louis Mourin, the leading Gerson scholar of our day, has remarked: “Le gersonisant se sent deborde par tous les problemes qui se posent a lui.”1 His indefatigable efforts at Pisa and Constance to resolve the Schism2 and his stringent criticisms of the methods of scholastic theology in vogue at the University in his day3 are subjects outside the scope of this chapter, which will concentrate attention principally on Gerson’s vernacular sermons addressed to the Court and to his own parishioners of St. Jean-en-Greve, and on his attack on the Roman de la Rose.

Gerson preached to a great variety of congregations: to the Court, to his fellow theologians and to the unlettered people of Paris and the bourgeoisie. The technique of the composition of sermons was a subject in which he had been elaborately trained at the University and, as M. Mourin’s masterly editions show,4 Gerson put into prac¬ tice the principles he had learned. Nevertheless, his intellectual power was such that he was able to outgrow, modify and where necessary discard this framework; the urgency of his message often breaks through any such artificial bounds, just as he eschewed, and indeed specifically condemned, fashionable displays of erudition for their own sake, hair-splitting and vain conjecture. He sees the irrelevance of speculation concerning the minutiae of practical details about the Virgin Birth, the Resurrection or the Day of Judgement, and the danger of too free and skilful a use of exempla to illustrate a theme. The preacher must be remembered neither as a story-teller nor as a titillator of unprofitable curiosity: his task is to fill his readers with penitence for their sins and with hope and confidence in their salvation. In a Latin sermon delivered at the 1 2 3 4

L. Mourin, Jean Gerson, Predicateur Frangais (Bruges, 1952). See J. B. Morrall, Gerson and the Great Schism (Manchester, i960). See E. Gilson, La Philosophic au Moyen Age (Paris, 1944), pp. 710-18. L. Mourin, Six Sermons Frangais Inedits de Jean Gerson (Paris, 1946).

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Synod of Rheims, he outlined the qualities required in a preacher_ qualities admirably fulfilled in his own person: The office of preaching demands that one possess a nature that is quick, shrewd and versatile. It demands an eloquence that pours out generously words that please and persuade. It demands a knowledge of the Scrip¬ tures and of all else that encourages good conduct. It demands that one be schooled in appreciating human nature and in understanding the manner of men s actions. It demands an exemplary life in the preacher. ®

Most important of all, Gerson realized the vital importance of suiting his sermon to its hearers, remembering the diversity of their understanding; Debet . . . formari sermo Doctorum secundum qualitatem auditorium. IN am altera doctis, altera minus eruditis, altera populo, altera clero lingua loquendum est.6

Again, when preaching on the Immaculate Conception, he remarks that he does not wish to make his discourse dull by too many learned references: Sens Qtii point n entendent latin peu sont plaisans, proffitables ou edmans, et si en seroit mon fait trop plus long et obscur. (Mourin, Six Sermons, p. 390.)7

It is in fact true that we find a quite different tone when Gerson is addressing the highly sophisticated Court of Charles VI, or a concourse of his fellow theologians, from that which he uses to the faithful of St. Jean-en-Greve. There was much matter for a preacher’s attention at the court: the recurrent insanity of the King, the in¬ trigues of Louis of Orleans and the Queen, the necromancy which they were believed to practise and the permanent likelihood that the power of Burgundy would destroy them all. Gerson speaks out 5 J. L. Connolly, John Gerson, Reformer and Mystic pp.I39-636 Ibid., p. 155, n. 1.

(Louvain,

1928),

7 The same anxiety that lack of formal learning should not prevent devout souls from making spiritual progress is found in the Montaigne de Contemplation, written primarily for his sisters, still living in the humble home he had left: Aucuns se pourront donner merveille pourquoy de matiere haulte comme est parler de vie contemplative, je vueil escripre en frangois plus qu’en latin . . . Et ne me retarde point la simplesse de mes dictes sueurs, car je n’ay entencion de dire choses que elles ne puissent bien comprendre, selon l’entendement que j’ay esprouve en elles. (M. J. Pinet, La Montaigne de Contemplation et la Mendicite Spirituelle de Jehan Gerson (Lyon, 1927), pp. 23, 27.)

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boldly against the laxity of morals at the Court and the black magic of Isabella and her circle; he urges a settlement to the Burgundian problem; but in many sermons he seizes the opportunity to consider the nature and responsibilities of kingship itself. Thus in a sermon on the Epiphany preached in 1390, Gerson, then only 27, uses the theme of spiritual royalty taken from the liturgy of the day to point the lesson of the tasks that confront a temporal king, and his duty towards his subjects, the Church and himself. This leads him to an impassioned plea that the king—“par miracle consacre”—should devote himself to ending both the dissension between himself and his powerful subjects and, more scandalous still, the division of the Church. It may not be possible, he says, to accomplish this within the present reign, but “grant chose seroit de l’encomancier, car le comancement est le plus fort”; and the accomplishment of such a task would be one of which Charlemagne, Judas Maccabaeus or St. Louis himself would have been proud: Et toutefoiz, en ce faisant, il est certain. Sire, que vous ferez oeuvre plus glorieuse et plus plaisant a Dieu, plus digne de merite et de renommee pardurable, que si vous vainquissiez ung grant peuple de Sarrazins par bataille.8

This theme of the duty of ending the Schism is one so present in Gerson’s mind that it recurs frequently when he is addressing those who by virtue of their position have both the opportunity and obligation of working to this end. In his Easter Day sermon of 1394, on the text “Pax vobis”, he begins by speaking of the glorious body of the risen Christ, and it may well be that the sermon he had prepared was to have been exclusively devoted to this theme. But the sight so many temporal and spiritual princes before him recalls to his mind the divisions of both church and state, and the peroration of this sermon is devoted to an appeal to them to seek peace in this world as well as the next: . . . en suppliant, enhortant et requerant vous, messeigneurs les princes et prelaz et autres nobles qui cy estes, par la foi et l’amour que devez a Dieu et a saincte Eglise, par la compassion que doit tout bon crestien de si miserable pernicieuse et domaigeable division, labourer diligemment, querer, conseiller, perseveramment poursu>r voyes licites, fatibles et souffisans pour venir a paix et union, laquelle Jhesucrist et vos predecesseurs 8 See E. Bourret, Essai Historique et Critique sur les Sermons Frangais de Gerson (Paris, 1858), p. 89.

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crestiens, martires et autres, tant amerent, tant recommander ent et tant chierement achaterent. (Bourret, p. 91.)

It was not only to the king and his party that Gerson addressed such appeals, where the emotional sincerity is apparent through the rhetorical devices of repetition and parallelism. As Almoner to the Duke of Burgundy it was his duty to preach before the duke on the feast of St. Antony, the duke’s patron saint. Not satisfied with the conventionally flattering discourse which the occasion traditionally demanded, Gerson took the opportunity of stressing the obligations of a Christian prince and deploring the schism in the Church and the civil strife within the kingdom. As Gerson grew older and more experienced in diplomacy he was no longer content, however, to point out to rulers specific and particular duties and obligations. In November 1405—a particularly critical time in France—in his capacity as Chancellor of the Uni¬ versity, he preached before the assembled Court. The king was in an unparalleled state of depression and neglect; the outrageous be¬ haviour of Isabella and the Duke of Orleans and the fantastic expenses they incurred had roused popular indignation; the Duke of Burgundy, John the Fearless, had earlier in the year advanced so far as to drive the Court out of Paris; the scandal of the Schism was still unresolved. Faced with these circumstances, Gerson does not on this occasion deal specifically with individual sins or the problems of kings and nobles at this time alone. Preaching on the text “May the king live for ever” he goes to the root of the whole question of the nature, origin and limits of authority; in fact, of kingship itself. He proceeds to outline a complete theory of government, considering such matters as the legitimate succession of the royal heir and the training he should receive, the relations between different social groups within the kingdom and the necessity of an impartial judicial system and of resistance to tyranny. In all these matters, Gerson’s aim is to show the relevance of Christian teaching to the lives and problems of those in authority; thus the duties of the king are founded on the cardinal virtues of prudence, justice, temperance and fortitude; the nobles are to emulate the attributes of God him¬ self, reserving their power to defend, not oppress, the people while

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the clergy must cultivate wisdom to guide the people and laity. In 1408 we see Gerson again seizing upon a contemporary crisis, not in order to comment on the details of the event itself, but to use it as a starting-point for the development of a whole philosophical system. The theme this time is justice, and two very dilferent miscarriages of justice gave Gerson his opportunity. One was the murder of the Duke of Orleans at the hands of Burgundy, whose power was such that within less than six months the king had granted him a pardon,9 the other the execution of two clerks by the order of the Provost of Paris, although as clerks these men were subject to ecclesiastical and not to civil courts. Using the text “Seek justice, ye who judge the earth”, Gerson speaks of the origins of all legal systems. No laws, he says, were necessary in the days of man’s innocence in Eden; but after Adam’s sin man lost “la justice originelle”. He goes on to speak of different types of justice, the origin of judicial authority, the relations between civil and military jurisdiction. Here he is speaking to a congregation of jurists, and he does not use the language of devotion or exhortation, but a style suggesting the lecture-room rather than the pulpit: Puis doncques que Raison ne suffisoit mie a gouverner soy et autrui, mais survenoient de jour en jour persequcions des hommes les uns contre les autres, y convient de necessite et peines et toys punitives contre les parvers et injustes, afin que les bons et simples puissent vivre en paix.... Et ycy nous avons la racine et les causes de dominacion et signourie cohertive. La cause efficiente occasionnelle fut peschie; la cause finable fut esperituelle et divine; la cause formele gist es loys bien instituees; la cause materiele est creature raisonnable, morale, glorificable. (Bourret, p. 1 r 8.)

This arid expository style makes a marked contrast with the language Gerson used when he was preaching to less lettered and sophisticated hearers at various of the parish churches of Paris. Many of these sermons were delivered at great feasts—Pentecost, Christmas, All Souls’ Day, Trinity Sunday—and Gerson’s concern was to drive home to his audience the vital lesson enshrined in each feast and to awaken penitence and zeal in the soul of each individual. There is nothing in these addresses that any of his hearers could not understand. The text that serves as a starting-point is repeated 9 For an account of the murder of Orleans and the events that followed, see J. Calmette, The Golden Age of Burgundy (London, 1962), pp. 79-89.

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many times, not in the Latin but in a rhymed French version that could hardly fail to lodge in the memory. Thus the Whitsuntide sermon has as its text “Mansionem apud eum faciemus” but the mnemonic verse runs Dieu en celle ame heubergera Qui sa parole accomplira

while in the sermon preached on the feast of St. Peter and St. Paul the text “Nimis honorati sunt amici tui Deus” becomes O Dieu comment sont tes amis Excellamment en honneur mis!

These texts are usually chosen so as to suggest an image which recurs and dominates the thought of the entire sermon and which Gerson is able to adapt and present in different lights so that by means of it he can drive home to his listeners the various truths which he wishes them to learn from the feast itself. In his earlier days, Gerson had tended to produce allegorical developments in the taste of his day, often developed to almost extravagant lengths. In, for example, his sermon for the Annunciation in 1397, preached to the Court and intended chiefly as a rebuke to the excesses of Queen Isabella, he describes how “trois pucelles ou damoiselles chambellanes” at Nazareth are presented to the Virgin Mary by Gabriel. They are respectively “discrete et saige Verite,” “pure et nette Virginite” and “obeissante Humilite” and they are given the task of serving Mary and accompanying her everywhere. We, too, says Gerson, may rely on the services of these maidens, since every Christian soul may receive the Word spiritually, as Mary did physically, but they are likely to be attacked by “trois larrons ou coupe-gorges” in the pay of Satan. These are “flatteur Mensongier”, “Delit luxurieux”, and “Estat pompeux, oultraigeux ou ambitieux” and only if the soul remains constantly vigilant will the maidens drive them away. His later sermons, and particularly those delivered to Paris congregations in the first few years of the fifteenth century, show Gerson, with increasing mastery of his technique, developing this allegorical method so that it is closely related to the matter of the

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text he has chosen, and the whole sermon is unified and dominated by the one image. The sermon preached on Whit Sunday, with the text “And we will make our abode with him”10 is an excellent example of the effectiveness of this technique. Gerson begins his Prothema with his verse rendering of the text and urges his listeners to rejoice at this opportunity to receive the Holy Ghost as an honoured guest. It is Gerson’s custom to end this introductory portion by leading the congregation in the recital of the Ave Maria, and on this occasion as he does so he reminds them that Mary was “la principale hostelaine apres Jhesu Crist de ce glorieux hoste”. Proceeding to the development of this theme, he urges his hearers to be worthy of the expected guest, and not “le corps au moustier et le cuer en la cuisine” and, remembering perhaps scenes from his home life as a poor boy in Champagne, goes on to give a lively picture of the spring-cleaning that will be necessary: Si dois gecter hors toutes ordures de pechie, la poudre d’avarice, les avanies d’ire et d’envie, la boe, la fiente de luxure, pour recevoir cest hoste. (Mourin, Six Sermons, p. 73.)

In this task the soul will have the assistance of three maidservants: Oraison, Obeissance and Paix. Oraison summons the Holy Ghost to be the soul’s guest, Obeissance is the portress and opens the door to him, and Paix provides the right atmosphere for the Spirit to dwell in the soul. After dealing briefly with some commonly-met difficulties concerning the Holy Ghost, Gerson paints in his perora¬ tion a picture of the soul who worthily receives him: Lors li metras la table de sobresse, la chandelle de vraye foy, le pain de sapience, le vin de compuncion, le sel de discreccion, le fruit de bonnes oeuvres. Tu espardras la belle erbe verte de bonnes pensees avecque les flourettes de sainctes meditacions. Tu lui fera chiere tres bonne et joeuse, et ly donras a lever de l’yaue de devocion, chaufee par feu de bonne amour et dileccion; puis tu ly rendras graces, puis le coucheras nettement et purement ou bel lit et linceux souefs, flairans de toute chastete. (Mourin, Six Sermons, p. 84.)

This sermon provides a striking example of the use and develop¬ ment of an extended image; but it is characteristic of Gerson’s extreme versatility and the sympathy he establishes between himself and his audience that he uses the allegorical method in a great variety of ways. In a sermon for All Souls’ Day on the text “Blessed are 10 Mourin, Six Sermons, pp. 71-86.

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they that mourn” Gerson presents himself as an advocate seeking to prove die truth of this paradox; his opponent is Plaisir Mondain and the preacher urges his hearers to listen to both sides before making up their minds. On Christmas Day, preaching before the king and concerned to attack abuses at court, Gerson presents the figure of Male Voulente who can assume various horrid shapes—Dissimula¬ tion, Adulation, Superstition and Dissipation. Then he addresses the king directly and makes the meaning of his allegory explicit: be brave enough to want the truth and act upon it; beware of flattery and rely on your own judgement; have nothing to do with super¬ stitious practices; let pity for the sufferings of the people restrain all tendency to extravagance. In a sermon on the Immaculate Concep¬ tion, before a popular audience with whom the cult of Mary was a favourite devotion, Gerson seeks to make his hearers cultivate the love of God and the nurturing of virtue and personifies the virtues— Wisdom, Truth, Prudence, and the rest—as he speaks of them. Skilful as are these allegorical developments and rich though Gerson’s sermons are in other stylistic devices, such as apostrophe, antithesis, repetition and alliteration, in the fashion of his day,11 it is clear from the matter of his sermons that his concern was never to pander to aesthetic fancy or merely to entertain his hearers with allegorical tales or illustrative anecdotes. In the Montaigne de Contemplacion, which is specifically written to instruct simple, unlettered people in the art of contemplative prayer, there is very little allegorical development. It is written at a level that they can understand sans grandement acquerre plus clere cognoissance qu’est celle de la foy qui leur est inspiree et donnee . . . en laissant les oeuvres du monde et en gardant leur cuer pur et net. (Montaigne, p. 32.)

Gerson in this treatise puts the fruits of his scholarship and insight within the reach of those who lack such gifts and opportunities; his style here is limpid and almost conversational, avoiding rhetorical niceties and displays of erudition which would only repel those for whom the work is intended. Such images as he uses are familiar and unpretentious: 11 Mourin, Jean Gerson, pp. 427-96.

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On n’est mie parfait soudainement, mais s’acquiert en semblence que nature fait son ouvrage, car d’imparfait vient a parfait; Le feu commence la fumee, puis est flamble et ensemble fumee, pui est feu cler et luisant en charbon. (Montaigne, p. 41.)

Again, he likens the recurrently changing states of the soul to the changing seasons, each with their characteristic phenomena: Le premier estat est compare a yver oil il est presque ades froit et obscur. Le second, au printemps, auquel, par grant mutacion, est maintenant chault, et puis froit et couvert de nues, puis pluet, puis fet bel. Le tiers estat est semblable au chaud este oil il est presque continuellement clarte et chaleur, combien que a la foiz, if vient pluie et obscurete et aucunes fois plus forte tempeste et plus horrible mutacion que en quelconques des aultres temps. (Montaigne, p. 91.)

The core of Gerson’s teaching, in both treatises and sermons, is in the text “Repent and believe the Gospel” and it is significant that this exhortation is the basis of both his Latin treatise Contra vanam curiositatem in negotio fidei, in which he criticizes contempor¬ ary methods of scholastic theology, and his two courses of sermons, for Advent and Lent, at St. Jean-en-Greve, all belonging to the period 1402-3. These sermons enjoining penitence were conceived on a grand scale. The first series was to consist of seven discourses; consequently the seven deadly sins are to be related to the seven petitions of the Lord’s Prayer, and he proposes to deal with the seven gifts of the Spirit, the seven Beatitudes, the seven virtues, cardinal and theological, and seven works of mercy and the seven days of the week. Such a zeal for numerology and such an obsession with the number seven are very much in the popular taste of his day: but it is perhaps significant that Gerson did not, in the event, keep to his ambitious schema. The urgency which he felt to denounce certain sins in particular and more especially the nature of sin itself far outweighs any preoccupation with the niceties of an essentially artificial structure; for Gerson, at least in his vernacular works, the substance is always of more importance than the form. While Gerson was preaching these sermons during the Advent of 1402, his mind was much preoccupied with the controversy over the Roman de la Rose and the danger to morals which he saw in the writings of Jean de Meung, and in particular in the long speeches of Genius and Nature and of the author himself, which occur at the end of that work. The preacher leaves his hearers in no doubt of the

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spiritual peril they incur by reading this work: • • Se je avoie ung Rommant de la Rose qui fust seul et vaulsist mil Iiv-res, )e 1 ardroie plus tost que je le vendisse pour publier ainsi comme tl est. Secondement: se je savoie qu’il (i.e. Jean de Meung) ne s’en feust repentx, je ne pneroie pour lui nez que pour Judas; et acroissent ceulx qui le lisent en mal la paine a icellui s’il est dampne ou en purgatoire. 1 lercement, se je confessoie personne qui en abusast, je lui commanderoie eftacer pluseurs choses ou du tout le jeter hors.

Earlier in the same year Gerson had taken a more direct part in the controversy in which he and Christine de Pisan were aligned against Pierre and Gontier Col and Jean de Montreuil, by composing his Traictie contre le Roman de la Rosed2 The author describes in this work how his spirit ascended to the “Holy Court of Christen¬ dom” where he found Justice surrounded by all the virtues, each of whom holds some office at the Court: Entendement is the Chancellor, Eloquence Theologienne is the Advocate, Prudence and Science are the Secretaries, and so on. Chastete begins the denunciation of Fol Amoureux, or Jean de Meung. Among the counts of this denun¬ ciation, Chastete declares that the author of the Rose wants to under¬ mine the institution of marriage, that he raises prurient thoughts in his readers, his influence being especially pernicious because the more reprehensible parts of his teaching are often embedded in “matieres diverses, qui bien souvent ne sont gueres a son propos” and may even include religious topics; and that he has committed an especial outrage by putting many of these doctrines into the mouth of Dame Raison. Jean de Meung has a host of these supporters, and in his satirical description of these enthusiasts for the Roman de la Rose Gerson implicitly condemns all the quasi-liberal thinking which can produce so many facile but, to his mind, ill-thought-out and invalid arguments in favour of the work. The author must not be blamed, they say, for the opinions expressed by the characters in his book; there are precedents in Scripture for language such as he uses; even if we admit that some parts of the book are reprehen¬ sible, there are good parts too, and in any case we are none of us perfect. While these supporters congratulate themselves on the skill of their pleading, Eloquence Theologienne ponders for a time and then 12 Ed. E. Langlois, Romania 45 (1918) 23-48.

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rises with dignity and speaks “a voix resonnant doulce et moienne”. She disposes easily of most of her opponent’s arguments, and after remarking that it is a sad reflection on Christian society that whereas in the pagan world Ovid was exiled for writing his Ars Amatoria, the author of the Rose is honoured in France, expresses indignation that Nature and Raison should be made the mouthpieces of Jean de Meung’s subversive teaching: Comment se pouoit donner plus grant hardement a tous desraisonnables que de faire Raison ainsi parler, mesmement que en parlant elle recite choses mignotes enclinans a toute legierte. Or baillies, baillies vos filles et vos enfans a tel docteur et s’elles ne sont assez sages, envoies les a l’escole de Raison. (Langlois, p. 45.)

Whereas Christine de Pisan attacked the Roman de la Rose princi¬ pally because she took exception to the anti-feminism of its author, Gerson’s objection is much more profound and in a sense more simple: he feels it a danger to the souls of ordinary people into whose hands it may fall, and, in Eloquence’s peroration, calls for its suppression, together with all writings and pictures “qui esmeuvent a lubricite”. This concern for individual souls, whether at the court or among the common people, is what strikes the reader most in the vernacular works of Gerson. It is characteristic of him that his preoccupation with the problems of the schism and his part in the academic con¬ troversy between realists and nominalists at the university are no more important to him than the spiritual welfare of the devout but unlettered women for whom he wrote the Montaigne de Contemplation. Characteristically, too, he took his duties as a member of the governing body of the Hotel Dieu seriously, and outlined reforms, both spiritual and physical, in the treatment of the sick.13 It is the same concern for individuals that makes him intent in his sermons on rousing the soul to penitence and to an awareness of God. Niceties of style do not appear to trouble Gerson unduly, and in any case we have no guarantee that the text of his sermons as we have it is a verbatim transcript.14 What he achieves is something much rarer in fourteenth- and fifteenth-century prose 13 M. Liebermann, Romania 83 (1962) 63 ff. 14 See ts/iourin, Jean Gerson, pp. 427-8.

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writing: clarity. Stylistic devices and elaboration of technique, which so often at this period, and even more in the half-century after Gerson, become an end in themselves, are alike made sub¬ servient to his moral, doctrinal or devotional purpose. His fine intellect, which enabled him to play such an important role in diplomatic and scholastic circles, is used in these sermons to make the mysteries of the faith available to the simplest understanding. His great series of penitential sermons was followed, on Good Friday 1403, by a sermon on the Passion which lasted for six hours. It began thus: Quant un chanteur de romans, vel historiarum, narre les paroles, les faiz d’ung bon prince qui fut gracieulx a regarder, vigoureux a guerroyer, courtois, adoucy et de bon aire a pardonner, il est voulentiers et doucement oy et escoute; et quand il vient au point de la mort, il n’y a nul ne nulle qui ait le cueur si dur qui ne commance a applaudir et a plorer, especialement ceulx et celles qui sont de son sang et de son lignaige. Cheres gens, nostre mere saincte Eglise n’a oncques cesse par tout ce Caresme de raconter les faiz et les dires de nostre tres bon prince et excellent, le benoist filz de Dieu, Nostre-Seigneur Jhesucrist, comment les pouvres saoula, les aveugles enlumina, les mors ressuscita, les malades gary et les pescheurs delivra. Maiz au jourduy nous sommes venus au point et au lieu, a l’occasion et a la maniere de son torment de sa passion et de sa tres amere mort, qui fut precieuse, amoureuse angoisseuse et oultrageuse, trop onteuse. Et pour ce, celluy ou celle a le cuer plus dur que nulle pierre qui ne font tout en larmes de pitie et de compassion, especialement s’il est filz de Dieu, ou fille, comme nous devons tous estre. (Bourret, p. 83.)

It is not surprising that, as contemporary accounts assure us, he held his listeners spellbound throughout the six hours.

Christine de Pisan (i364-?i43o) The later Middle Ages was a period when anti-feminism, whether open or implicit, was expressed in literature with unparalleled virulence. One of the most outspoken critics of women at this period was Eustache Deschamps, whose poems abound in references to the misfortunes of the married man and examples of strong men undone by feminine wiles. But even he exempts Christine de Pisan from this general execration. In a ballade replying to a letter he had received from her, he praised her learning, wisdom and piety: Muse eloquent entre les .ix., Christine, Nonpareille que je sache an jour d’ui, En sens acquis et en toute doctrine, Tu as de Dieu science et non d’autruy: Tes epistres et livres, que je luy En plusieurs lieux, de grant philosophic, Et ce que tu m’as escript une fie. Me font certain de la grant habondance De ton sfavoir qui tousjours multiplie, Seule en tes faiz ou royaume de France.

Some forty years later, after her death, Martin Lefranc was to compare her to Cicero and to other classical writers: Elle fut Tulle et Cathon: Tulle, car en toute eloquence Elle eut la rose et le bouton, Cathon aussi en sapience.

It is not surprising that Christine de Pisan inspired such respect, not to say veneration, since she was not only a woman writer making her mark in an almost exclusively masculine society, but also a completely professional author. Her nature was naturally studious and didactic, but it was circumstances and not ambition that com98

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pelled her to this success. Christine was not French by birth, though she was to give to the land of her adoption an almost fanatical devotion. Her father, Thomas de Pisan, a doctor and astrologer, left his home in Bologna for Paris, where he held a court appoint¬ ment under Charles V; there in 1368, when Christine was some four years old, she and the rest of the family joined him. She was married at the age of 15 to Etienne de Castel, a lawyer who, like Alain Chartier, was “secretaire du roy”, with whom, as she tells us, she was very happy. The death of Charles V, calamitous in so many ways for France as a whole, was especially so for Christine, and marked the beginning of a series of misfortunes. Her father died in reduced circumstances; her husband fell victim to an epidemic while on a diplomatic mission to Beauvais; Christine was left, at the age of 25, to support her widowed mother as well as her three children; she was involved in endless and costly litigation concerned with her husband’s estate; her literary patrons—Philip the Bold, John the Fearless, Galeazzo Visconti—all died at the moment when she most needed their help. By determination and a keen sense of duty, together with a certain amount of flattery of those in high places, Christine was able, before she retired to end her days in a convent at Poissy, both to achieve her purpose of earning her living and that of her family, and also to make her mark in literary circles.1 Christine de Pisan’s prose works are those of her maturity. She began by composing lyric verse in the fashion of the day, competent in technique and entirely conventional in content, except for those poems where she laments her widowhood. Her earliest attempt at prose was when she took part in the Roman de la Rose controversy, when, as she explains, she adopted this medium because it had been used by her opponents; but her first important commission, which she received from Philip the Bold, was to write a biography of his brother, Charles V.2 For Christine, who recalled the days at the court of this monarch as the happiest of her life, this task was highly 1 For a detailed account of Christine’s life, see M. J. Pinet, Christine de Pisan (Bibliotheque du XVe. siecle, Vol. XXXV, Paris, 1927). 2 7.6 Livre des Fais et Bonnes Meurs du Sage Roy Charles V, ed. S. Solente (Societe de l’Histoire de France, Paris, 1936-41, 2 vols.)

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congenial; indeed, the tone of the book is so eulogistic as to repel the modern reader, accustomed to a more critical approach by biographers to their subjects. Her contemporaries, however, thought otherwise, and though Philip died before she could present the completed work to him, her reputation was made and her confidence in her own powers strengthened. She proceeded to write the Cite des Dames and the Livre des Trois Vertus,3 both addressed to the Queen and the Princesses of the Royal Court, and containing, besides innumerable exempla illustrating the courage and virtue of women of pagan and biblical times, a catalogue of the duties of all women, according to their position in feudal society. In 1405 she wrote VAvision Christine,4 an allegorical work containing much autobiographical material; and before she retired to her convent had addressed exhortations, warnings and lamentations on the misfortunes of France to Isabella of Bavaria, the Dukes of Berry, Orleans and Guyenne, and in fact any influential personage whom she judged capable of rescuing from misfortune the country of her adoption and, it must be added, of providing her with patronage. The story of Christine’s determined battle against misfortune and her strong sense of moral responsibility are so admirable that it is with reluctance that the critic must acknowledge her faults as a writer: prolixity, lack of originality, pedantry, confusion both in the construction of her more ambitious works and in the style in which they are written. It is not only we, more than five hundred years later, who make these complaints; in L? Avision, Dame Opinion tells Christine what her contemporaries think of her writing. Some, she says, declare that she could not have written them at all, but “clers ou religieux les te forgent”, while Les autres dient ton stille estre trop obscur et que on ne l’entent, si n est si delictable .... Les uns sur le langage donront leur sentence en plusieurs manieres: diront que il n’est pas bien elegant; les autres que la composition des materes est estrange. (L’Avision, pp. 143—4.) There is no modern edition of either of these works. A preliminary study j ?,e ■e des Trois Vertus exists: M. Laigle, Le Livre des Trois Verms de Christine de Pisan et son Milieu Historique et Litteraire (Librairie Speciale pour l’Histoire de France, Paris, 1912).

4

Towner, L'Avision Christine, Introduction and Text (Catholic University of America, Washington, D.C., 1932).

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She is also aware of the charge of lack of originality, and makes an interesting and significant answer. Some critics, she says, declare that Ceste femme ne dit mie de soy ce qu’elle explique en son livre, ains fait son traictie par proces de ce que autres acteurs ont dit a la lettre. (Pais et Bonnes Meurs, I, p. 191.)

She retorts that a builder or a mason does not himself construct the stones with which he builds, any more than an embroiderer makes the silks and gold thread that are used to produce the finished work, and adds. Tout ainssi vrayement n’ay je mie faictes routes les matieres de quoy le traictie de ma compilation est compose: il me souffit seulement que les sache appliquer a propoz, si que bien puissent servir a la fin de l’ymaginacion a laquelle je tiens a perfaire. {Ibid.)

This is a very fair assessment of Christine’s method of work, for it is true that most of her prose work is in the nature of a compilation of maxims and exempla from classical authors; moreover, as her editors, notably Miss Willard in her edition of the Livre de la Paix5 have shown, many of these are not—despite Christine’s account in LAvision of the period of intensive study that followed her husband’s death—taken direct from their classical sources, but are almost verbatim transcriptions from such compendiums as those of Valerius Maximus and Brunetto Latini. In the same way, much of the Cite des Dames is virtually a translation of Boccaccio’s De Claris Mulieribus; though, since her fortunes were at a low ebb in 1405 when she wrote the book, Christine thought it expedient to add to the illust¬ rious ladies who inhabited her city those powerful contemporaries whose friendship was vital to her—Valentine Visconti, Duchess of Orleans, and the Duchesses of Berry, Burgundy and Bourbon. Moreover she was not afraid to use the same material more than once: when in the Livre de la Paix she exhorts Louis of Guyenne to follow the example of his grandfather Charles V, she many times emphasizes her teaching by recounting anecdotes which had already 5 The “Lime de la Paix” of Christine de Pisan, ed. Charity Cannon Willard (Mouton & Co., Gravenhage, 1958)-

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appeared in almost identical form in the Fais et Bonnes Meurs. Even this latter work, a labour of love, as Christine assures us, as well as a commission, contains much that is borrowed from various, usually unacknowledged, sources.6 7 As the editor of this work has suggested, Christine has succeeded in giving less a true picture of Charles V as an historical figure than a sketch of the ideal monarch—a theme to which she was to revert in the Lime de la Paix—based on theor¬ etical writings on such topics and expanded by earlier accounts of the campaigns of Charles and du Guesclin and with the inevitable exempla culled from the compendiums. Nevertheless, so highly individual is the personality of Christine de Pisan that it leaves its imprint on all her prose writings, even though, in the fashion of her day, she has padded them out with material from over-familiar sources. This is apparent from the start in her first attempt at prose-writing, her intervention in the dispute concerning the Roman de la Rose.1 Christine’s condemnation is quite different in tone from that of her ally, Gerson. He was con¬ cerned with the larger moral issues raised by the dissemination of Jean de Meung’s doctrines in so popular a work; Christine, though she touches on these, is especially outraged because she sees the book as wholly derogatory to women. She makes copious references to her “petit engin” and describes herself as “femme ignorant d’entendement et de sentement legier”, but these are clearly no more than conventional disclaimers, and she is well able to take up the cudgels on behalf of her sex against Jean de Meung’s anti-feminism. She declares that the accusations against women of disloyalty and indis¬ cretion are easily disproved by facts: history, as well as personal experience, shows that plenty of wives are more devoted than their husbands deserve. In any case, if men find their secrets are betrayed, they should learn to keep their own counsel; and if they think that women waste their money, let them refuse to give it to them. Jean de Meung, she observes tartly, seems only to have known the lowest type of women; he should not judge the whole sex by these. And she 6 See Fais et Bonnes Meurs, Introduction, pp. xxxii-lxxi. 7 F. Beck, Les Epistres sur le Roman de la Rose von Christine de Pizan (Neuburg, 1887).

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adds that she does not take this view simply because she is a woman herself— Car veritablement mon motif n’est simplement fors soustenir pure verite, si comme je le sgay de certaine science estre au contraire des dictes choses de moy nyees (Beck, p. 14).

Christine gives us a lively picture of herself in these letters, describing how she read the Roman de la Rose, skipping “comme coq sur braise” those parts that did not appeal to her, or recommending Gontier Col to read Dante, “ou plus tu pourras profiter que en ton Roman de la Rose, et cent fois mieulx compose, ne il n’y a comparaison”. Her most detailed self-portrait, however, is in L'Avision Christine. Many mediaeval writers remain shadowy figures, and the details of their life are obscure; but Christine de Pisan has provided us with a complete autobiography in Part III of this work, in the form of a conversation with Philosophie—or rather a monologue composed on the theme of her sufferings at the hands of a perverse, not to say inimical Fortune. This theme, and the comments of Philosophie upon Christine’s story, obviously owe much to Boethius’s De Consolatione Philosophiae; but it is when she forgets these bookish influences and becomes absorbed in recounting her memories of her childhood in Italy, her veneration for her father, the happy days at the court of Charles V and the joy of her marriage, brought to so abrupt a conclusion, that her book becomes original and lively. She tells us how she was presented to Charles V, who was to become her hero, when she was still a young child, newly arrived from Italy and dressed in the Lombard fashion; she describes her endless difficulties in litigation after the death of her husband, when she was obliged not only to resign herself to the endless delays of the law, but also to endure insults in silence lest a protest should prejudice her cause: O Dieux! Quantes parolles anuyeuses, quans regars nices, que de rigolages de aucuns, remplis de vins et de graisse, deusse souvent y ouyr, lesqueiulx choses, de paour de ampirer mon fait, comme celle qui besoin avoit, je dissimuloye sanz rien respondre, me retournant de autre pars, ou faisant semblant que ne l’entendisse, le getoie a truffe. (.L’Avision, p. 160.)

It was to console herself for her husband’s death and to provide

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herself with some distraction from these anxieties that, as she tells us, or rather Philosophic, she turned to study, beginning with ancient history and continuing up to that of more modern times, and proceeding by way of romance to poetry, which delighted her: Adonc fus je aise quant j’oz trouve le stile a moy naturel, me delittant en leurs soubtilles covertures et belles matieres mucees soubz fictions delictables et morales. (L’Avision, p. 162.)

This unusually vivid picture of a fifteenth-century personality is filled out by details in the rest of Christine’s prose works. The first part of the Avision, which is not autobiographical but deals with the history of France, nevertheless makes clear to us her passionate attachment to the land of her adoption: . . . glorieuse de nom, fertile de fruis, habondant en richeces, grande et lee en circuit, adiffiee notablement d’espesses villes, fors, cites, chastiaulx, bours, forteresses et tres nobles manoirs comme sanz nombre, poissans seigneurs, princes natureulx non crueulx, benignes en conversation, catholiques en foy, prudens en gouvemement et beaulx en fafon, de fort et poissant chevalerie, loyaulx subgiez, obeissant peuple. {U Avision, p. 76.)

It is clear, as it is in her account of Charles V, that where Christine gives her loyalty and admiration she gives it whole-heartedly and with an uncritical enthusiasm perhaps characteristically feminine. Indeed, although in an earlier verse work, the Mutacion de Fortune, Christine had described herself as changed into a man by the vicissi¬ tudes of Fortune, since she had been obliged to undertake responsi¬ bilities normally the prerogative of men, one is always aware, in reading her, that a woman is talking. She was conscious, in a period of insecurity and unrest, with a consequent relaxing of the moral code, that women had a special role to play in raising the tone of social behaviour and in restoring justice and charity to everyday life. It was with this end in view that she wrote the Cite des Dames and more particularly the Livre des Trois Vertus, where she was concerned to lay down the duties of women in every class of society, from princesses to femmes d estat, bourgeoises et femmes du commun peuple.” The feminist viewpoint that she had already expressed by entering the Roman de la Rose controversy now receives more detailed and original treatment. She does not, it is true, make any

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claim for female emancipation; on the contrary she is insistent that a good wife must defer to her husband: Elle se rendra humble vers lui en fait, en reverence et en parole; l’obeyra sans murmuration et gardera sa paix, a son pouoir, soigneusement. (Laigle, p. 237.)

On the other hand she points the many ways in which a wife can help her husband, both morally by drawing his attention to some fault in his character “duquel l’acoustumance lui peust tourner a dampnation” and practically by running his household efficiently and without undue expense. At the same time, she is no Griselda; she turns the tables on the many anti-feminist writers of her day by pointing out, with an abundance of references to biblical and classical sources as well as to her own experience, that women, too, can be unhappy in marriage and men jealous and lecherous. More¬ over, recalling no doubt her own joy in study she declares that girls have as good brains as boys and deserve to have equal care expended on their education: Si la coustume estoit de mettre les petites filles a l’escole, et que communement on les fist apprendre les sciences comme on fait aux filz, qu’elles apprendroient aussi parfaitement et entenderoient les subtilites de toutes les arz et sciences comme ils font .... Leur corps est plus faible, mais leur entendement est plus delivre et plus agu ou il s’applique. (Laigle, pp. 120-1.)

Christine’s views on the place of women in society are, it will be seen, liberal and in advance of those of her contemporaries. She is, however, no progressive politically speaking, recalling with nostalgia the golden age of Charles V and accepting without question the hierarchic structure of feudal society. The popular risings of 1413 which delayed her completion of the Livre de la Paix had, under¬ standably enough, terrified her by their violence and brutality. In the third part of this work, which deals with a prince’s relationship with his subjects, she insists that it is right that kings and nobles should rule over the common people, who must not rebel against this proper authority; the doctrine, satirized by Orwell, that all are equal, but some are more equal than others, found an early exponent in Christine de Pisan. Addressing the people, she says: ... car quoy que voirement tous hommes soient pareulx quant a creacion et naissance, neantmoins devez savoir que par longues acous-

106

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS tumance en difference d’estat en tourne en usage, si comme naturel, en ceulx qui sont nobles de lignage autre grandeur de couraige et de meurs, que es autres on doit avoir ou ilz folignent ceulx qui y faillent. Et pour ce . . . devez estre humbles soubz seigneurie et greigneurs. (Livre de la Paix, p. 128.)

The people, she declares, have their proper part to play in the country’s economy, but they are of their nature unfit to govern; the prince’s problem is how to keep them in proper subjection without oppression. She goes on to describe, with patrician scorn, the efforts of working men, quite untrained in the niceties either of correct speech or of legal procedure, to lead their fellows in rebellion: Et un tel fol, qui a paines sara sa Pater Nostre, ne soy meismes gouverner fors que par les tavernes, vouldra gouverner autruy! . . . C’est tout pour rire, mais qu’il n’y eust peril, leur ouir dire leurs raisons ou le plus fol parle premier a tout son tablier devant soy .. . O! mais quel orreur est-ce a veoir au partir de la celle diabolique assemblee de innombrable menue gent suivant l’un l’autre comme brebis. (Livre de la Paix, p. 131.)

These shrill comments strike rather discordantly on the ear of a modern reader; they contrast sharply both with Gerson’s pity for the suffering of the common people, which he urged upon the king’s attention, and with Chartier’s sober assessment of the share of the people in both the misfortunes and the responsibilities of the state. Christine had no doubt been badly frightened by the Cabochien uprising, and this reaction is a very natural and feminine one. At the same time, she was writing for Louis of Guyenne, whose protection, like that of the rest of the royal circle, could be of the greatest value to her. She paints for him a picture of the ideal sovereign, enumera¬ ting the seven princely virtues of prudence, justice, magnanimity, moral force, clemency, liberality and truth, with many references to the manner in which they were exemplified by his illustrious grand¬ father. It is true that in so doing she rebukes by implication that Prince’s tendency to the contrary vices: he was, as contemporary accounts tell us, extravagant, pleasure-loving and lazy. She wishes to rouse in him a sense of responsibility, since his place in society makes him born to rule; but she is concerned also to assure him of her loyalty and her sense of outrage that his authority should be questioned and his person threatened by any rabble-rouser. Christine de Pisan was a prolific writer. She tells us in VAvision that

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depuis l’an .MCCCIIII xxXIX. que je commencay, jusques a cestui .CCCC. et cinq, ouquel encore je ne cesse, complies en ce tandis .XV. volumes principaulx, sanz les autres particuliers petiz dittiez, lesquelx tous ensemble contiennent environ .LXX. quoyers de grant volume. (JL’ Avision p. 164.)

—and she was to write several more substantial volumes before she retired to her convent. She evidently wrote with great facility; as a result of her period of intensive study she had a mind well-stocked with material from earlier writers; she had a strong sense of civic and moral duty; and it was essential, if she and her family were to live, that she keep her patrons supplied with books likely to capture their attention and meet with their approval. She tells us herself that the whole of the Fais et Bonnes Meurs was written in less than a year. She had presented the Mutacion de Fortune to Philip the Bold on New Year’s Day, 1404. Some time shortly afterwards he sum¬ moned her to commission the work on Charles V, and she had completed Part I by 28 April 1404, the day after Philip’s death, Part II by 20 September 1404 and Part III by 30 November of that year, so that she was able to present a copy to the Duke of Berry on New Year’s Day, 1405. This speed of composition doubtless accounts for her many inaccuracies: her quotations often appear to have been made from memory without verification, and such few dates as she mentions in her account of Charles V are usually wrong.8 It may also be the reason for the lack of balance in many of her works and the fashion in which she often abandons some scheme of construction before she has reached the end of the book. Her favourite method is to make a tripartite division of her material; but in the Lime de la Paix the third section is considerably longer than the other two put together, and in the Fais et Bonnes Meurs nearly as long. Christine’s headlong rate of composition is probably also the cause of her lack of success in the technique of allegory, a genre which requires the careful and patient working out of detail if it is to be successful. In U Avision Christine’s allegory is chaotic, and in each part serves only to set the scene for a dialogue between the author and some symbolic figure, which is to contain the real 8 See Fais et Bonnes Meurs, Introduction, pp. lxxx-lxxxi.

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substance of the work. The first part has for title, “De l’ymage du monde et les merveilles que elle y vid”. At the beginning she tells us, with an echo of her admired Dante, how when “ja passe avoye la moitie de mon pelerinage” she stops to rest, and dreams that she is in a dark country, where she sees a strange gigantic figure: . . . de belle fourme mais de grandeur inextimable, car sa teste trespercoit les nues, ses piez marchoient les abismes et son ventre avironnoit toute la terre. Clere face et sanguine avoit, aux crins de son chief donnoient aournement innombrables estoilles, de la beaulte de ses yeulx yssoit si grant clarte que tout l’enluminoit, et iusques aux entrailles de son corps reverberoit leur clarte. L’aspiracion de sa tres grant gueule attraioit si grant air et vent que tout en estoit remplis de convenable frescheur. (L’Avision, p. 73.)

This, she tells us, is Chaos, though Mile Pinet has suggested9 that Christine may well be confusing the ideas of Chaos and Cosmos. Beside this fearsome giant is “une grant ombre coronnee de fourme femmenine” whom we identify as Nature. Her task is to feed Chaos: Environ soy avoit instrumens infinis de divers coings et empraintes ainsi comme sont a Paris moules a faire gauffres. . . . Sanz prendre repos elle destrempoit mortier qu’elle coaguloit ensemble, en laquelle mixtion mettoit fiel, miel, plomb et plume. (L’Avision, p. 74.)

This mixture is put into the moulds, which are then placed in the mouth of the image, where they are cooked for the appropriate time. When they are done, she takes them out and reveals the little images so made; the great image then swallows them whole. This strange picture is no doubt the result of Christine’s wide and sometimes ill-digested reading, since it contains echoes of Hebraic myths, cabalistic lore gleaned from her father’s books and some elements of the Platonic theory of cosmic evolution. Christine’s spirit now, she tells us, falls into the hands of Nature: it is put into a mould and baked, emerging as a “petit corps humain”, and is then swallowed up and walks about inside the giant, observing mountains and valleys. She recalls that she had often heard of la haultece, noblece, poissance et dignite d’une princesse de grant auttorite couronnee de precieux dyademe a septre royal de grant ancienete et richece.

This princess is France. Christine makes her way thither, over mountains, through forests and across rivers, and the remainder 9 Pinet, op. cit., p. 328.

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of the first part of the book consists of a dialogue between the author and the Princess, recounting the history of France from its mytho¬ logical origins in Troy until Christine’s own day. The original allegory, developed in such detail, and the ambitious cosmological theme are completely abandoned, although new allegorical themes, such as that of the Golden Tree, representing the royal house of France, or the “deux nobles oyseaulx de proie” (Louis of Orleans and Philip of Burgundy) are woven into her account of the past glories and present sufferings of France, making them often highly obscure. Part II of U Avision, which has no link with the first except in the person of the narrator is, if anything, still more esoteric in its alle¬ gorical treatment. But all this elaborate mechanism serves merely to introduce Dame Opinion—in other words, speculative philosophy— though it is not until the end of Part II that Christine recognizes her. By way of indentifying herself, Opinion gives what amounts to a complete guide to human knowledge, dealing in turn with the religions of the world, the principal heresies, the chief philosophical systems, the history of the world from Babylon onward, alchemy and even the art of war. As in Part I, the allegorical apparatus of the beginning of the section is completely abandoned, as Christine concentrates on her real business of didacticism. In Part III of U Avision Christine turns from the intellectual world to explore that of the spirit. Once again the introductory portion, which describes Christine’s arrival at a large and beautiful convent where she encounters Philosophic, in the form of dazzling light, is nothing more than a pretext for the real matter, in this case her autobiography. Here the allegory is much simpler than in the rest of the book, corresponding to the subjective nature of much of the material. The style, too, is much more lucid, as Christine deals with familiar topics and writes from the heart. Here she abandons the prose manner which she evidently considers superior and keeps for lofty subjects, on which the influence cf legal style and termin¬ ology, characteristic of fifteenth-century prose as a whole, lies particularly heavily, the result perhaps of her interminable litigation and of her husband’s professional association with legal and diplo-

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matic circles. Such expressions as “nonobstant que”, “pour ce que” and “c’est assavoir” abound in her prose, adding little to its meaning and slowing up its pace. At the same time, owing no doubt to her extensive reading, her French is highly latinized not only in vocabu¬ lary but often in syntax as well. To these two habits of writing is added that of producing sentences of immense length and complexity where the sense is lost to the reader as he is led through a maze of qualifying subordinate clauses. This was the “stile clergial” which Christine admired and struggled to perfect. But she had another, much simpler, style, which we find her using when she describes events in her own life or scenes—such as those of the Cabochien rising—which she had witnessed. This compara¬ tively artless and unsophisticated manner which she keeps for less lofty topics is, by modern standards of readability at least, far more successful. Her description of her battles with the law after her widowhood, or of the rabble in the Paris streets in 1413, or of Charles V riding with his entourage, lui assis sus paleffroy de grant eslite, tout temps vestu en habit royal, chevauchant entre ses gens, si loings de lui et par tel et si honnorable ordennance que, a 1 aourne de son bel ordre, bien peust savoir et cognoistre tout homme, estrangier ou autre, lequel de tous estoit le roy . . . Devant et apres, les plus prochains du roy chevauchoient, les barons et princes de son sang, ses freres ou autres; mais nul ja ne 1 approchast, se il ne Pappellast. (Fais et Bonnes Meurs, I, p. 50.)

all these are lively and bring the scene vividly before our eyes. A modern reader might well wish that she had kept to this second manner, and it is evident from Opinion’s remarks that even her contemporaries often found her work difficult to read. Nevertheless, despite her pedantic commonplaces, her confused and over-complex allegory and the often involved and heavily latinized periods in which they are expressed, the personality of Christine de Pisan emerges clearly and attractively from her writing: a formidable opponent in debate, a tireless upholder of moral principles, a devoted daughter, wife and mother. Most interesting of all, perhaps, in this age when men of letters are usually either aristocratic dillettanti like Charles d’Orleans or have some other profession, in diplomacy, like Chartier, or the Church, like Gerson,

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she is a completely professional author, living by her pen and devoting to her writing all her time and her intellectual powers. She would doubtless have made her mark at any period; in the early fifteenth century she is a unique phenomenon.

Alain Chartier (?i385-?i429)

In the general holocaust of literary reputations of the previous century that characterized the Renaissance in France, that of Alain Chartier is one of the few to survive unscathed and even enhanced. Where his contemporaries had especially admired the conventional graces of La Belle Dame Sans Mercy, later writers perceived and valued the forcefulness and the enduring qualities of his prose writing. Thus Pierre Fabri, in his Grant et Vray Art de Pleine Rethorique of 1521, after listing those whom he considers the greatest writers of the fifteenth century, adds, Tous ensemble donnent le lieu de triumphe a maistre Alain Charestier, normant, lequel a passe en beau langage elegant et substantieux tous ses predecesseurs. Et depuis, homme ne s’est fait second a luy, ainsi comme ceulx qui verroient ses oeuvres qui sont plusieurs, pourront congnoistre la doulceur de son langaige.1

The modern reader may feel less enthusiasm for the elaborate, highly latinized and rhetorical style of Chartier’s prose and the painstaking detail with which he presents the allegorical figures that loom in his pages; but we, like his contemporaries and immediate successors, cannot remain unmoved by the sincerity and fervour of his patriotism, his clear-sighted analysis of the ills of his day and his rejection both of facile optimism and of equally superficial despair. The circumstances of Chartier’s career helped to determine both the content and the form of his prose writing. In the opening sentence of the Quadrilogue Invectif he describes himself as “humble secretaire du roy nostre sire”—that is to say, of the exiled Dauphin, 1 For this and other sixteenth-century evaluations of Chartier’s achievement, see E. J. Hoffman, Alain Chartier, His Work and Reputation. (Wittes Press’ New York, 1942), pp. 138 ff. 112

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as yet uncrowned as Charles VII. He was, in fact, a civil servant and one closely concerned with matters of the highest and most confi¬ dential nature.2 In this capacity he was sent on diplomatic missions to the German Emperor and to the Pope at Avignon, and was present at the peace talks with Burgundy at Bruges in 1426; towards the end of his career he was sent to Scotland to take part in the negotiations for the marriage of the future Louis XI with the Scots Princess Margaret. Chartier was thus at the heart of many of the political and diplomatic manoeuvres of the third decade of the fifteenth century, and, while every thinking man must have been distressed by the dissensions of that troubled period, his position made him peculiarly fitted to see their causes and to suggest a cure for them. His duties involved him in the writing of many reports and addresses to the eminent men with whom he had to deal. These were, of course, in Latin, and the fluency with which Chartier expressed himself in that tongue has deeply influenced his style in writing French prose. In the same prefatory remarks of the Quadrilogue he declares that he is “lointain immitateur des anciens”; and his knowledge of Seneca, Livy and Cicero is revealed not only in the exempla from classical history that he uses to give substance to his arguments, but in his elaborate rhetorical technique and heavily latinized vocabulary. Chartier’s French prose works are only two in number: the Quadrilogue Invectif3 and the Traite de VEsperance.4 The Curial, his attack on court life, in the form of a letter written to his brother who aspired to become a courtier, is now generally regarded as being Chartier’s own work only in the original Latin, the French version being by an unknown hand.5 The Quadrilogue was written in 1422, when French fortunes were at a particularly low ebb; two years 2 P. Champion, Histoire Poetique duXVe siecle (Paris, 1923), I, pp. 29-31 gives an account of the duties of the secretariat. 3 Le Quadrilogue Invectif, ed. E. Droz (Classiques Franqais du Moyen Age, Paris, 1923). 4 There is as yet no modern edition of this work. It was published by Du Chesne (Paris, 1617) together with the rest of Chartier’s writings and some falsely attributed to him. 5 See A. Piaget, Romania 30 (1901) 46; Champion, op. cit., p. 56 ; Hoffman, op. cit., pp. 174-9-

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before, by the terms of the Treaty of Troyes, Henry V had married Catherine and become heir to the French throne. As Calmette tells us, Passion and interest reigned supreme; the physical and moral distress was such that Paris . . . greeted the treaty of capitulation with cheers, processions, singing and dancing.6

The Dauphin had had to flee from Paris and was in exile at Bourges, where he became the focus of a resistance movement increasingly recognized as a nationalist one. With this movement Chartier passionately identified himself, and the Quadrilogue must be re¬ garded as one of its most powerful pieces of propaganda. The nobility of France had suffered loss of lands in the prolonged fighting, and the people, without civil rights and seeing the land, on which they depended for a living, laid waste by a seemingly endless succession of military campaigns, was at starvation level. It is hardly surprising that an atmosphere of despair and inertia prevailed. From this Joan of Arc was to rouse the Dauphin in 1429; seven years earlier Chartier, in this work, analysed the complaints of clergy, nobility and people and urged them to resolve their individual difficulties by working for a common purpose: that of the rehabilitation of France itself. In the Prologue to this work, Chartier expounds his view of history, which he sees as a clear succession of cause and effect. Enjoyment of power, he says, comes from God; the loss of it is the inevitable consequence of neglect of the divine law. Too much material prosperity brings discontent, and ingratitude for divine gifts results in the loss of divine grace. He then asks that question so familiar to readers of the fifteenth century: what has become of Nineveh, Babylon, Troy, Thebes, Athens? This melancholy glance at departed glories, one of the most frequently recurring themes of the age, has as a rule a complementary theme no less commonplace, that of the wheel of Fortune, which raises some to eminence only to bring them low at the next turn. Chartier will have nothing to do with this defeatist explanation, which provided his contemporaries with so convenient an excuse for melancholy inertia. For him it is clear that these great empires of the past, and that of Rome itself, caused 6 J-

Calmette, op. cit., p. 132.

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their own downfall, and the reason is to be found in the judgements of God, not the blind operations of Fate: Et pour ce que les jugemens de Dieu, sans qui riens ne se fait, sont une abisme parfonde ou nul entendement humain ne sceit prendre fons et que noz sens sont trop foibles, noz ans trop cours et noz affections trop fraelles a les comprendre, nous imputons a Fortune, qui est chose faincte et vaine et ne se peut revencher, la juste venjance que Dieu prent de noz faultes. (Quadrilogue, p. 4.)

This uncompromising rejection of any easy and passive attitude to conditions in the France of his day sets the sombre and responsible tone of the whole work. It takes the form of a conversation between France herself and the three estates, of Nobility, Clergy and People, in which an attempt is made to analyse the present evils and to find a remedy for them. Chartier, however, does not proceed to the core of his argument until he has set the scene with every possible allegorical elaboration. France is represented as a distressed lady of noble birth. Her hair is dishevelled, her crown awry and her robe, which is symbolically embroidered, the upper part with fleurs de lis, the middle with letters and figures pertaining to learning, and the hem with beasts, flowers and fruit, is torn and dirty. She stands beside a palace, clearly intended to represent the Royal House; it is falling to ruin, and only hasty and ineffective attempts to repair it have been made; the lady herself tries to hold up the crumbling wall, but it only falls down in another place. Looking round for help, she sees her three children; but one is leaning on his spear, “effraye et songeur,” one is sitting down to listen in silence and the third weeping on the ground. Such allegorical representations, so much in the taste of the age, have at best only an antiquarian interest for the twentieth-century reader; but it is perhaps worth while for us to try to appreciate the reason for the evident care that Chartier has expended on them. The facts of the situation in France in 1421-22 were so well known to any potential reader of the Quadrilogue that merely to enumerate them would have provided a very dull opening for a work where it is vital that the reader’s attention should be engaged from the outset. To present them instead under this alle¬ gorical veil provides a challenge and stimulates the interest, as the reader recognizes the significance of the embroideries on Prance s

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robe or recalls manoeuvres to restore the power of the monarchy, to which Chartier may be referring when he remarks that . . . n’y apparoit refection sinon aucuns appuys de foibles et petites estaies que pour passer temps et a la haste, non pas a durer, on avoit 9a et la assises ou et quant la ruyne sembloit greigneur et le peril plus prouchain. (Quadrilogue, p. 8.)

The careful detail in the description of the anguished lady and her surroundings is, then, perhaps intended to have an intellectual rather than an aesthetic appeal. There is no doubt that the long speech with which France opens the discussion is uncompromisingly intellectual in its demands on the reader, while taking a sternly moral tone as she indicates the attitude that all patriotic Frenchmen should take up. Every natural law—love of country, of liberty, of life itself, the duty to defend wives and children, and to protect the prince—should urge the French to work for the common end of driving out the enemy. Lethargy, frivolity and a kind of superstitious belief that the foe is invincible will prove the undoing of the nation. Such reproaches are soon seen to be justified in the answers made by the figures represent¬ ing the people and the nobility; each is filled with self-pity, each complains of persecution and exploitation at the hands of the other, each claims to suffer more than the other from the miseries of prolonged war. The peasants mournfully recount their losses at the hands of marauding soldiers, and complain of labour shortages because of military service, common land enclosed and women and children dying of starvation;7 the nobility retort that the common people are suffering from their own earlier improvidence, that they themselves have often lost homes and lands and that only those who actually fight can know the sufferings of the soldier: Quantes malles nuiz et disete de boire et de menger endurent souvent ceulx qui le mestier de la guerre frequentent, chargez de fer au vent et a la pluye, sans autre couverture que du ciel et y perdent souvent leurs chevaulx et leur chatel, mettent leur vie en aventure de mort et de fait y meurent. (Quadrilogue, p. 26.)

Such mutual recriminations could continue indefinitely, as no doubt they did in the real life of the early fifteenth century. In the 7 The sufferings of the people were of concern to many writers of the day. See J. Huizinga, op. cit., pp. 61-2.

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Quadrilogue, the pensive figure, that of the Clergy, who clearly

represents Chartier’s own point of view, intervenes to suggest a more constructive approach to the problems of the times. He preaches a long and closely-argued sermon on the theme that any leader re¬ quires three things: wisdom, resources and obedience. These things, he declares, are all at hand in France, if the French will learn to use them properly. This section of the Quadrilogue, where Chartier is putting his own views forward, is constructive and practical; we see him as a master not only of argument and rhetoric, but of economic principles and practice. Money, he says, must be earned, and warfare is endlessly expensive. While the country is occupied by the enemy and subject to pillage, money is naturally scarcer, while expenses are unlimited, and ainsi le trop qui va d’une part n’a point de contrepois, si ne peut la balance soy tenir droicte ne la mesure estre gardee. (Quadrilogue, p. 46.)

The Clergy’s lesson is that all—from the princes to the people— must be prepared for sacrifice and discipline; and it is with this same theme that France brings the discussion to an end. She bids all three estates cease their disputes and urges each to try to over¬ come its own faults and weaknesses and work together for the common good, as do the bees: Ne soiez pas plus desordonnez que les mendres besteletes, ne plus negligens ou mains enclinez a vostre commune salvation, utilite et defense, que sont les mouchetes a miel, que chascune en leur essaim gardent leurs offices et leurs ordres et mectent leur vie pour deffendre et entretenir leur assemblee et leur petite pollice et pour garder la seigneurie de leur roy qui regne entre elles soubz une petite ruche, que moult de foiz, quant il est navrez en leurs batailles contre une autre compaignie d’autres mouchetes, elles portent et soustiennent a leurs eles et se laissent mourir pour luy maintenir sa saigneurie et sa vie. (Quadrilogue, p. 58.)

Chartier, it will be seen, makes few concessions to his readers in the Quadrilogue Invectif. He is merciless in his exposure of the selfpity and the consequent self-interest that he sees in all sections of the populace and, sombrely assessing the true facts of France’s situation, refuses to accept the common evasions of such fashionable concepts as the mutability of Fortune. At a time when powerful men were swayed only by the desire for more power, and when lesser

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ones found themselves caught up in the conflicts so created, he calls for something new in feudal society—loyalty not to an overlord, but to France herself. A rousing call to patriotic duty is often effective at a time of confusion and despair; and the Quadrilogue evidently enjoyed a great popularity if we are to judge by the number of manuscripts— more than forty of them, scattered over the whole of Europe8— and the many imitators of the work.9 This might at first appear surprising, since no class of the community escapes Chartier’s castigation. The Quadrilogue, however, does not appeal to the reader on the merits of its content alone; stylistically it is an equally re¬ markable work, and it was perhaps especially on aesthetic grounds that it was admired by his contemporaries. Chartier was widely read in Latin literature, and in fact wrote more in Latin than in French. He admires the rhetoric of Cicero and the orotund periods of Seneca10 and shows a remarkable skill in adapting the devices of Latin oratory to the exigencies of French prose. At the same time because he is writing on a matter on which he feels deeply and passionately such stylistic ornaments as apostrophe, antithesis and the subtle balance of sound and harmony within the sentence are subordinate to his purpose of rousing the indifferent; the result is a striking synthesis of substance and style. The effect that Chartier thus achieves is a highly emotional one. He is particularly given to the use of apostrophe and this device is especially striking in introducing a note of highly charged feeling into what might otherwise tend to become too arid a discourse. The Clergy’s long oration provides one of many examples. He has been analysing weaknesses in the army: those who ought to bear the responsibility of command often prefer to enjoy only the privileges of their rank; while others are too proud to wish to serve under 8 E. Droz, op. cit.. Introduction, pp. ix, x. 9 These are listed and summarized by Hoffman, op. cit., pp. 164-8. 10 Etienne Pasquier, writing some 170 years after Chartier, whom he described as “Grand poete de son temps et encore plus grand orateur,” perceived the close affinity between Chartier’s style and that of his Latin master: “Et une infinite d’autres belles sentences, desquelles il est si confit de ligne en ligne que je ne le puis mieux comparer qu’a l’ancien Seneque Romain”. (Recherches de la France, 1596 edition, p. 267.)

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another man s command. As this question of pride arises, the figure of the Clergy breaks off to address Arrogance itself, and to reproach this sin for the evils it has brought on France: O arrogance aveuglee, folie et petite cognoissance de vertu, o tresperilleuse erreur en fait d’armes et de batailles, par ta malediction sont desroutees et desordonnees les puissances et les armes desjoinctes et divisees, quant chascun veult croire son sens et suivre son oppinion. (Quadrilogue, p. 52.)

The effect of this is to intensify the emotional tone of the passage; the author is then able to go on, with the reader’s attention recalled, to cite examples of the evil effects of such arrogance in military affairs, first from his own recollections and then from antiquity. In such a work as this, which is in effect a pamphlet designed to spread patriotic fervour among the indifferent, the author must always be careful not to let his thought become too abstruse; the reader’s attention and his feelings must be constantly engaged, so that he sees the relevance of the argument to his own circumstances. It is perhaps this, as much as the fashionable taste for allegorical figures, that causes Chartier to present us with personifications of some of the great abstractions of which he speaks: Labeur a perdu son esperance, Marchandise ne treuve chemin qui la puisse sauvement adrecier. (Quadrilogue, p. 18.)

or again Justice a laissie son siege tribunal, ouquel se siet et preside Voulente. (Quadrilogue, p. 20.)

This same preoccupation doubtless accounts for the similes in which his prose abounds. Some of these are conventional and perfunctory enough, borrowed from Scripture or from the ancient writers with whom Chartier is so familiar. Thus there are references to the state being like a rudderless ship tossed in a storm, and irresponsible members of the nobility are likened to poor husbandmen. But Chartier, convinced that the state of France is indeed desperate and that the kingdom may be heading for extinction, also, with more originality, takes many opportunities of making analogies between the state of France and that of a sick man; in a public familiar with epidemics, starvation and suffering of every kind they were likely to arouse emotional memories and a feeling of equal urgency.

120

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS Je ne voy meilleur similitude a ce propos sinon que nostre police franfoise est comme l’omme furieux qui de ses dens mort et dessire ses autres membres. (Quadrilogue, p. 21.) Et comme la soif aux ydropiques en bevant leur croist et augmente, ainsi qui plus en avoit plus en convoitoit avoir. (Quadrilogue, p. 34.J Ainsi que de longue maladie dont les membres sont alterez et corrompuz ne peut on recouvrer a garison sans divers assez et mutacions merveilleuses et recidives, aussi ne povons nous gecter de ceste tribulacion tumultueuse et entremeslee sans souffrir mains doubteux assaulx et mortelx perilz et la contagieuse infection qui entre nous court ait prins son cours, si que par apres les choses retournent a leur nature. (Quadrilogue, p. 40.) Les pluseurs en leurs couraiges fuioyent 1’adhesion de leur seigneur et l’aide de leur seigneurie comme chose perdue et comme malade jugie a mort et abandonne sans remede, qui depuis ont reprins cuer et bonne fiance. (Quadrilogue, p. 43.)

Remarkably enough in an age characterized by prolixity, the Quadrilogue Invectif can be read at one sitting; and so read, it is this

impression of deeply felt urgency that most impresses. Devices such as paradox and antithesis are never allowed to generate into mere verbal conceits, but succeed in heightening the tension and concen¬ trating the emotional impact in a remarkable way. The result is that this work, conventional and traditional in its use of the dream framework and the technique of the “debat”, and using rhetorical tricks outmoded even by the following century, retains its freshness and urgency and has been felt by succeeding generations to be still relevant to their dilemma. Writing in 1876, Delaunay, speaking of the Quadrilogue, remarked that “Les douloureuses analogies de nos jours en ont renouvele l’inter et,”11 and its vogue did not end with the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian war, but received a new im¬ petus during the German occupation of 1940-4, when once again Chartier’s pleas for a sacrifice of self-interest to patriotism became no less painfully relevant than they had been at the close of the reign of Charles VI more than five hundred years earlier. The Traite de I’Esperance, ou Consolation des Trois Vertus is a much more ambitious work, conceived on a grandiose scale and not completed. In a verse prologue, Chartier tells us that it was begun “Au dixiesme an de mon dolent exil,” most probably in 1428.12 The 11 D. Delaunay, Etude sur Alain Chartier (Rennes, 1876), p. 69. See A. Piaget, La Belle Dame Sans Merci et ses Imitateurs, Romania 30 (1901) 40-1; Hoffman, op. cit., p. 185, n. 5.

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years at the Dauphin’s court had given him ample time and opportun¬ ity to taste the full bitterness of disappointed hope and to see the triumph of opportunism over virtue which he had stigmatized in Le Curial. Surrounded by ambitious and unscrupulous characters such as La Tremoille and Regnault de Chartres, and disillusioned by the weak and vacillating character of the young man on whom his hopes had been fixed as the saviour of France, Chartier declares that he can no longer write except in the most sombre terms: Paine, paour, pouvrete, perte et doute Ont assiege si ma pensee toute Qu’il n’en saut rien, fors que par leur dangier . . . Car en moy n’est entendement ne sens D’escrire, fors ainsi comme je sens.

The work begins by describing the state of depression in which it was undertaken, caused by La memoire des choses passees, l’espouentement des dispositions presentes, et l’orriblete des perilz avenir. (Du Chesne, p. 263.)

A fearsome woman approaches him. She is dressed in rags, hexface is emaciated, her look downcast, her mouth gaping. This is Melancholic, qui trouble les pensees, desciche le corps, corrompt les humeurs, affoiblit les sensitifs esperits, et maine l’omme a languour et a mort . . . A l’approcher sans mot dire m’enveloppa soudainement entre ses bras, et me couvri visage et corps de ce malheureux mantel: maiz de ses bras si estroit me serroit, que je sentoye mon cueur ou dedans destraint comme en presse: et de ses mains me tenoit la teste et les yeux embrunchez et estompez, si que je n’avoye l’aise de veoir ne oyr. (Du Chesne, p. 266.)

This description of the symptoms of melancholia, despite the fact that Chartier expresses it in the terms of allegory which come most easily to him, corresponds strikingly with the accounts given by modern psychiatry.13 After several days in bed, indifferent to all around him, the author becomes aware that three more terrible 13 “The real involutional cases seldom show any involvement of the intell¬

ectual faculties. Considering the depth of distress which they exhibit, their intellectual clearness always stands out prominently .... The outstanding feature in all this group of cases is the anxious depression, and this has often been preceded by a stage during which the patient has complained of tiredness, of feelings of inadequacy, of being easily fatigued, and of sleeplessness. They may also have physical symptoms, such as feelings of pressure in the head, difficulty of thinking, flushing vertigo and F.F.P.W.

5

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women have appeared in his room; each carries her own character¬ istic burden. The first is Deffiance, who has an iron box with a double lid and many other pieces of luggage which she clasps to her, sus¬ picious of tv try one, Indignation has a scourge in one hand, and in the other a notebook setting out all the injuries she has suffered; while the dishevelled and ghastly Desesperance carries a shroud over her arm and a knife in her hand. Through the mouths of this repulsive trio, Chartier tells the readers of his sufferings and anxieties. Indignation asks him why he continues to frequent the Court, since it should by now be plain to him that the machinations of his enemies will prevent him from achieving any benefit either to the realm or to himself. Here, though vanity and ambition continually lead men to come to court, the mutability of Fortune is seen at its most extreme; Chartier would have done better to lead a quiet life of scholarship. Deffiance, how¬ ever, soon dispels any idea that he could now find such a refuge. Where can he go? In the city, rich merchants will cheat him, the country is laid waste by marauding bandits; and if he tries to begin afresh in another country, even supposing that he survives the perils of the journey, he will be despised as a traitor to his own land. There is no hope anywhere: Aide et confort sont taris. Le sens meme fault avecques la parolle. Et plus n’y voy, fors que Dieu a les Francois delaissiez et oubliez. (Du Chesne, p. 272.)

The author’s confusion and misery are now even further intensified by Desesperance who suggests that since nothing but ruin is on every hand, suicide remains the only solution, and cites many examples lrom antiquity to add force to her argument. But this mention of self-destruction rouses Nature from her coma, and she in turn wakes Entendement, who, urging the author to have no truck with his three formidable visitors, opens the rusted door of Memory to admit three beautiful ladies and a maiden, the mere sight of whom irritability .... They feel frightened, are restless, wring their hands, moan and groan, and tend to rake over their past”. D. K. Henderson and R. D. Gillespie, A Text Book of Psychiatry, 3rd edition (O.U.P., Oxford Medical Publications, 1932), p. 164.

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dazzles Entendement, while the discomfited hags retire to obscure corners of the room. The ladies are, as we might expect, Faith, Hope and Charity, who have come to tally the author’s fainting spirits. Unfortunately, since Chartier did not live to complete this book we never learn who the maiden is 4 or hear any words from Charity. We hear, however, at great and indeed excessive length from her two sisters, for Chartier uses this means to develop his views, at times in inordinate detail. Faith carries the Old Testament closed under her left arm and the New open in her right hand, and wears a crown with twelve points, representing the twelve articles of faith. Entendement begs her to elucidate various matters that have troubled him: why does God allow the Christian kingdom of France to suffer such adversity?— why, if kingship is of God, are kingdoms allowed to pass from one sinful ruler to another even worse?—why, if divine justice is perfect, do we see the innocent suffer with the guilty, and why are ordinary citizens punished for the faults of their rulers? These are pertinent questions, which must have been much in the minds of all thinking men of the period; and it cannot be said that Foy gives answers that offer easy or immediate consolation. It is not for man, she declares, to question the inscrutable ways of God; perhaps France deserves her sufferings, and since divine justice is necessarily perfect, the innocent who suffer unjustly on this earth may feel assured that this provides proof of another and more just life to come: Or ne te esbahis doncques plus, se tu vois souffrir paine a ceulx que tu reputes justifiez. Car tu ne sees quel gaing espirituel redonde de ce temporel dommaige, ne quel pechie passe et couvert tapit soubz celle justice reputee. (Du Chesne, p. 302.)

After condemning the Church for the materialism, ambition and laziness of her ministers and remarking that Constantine’s endow¬ ment of the Church with lands and riches had precipitated its decline by putting an end to apostolic poverty, Foy goes on to give a lecture on the three legitimate types of government; Monarchy, Aristocracy and Democracy. From this she turns to the Court. Her condemnations here are specific, and both more bitter and different 14 Delaunay, op. cit., p. 177, suggests that she may represent the Church, or Grace, or Reason.

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in kind from the strictures that Chartier had made in the Curial. There he had declared that a state of poverty and obscurity in which a man could call his soul his own was more to be desired than the artificial glitter of the Court, and that deceit and intrigue, not virtue, were the steps to advancement. In the Traite de I’Esperance his fulminations are especially directed against those who plot against the prince himself, for whose benefit the whole court exists. Chartier had seen the Dauphin, son of an insane father and a pleasure-loving mother, made a pawn in the game of power politics between France and Burgundy and deliberately kept in a state of ignorance and encouraged in frivolous pursuits. Through the mouth of Foy he now declares that it is knowledge that distinguishes man from the beasts and intellectual superiority that makes him fit to govern; and he condemns the disloyalty and ambition of those courtiers who want to keep the prince ignorant: Car ce fol langage court aujourd’hui entre les Curiaulx: QUE NOBLE HOMME NE DOIT SgAVOIR LES LETTRES, et tiennent a reprouche de gentillesse de bien lire ou bien escrire. Las! qui pourroit dire plus grant folie, ne plus perilleux erreur publier? Certes a bon droit puet estre appelle beste, qui se glorifie de ressembler aux bestes en non s?avoir, et se donner louange de son deffaut. (Du Chesne, p. 316.)

Foy ends her instruction of Entendement by making clear that, since self-interest and mutual suspicion are rife in the land, the civil war that now ravages France is clearly an act of divine judgement and not due to any blind operation of Fortune: Ou est une noble maison de France qui se puisse dire quicte des dangers de prison, ou exempte des douleances de nouvelle mort? De toutes parts les chasteaux sont habitez de veufves esplourees ou desloees femmes de prisonniers: et sont les seigneuries en mains d’enfans et d’orphenins. (Du Chesne, p. 323.)

Entendement declares herself comforted by these explanations, but

asks when the French may look forward to some improvement in their lot. Foy, with a courtesy that, we are told, is characteristic of the harmony that prevails among the virtues, introduces Esperance who will, she says, provide the reassurance the author requires. Esperance, like her sister, has brought her own impedimenta: in one hand she carries a box of ointment, which is the balm of spiritual consolation; the other holds fast to a ring of an anchor “dont le bee

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estoit fiche dedans les cieulx.” She is even more enthusiastic than Foy in the imparting not only of consolation but of information; in other words, Chartier contrives, under the general heading of Hope, to teach his readers something of philosophy, as the visitor distinguishes the four different types of false hope, “Presumptive, Deffective, Oppinative et Frustrative”; of history as, in response to Entendement’s request, she supplies examples of all these, ranging from Priam to Robert the Bruce by way of Judas Maccabteus and Philip of Macedonia; and of doctrine, as she teaches about the efficacy of prayer and sacrifice, again with many examples. Remarks on worthless sacrifices lead Esperance to a general consideration of the clergy and their shortcomings, and it is in the middle of a condemnation of their dissolute lives that the Traite abruptly breaks off. The length and diffuseness of the Traite de TEsperance and the seemingly interminable exempla with which Chartier’s supernatural visitors endorse their arguments, make it a less successful work than the Quadrilogue Invectif. In both we find the dream convention and the use of allegorical figures; both are suffused with patriotic fervour and a high moral purpose; both are expressed in rhetorical language owing much to classical patterns and highly effective in conveying the author’s emotion. In the Quadrilogue all these elements are disciplined by the fact that Chartier was writing a pamphlet to meet a particular situation; so that the prolixity so characteristic of fifteenth-century writing is kept in check by the demands of this medium. The Traite, however, is a more personal document, the fruit of disappointment and bitterness at the frustration of his hopes for himself, for France, and for his sovereign. Champion has re¬ marked of this work, “Ce n’est plus absolument Torateur qui parle; c’est surtout le pretre qu’il est devenu.”15 Despite the long discourses of Faith and Hope, the impression that the Traite leaves is a gloomy one. It is significant that, while Faith can only suggest that the triumph of the ungodly in this world must be accepted as proof of a more just life to come, Hope, too, can see no certain end 15 Champion, op. cit., p. 135.

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to the rule of tyrants and the misfortunes of war except in a life beyond this one: Laissons ester l’incertain estat, et la gloire caduque des turbateurs de la terre. Arrestons nous a la certaine Esperance de ceux, qui entre les persecutions de guerre s’attendent d’avoir paix, et ou milieu des miseres esperent prosperite et repos. (Du Chesne, p. 365.)

The Traite was admired and imitated by Chartier’s successors16 who doubtless especially savoured precisely those qualities of erudition and “sentence”, of rhetoric and allegory, that tend to repel or at least to weary the modern reader. It is noteworthy that all those writers of the hundred years or so following his death who spoke his praises reserved particular admiration for his style— “La bonne liaison de paroles et mots exquis ... la gravite des sentences” of which Pasquier speaks. It is doubtless always easier to admire technical skill than to accept the relevance of moral strictures to our own case; but for Chartier beauty and eloquence of expression are never an end in themselves. He writes, as he tells us in the Prologue to the Traite, “par douleur”, and it is the substance —the call to subordinate selfish ends to the service of the country, the sombre assessment of France’s misfortunes and their cause, the contemptuous appraisal of the frivolity of court life—that is of pre¬ eminent importance. Far though their mode of expression may be from our taste, this sincerity and urgency of purpose emerge v/ith undiminished clarity today.

16 See Hoffman, op. cit., p. 195.

Three Historians

Jean Froissart (?i337-?i405) In a well-known passage of his essay on books, Montaigne places Froissart in the category of historians that he characterizes as simples, explaining that by this he means that he was content to amass information without attempting a critical assessment of the events he records. “C’est la matiere de l’histoire nue et informe,” he says; “chascun en peult faire son proufit autant qu’il a d’entendement.” This is a pertinent and an exact comment; and while Frois¬ sart remains one of the most enjoyable writers of his period, full of colour and vivacity, infusing life into the turbulent and complex events of the fourteenth century, we shall look in vain in his Chroni¬ cles for any attempt to ascribe causes to events or to foresee their possible repercussions. Some critics have complained of the shallow¬ ness and superficiality of his mind; but it is important to judge him only by his success in achieving what he set out to do, and not by any preconceived notions we may have of the function of an his¬ torian. Froissart’s aims were quite simple, and are set out for the reader in the Prologue to the first book and the preamble to the third.1 He wishes, he says, to set down as clearly and accurately as possible the events that have taken place in his lifetime and a little before it. 1 There are two principal editions of the Chroniques of Froissart: (1) CEuvres Computes de Froissart, ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove. (Brussels, 1867-77, 28 vols.). (2) Chroniques de Froissart, ed. S. Luce, G. Raynaud and L. Mirot (Societe de l’Histoire de France, Paris, 1869-1931, 12 vols.). This edition is incomplete: it provides all the variants of Book I, the whole of Book II and the first part of Book III. Froissart’s account of his expedition to the court of the Count of Foix at Orthez has been published separately by A. H. Diverres under the title of Le Voyage en Bearn (Manchester, 1953). 129

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In this way he will not only have recorded the truth to the best of his ability, but will have fulfilled a moral purpose; that of urging young men of future generations to aspire to the ideal of chivalrous conduct, or prouesse: Car c’est une si noble vertu, et de si grant recommendation, que on ne le doit mies passer trop briefment, car elle est mere materiele et lumiere des gentilz hommes . . . Vous ver6s et trouver£s en ce livre, se vous le lisi6s, comment pluiseur chevalier et escuier se sont fait et avanciet, plus par leur proece que par leur linage. (Soc. de l’Hist. de France, I, pp. 2-3.)

Again, in the preamble to Book III, he declares. Si vous vouldroie esclarcir par bel langaige tout ce dont je fus adont infourmd pour rengrossir nostre matiere et pour exemplier les bons qui se desirent a avanchier par armes. (Soc. de l’Hist. de France,XII,p.3.)

The uses to which his literary gifts of bel languige are to be put, then, specifically do not include any judgement of the events he records, or any philosophical conclusions to which they might give rise. The circumstances of Froissart’s life gave him many opportunities to observe at first hand the outstanding events of his day or to converse with those who had been present at them; at the same time, since he occupied a privileged position at the courts of several great lords, it is not surprising that his attitude toward the feudal and chivalrous society of his day was one of uncritical approval. From obscure beginnings at Valenciennes in Hainaut he became attached by turns to the court of England, where he was under the patronage of Edward Ill’s Queen, Philippa of Hainaut, to the sumptuous household of Wenceslas of Bohemia in Brussels and to that of Guy of Blois.2 He thus had both funds and leisure to pursue his researches, and we find him travelling to places all over Europe where notable events were taking place—royal marriages, battles, treaties, the invasion preparations of Charles VI in Flanders, the reception given by the Pope at Avignon to Jeanne de Boulogne before her marriage to the Duke of Berry, the state entry into Paris of Isabella of Bavaria—or to centres, such as that of the court of Gaston Phoebus, Count of Foix, at Orthez, where he thought he could meet reliable informants able to fill out details of events he had 2 A detailed account of Froissart’s career is given in F. S. Shears, Froissart, Chronicler and Poet (London, 1930), pp. 1-71.

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not been able to witness personally. The Chronicles cover the years from 1325 until the death of Richard II in 1400. For the earlier years Froissart was at first content to rely on the work of his predecessor Jean le Bel,3 and many passages of his first version of this early period are verbatim transcripts of the earlier chronicler. Later, however, as Froissart grew in confidence and authority, he was largely to rewrite his first book, not only adding information that he had subsequently acquired, but modifying, in the light of more mature experience, his originally wholly flattering picture of the English.4 Froissart was, then, writing for the most part of contemporary events and necessarily lacked the perspective essential to the objective writing of history as we understand that art. The wars he recounted were for him a series of battles and skirmishes, the battles them¬ selves a series of single combats; he gives us no idea of the overall strategy of the campaign or the tactics of a battle. But if we do not gain from him a coherent picture of the events of the fourteenth century as a whole, we have what is perhaps more valuable: a sense of involvement in those events. Wherever he could, Froissart made it his business to see things for himself; where he could not, he sought out reliable eye-witnesses and either questioned them closely, or simply let them talk of what they knew. And because he possessed an extraordinary ear for dialogue, an exact eye for the detail of a scene and above all an immense enthusiasm for what he was doing, the reader is able to share his experiences. His talents are, in fact, precisely those of the modern journalist: the ability to secure an exclusive interview, to be present at notable events and provide a first-hand account of them, the willingness to undertake long jour¬ neys and to endure great hardships in order to secure his copy— all these qualities of the twentieth-century special correspondent were the stock-in-trade of Froissart too; and it was these qualities 3 Chronique de Jean le Bel, ed. Jules Viard and Eugene Deprez (Society de l’Histoire de France, Paris, 1905, 2 vols.). 4 See S Luce, Introduction to Vol. I of the Societe de l’Histoire de France edition, for an account of the scope and tone of Froissart’s successive versions of his first book.

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that he himself enumerated when summarizing his talents as a chronicler: Je avoye, Dieu mercy, sens et memoire et bonne souvenance de toutes les choses passees, engin cler et agu pour concepvoir tous les fais dont je pourroie estre infourme touchant a ma principale matiere, eage, corps et membres pour souffrir paine. (Soc. de 1’Hist. de France, XII, p. 2.)

The Chronicles, despite the vast field they cover, remain because of Froissart’s methods a highly personal document. We see events through his eyes, or through conversations he had with those he thought likely to fill in the gaps in his own knowledge, and the facts are consequently coloured either by his own prejudices or by those of his informants. He was well aware of the dangers of such a method and went to considerable trouble to seek out representatives of both sides in a dispute and to obtain their rival versions. Thus after undertaking the long and arduous journey from Blois to the Pyrenees to accumulate information about the wars in Spain and Portugal, he was still willing, after his return, to go to Middelburgh in Holland because he had heard of a Portuguese knight there, Don Juan Fernandez Pasteco, who was able to give him the Portuguese version of these same wars. What Froissart makes no attempt to do, either in this instance or in the accounts of the battles of Poitiers and Crecy which he received from both French and English participants, is to balance the opposing accounts or to make any attempt at synthesis or at final judgement. Similarly, although the final version of Book I shows a complete reversal of Froissart’s original attitude towards the English, he makes no effort to justify his volte-face; as Montaigne has said, it is for the reader to make his own judgement from the raw material that the chronicler provides. The unique value of that material, however, is evident at every turn. On his journey to Orthez, Froissart had the good fortune to fall in with another knight, Espan de Lion, who was also on his way to the court of the Count of Foix, with whom he was already well acquainted. For the remainder of the journey, this travelling com¬ panion recounted to Froissart all that he knew of the character of Gaston Phoebus, culminating in the story of his murder of his own

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son, whom he suspected of trying to poison him.5 When Froissart reached Orthez he found as great a wealth of material as he had hoped, and his own account shows his assiduity in collecting it, never missing an opportunity of drawing out his informants. There was, for example, a certain Bascot de Mauleon who had attracted the chronicler’s attention by his evident wealth and the respect with which he was treated. He was in fact an unscrupulous and successful bandit, and one evening Froissart was able to hear his story: Une nuit apres soupper, seans au feu et attendans la mie nuit, que le conte de Foix devoit soupper, son cousin le mist en voye de parler et de recorder de sa vie et des armes, ou en son temps il avoit este, tant de pertes que de prouffis ... Si me demanda: “Messire Jehan, avez-vous point en vostre hystoire ce dont je vous parleray?” Je lui respondi: “Je ne s?ay ai-ge ou non,” di-ge. “Faictes vostre compte, car je vous oy volentiers parler d’armes, et il ne me puet pas de tout souvenir, et aussi je ne puis pas avoir este de tout informe.”—“C’est voir,” respondi l’escuier. A ces mots, il commenqa son compte et dist ainsi . . . (Soc. de l’Hist. de France, XII, p. 96.)

We see him at work again in the same way on the occasion of his return to England after a lapse of almost thirty years. At Canterbury he lodged in the same inn as two amiable knights, William Lisle and John de Grailly, who obligingly supplied him with the details of the English king’s latest negotiations with France. A little later, after he had presented his book to Richard II, he made the acquaintance of Henry Chrystead, who had taken part in the recent Irish expedi¬ tion. He knew Ireland and its uncouth inhabitants well, and gave Froissart a graphic and alarming description of the hasards of a campaign in that country: Et ont Yrlandois coutiauls agus devant, a largue alumelle a deux taillans a la maniere de darde, dont il occient leur ennemy, et ne tiennent point ung homme pour mort jusques a tant que ils luy ont cope la gueule mm me a un mouton, et luy ouvrent le ventre et en prendent le cuer et l’emportent, et dient les aucuns qui congnoissent leur nature, que ils le manguent par grant delit, et ne prendent nul homme a raenchon, et quant ils voient que ils n’ont point le plus bel d’aucuns rencontres que on leur fait, ils s’espardent et boutent en hayes et en buisson et dedens terre, et les pert-on ainsi et ne scet-on que ils deviennent. (K. de Lettenhove, XV, pp. 169-70.) 5 Professor Diverres has pointed out (Introduction, p. xxiii) that the character of Gaston Phoebus is so skilfully and subtly revealed through these conver¬ sations that it is obvious that Froissart was not content merely to trans¬ cribe them, but must have edited and embellished them with great care.

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Such descriptions have a unique actuality and vividness that they owe not only to the fact that they are based on personal experience, but also to the artistry which Froissart has brought to bear on this material. In the preamble to his revised version of the First Book, written after 1376, he explains that, following in the footsteps of Jean le Bel, he had determined to write in prose, because he noticed that the writers of verse chronicles were hampered by the exigences of rhyme and metre: “leurs rimmez et leurs canchons controuvees n’ataindent en riens la vraie matiere.” Much of the sense of reality and truth, to which he attached such evident importance, is conveyed by Froissart’s extensive and skilful use of direct speech. Earlier chroniclers, like writers of romance, where they had ascribed words to their characters, did so for the most part in set speeches of con¬ siderable formality. Froissart, however, catches the intonation of the spoken word and enlivens his narrative by frequent and lively dialogues. Some are so striking that there can be little doubt that Froissart is setting down the very words exchanged as he or one of his informants remembered them, as in for instance, the grosses paroles that passed before the battle of Poitiers between Jean de Clermont, one of the marshals of France, and Jean Chandos, a member of the Prince of Wales’s bodyguard, when they discovered that they were each wearing the same devise: “Chandos, ossi vous desiroi je a encontrer. Depuis quant aves vous empris a porter ma devise?” “Et vous la mienne?” ce respondi messires Jehan Chandos, “car autant bien est-elle mienne comme elle est vostre. “Je le vous devee, dist messires Jehans de Clermont; “et se ne fust la souffrance qui est entre les vostres et les nostres, je le vous monstrasse tantost que vous n’aves nulle cause dou porter.” “Ha!” ce respondi messires Jehan Chandos, “demain au matin vous me trouveres tout apareille dou deffendre et de prouver par fait d’armes que otant bien est elle mienne comme vostre.” (Soc. de l’Hist. de France, V, pp. 28-9.)

On other occasions Froissart is evidently inventing words that passed at private meetings at which he cannot have been present: the interview between Queen Isabella and her brother Charles, when she was fleeing from Hugh Despenser; the conversation be¬ tween the young son of Gaston Phoebus and Julbain, the boy who shared a bed with him, when after some horseplay Julbain discovered

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the purse containing the poison that the King of Navarre had secretly given the young Gaston; the haughty reply given by Duke Albert of Hainaut when an English spokesman, having heard of the proposed marriage between the duke’s son and the daughter of the Duke of Burgundy, reminded Albert of an earlier suggestion that he might marry the Duke of Lancaster’s daughter Philippa: De ceste parolle li dus Aubers mua un petit couleur, et dist: “Oil, sires. Par ma foil pour quoi le demand6s vous?”—“Monseigneur,” dist il, “j’en parolle pour ce que monsigneur le due de Lancastre a tousjours espere jusques a chi, que madamoiselle Phelippe sa fille aroit Guillaume, monseigneur vostre fil.” Lors dist li dus Aubers, “Compains, dites a mon cousin que quant il a mariet ou mariera ses enffans, que point je ne m’en ensonnierai. Ossi ne s’a il que faire d’ensonnier de mes enffans, ne quant je les voel marier, ne ou, ne comment, ne a qui.” (Soc. de l’Hist. de France, XI, p. 193.)

Such passages of conversation inject life into the narrative by introducing a human element into what could easily become an arid recital of negotiations and the struggle for power. It is the personal¬ ities behind these negotiations that interest Froissart, and he makes them live for his readers by the characteristic words that he has either heard them utter or feels able to ascribe to them. In the same way, Froissart also uses direct speech to convey the taste of public opinion, and to show the effect upon the populace of the events of the chronicles. Filled as he himself is with admiration for the splen¬ dours of the feudal scene and the clash of arms, he is well aware, and increasingly so as he grows older, that successful campaigns are often achieved only at the expense of hardship and privation for the common people; the morale of the lower ranks sank at the prospect of long periods of inaction, and the population of occupied territories resented having their meagre resources depleted by the troops quartered upon them. Froissart conveys his sense of the reality of these problems not by any theoretical or generalized analysis, but by putting into the mouths of the soldiers, the peasants or the burgesses a direct statement of their grievances. One is again reminded of the journalistic device of the interview with the “man in the street”; like the modern reporter, Froissart is overridingly concerned with the human interest of the events he records. In 1385, for example, the arrival of a French army at Edinburgh caused some

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resentment among the Scots, who felt themselves well able to deal unaided with the English and to endure any hardships that the campaign might bring: Si commenchierent a murmurer li aucun et dire: “Quels diables les a mandes? Ne savons nous pas bien faire nostre guerre sans eux as Engles? Nous ne ferons ja bonne besogne tant qu’il soient avoec nous. On leur die que il s’en revoissent et que nous somme gens ass6s en Escoce, pour parmaintenir nostre guerre, et que point nous ne volons leur compaignie. II ne nous entendent point, ne nous eux; nous ne savons parler ensamble. II aront tantos riffle et mengie tout ce qu’il i a en ce pais, il nous feront plus de contraires, de despis et de damages, se nous les lalons convenir, que li Engles ne feroient.” (Soc. de l’Hist. de France, XI, pp. 214-5.)

Again, the gradual decline in enthusiasm for the grandiose plan for the invasion of England is skilfully conveyed through the remarks ascribed to those involved in it. At first, as the vast ships with their elaborate equipment raised high hopes, we are told that the French soldiers were eager to engage with the enemy, confident that they would soon have victory and revenge: Nous destruirons Angleterre: elle ne pourra nullement durer et resister a 1 encontre de nous. Le temps est venu que nous serons grandement venges des cruels faits et offenses que ils ont fait en France. Nous ravirons 1’or, l’argent et les richesses que du temps passe ils ont portds de France en Angleterre. (K. de Lettenhove, XI, p. 403.)

As winter approached, however, the people of Flanders soon grew tired of seeing the French army, their own enthusiasm rapidly declining, still on Flemish soil, and viewed the invasion scheme with scepticism: Et disoient en requoy plusieurs l’un a l’autre: “Et que diable! ne se delivre ce roy de passer oultre en Angleterre, se il doit passer! Pourquoy se tient il tant en ce pays? Ne sommes-nous pas povres asses, se encoires ces Francois ne nous apovrissent?” Et disoient l’un a l’autre: “Vous ne les verres passer en Angleterre de cest an. Si leur est advis que ils conquerront tantost Angleterre, mais non feront.” (K. de Lettenhove, XII, p. 21.)

Despite Froissart’s evident interest in the personalities that dominated the fourteenth-century scene, his portraits, composed according to the rules of rhetorical composition, are so conventional as often to be worthless as a clue to character. Huizinga, whose judgement of Froissart is severe, remarks6 that when he describes 6 Huizinga, p. 296.

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the Duke of Burgundy as “sage, froid et imaginatif, et qui sur ses besoignes veoit au loin,” this seems a penetrating analysis of charac¬ ter only until we realize that Froissart applied these terms to many other people. Again, Gaston Phoebus is represented, in the setpiece where Froissart describes him, as the pattern of chivalry, whereas the picture that emerges from the reminiscences of Espan du Lion and Froissart’s own observations is that of a violent and unscrupulous despot living in conditions of great splendour; an impression epitomized in the description of the Count descending to supper at midnight preceded by trumpeters and surrounded by torch-bearers. Froissart’s understanding of character, then, is far from profound; his gifts are pictorial rather than analytical and the persons who move across his crowded canvas are usually most effectively shown in action, or caught in some characteristic scene or pose. Edward III is fixed forever in our minds as the successful and confident war-leader, not through an attempt to dissect his mentality but by means of the many scenes in which we find him leading and encouraging his troops, or through Froissart’s picture of the king sitting relaxed on the quarter-deck of his own ship, La Sale dou Roy, listening to his minstrels while he waited for the enemy to come in sight off Winchelsea: Et faisoit ses menestrelz corner devant lui une danse d’Alemagne, que messires Jehans Chandos, qui la estoit, avoit nouvellement raporte. Et encores par esbatement il faisoit le dit chevalier chanter avoech ses menestrelz, et y prendoit grant plaisance. Et a le fois regardoit en hault, car il avoit mis un gette ou chastiel de sa nef, pour noncier quant li Espagnol venroient. (Soc. de l’Hist. de France, IV, p. 91-)

One of the most forceful personalities in the Chronicles, who clearly fascinated Froissart, was the Flemish popular leader Jacob van Artevelde, a man so powerful that, as he tells us, no count, duke or prince had more absolute authority in any country; and he shows us this former brewer making his way through the streets of Ghent surrounded by a bodyguard of sixty or eighty armed men who accompanied him everywhere. An inner circle of these were ready at a sign from their master to kill on sight and without question anyone to whom he took exception. Like many leaders who have come to the fore through strong-arm tactics Artevelde found that

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his power was short-lived, and Froissart gives a dramatic account of how he tried at first to appease and then to escape from a crowd of incensed weavers, who caught and brutally assassinated him. As a result of Froissart’s method of presenting Artevelde, the reader has a vivid picture of him; but there is no attempt to penetrate the Flemish leader’s motives or to explain the powerful if temporary hold he had over his followers. This gift for creating an immediate and memorable impression through the selection of striking external features rather than relying on an analytical approach is characteristic not only of Froissart’s method of presenting individuals but of his whole technique in the Chronicles. The effect on the reader is often that of being a spectator at an unending cavalcade of men-at-arms, kings, nobles and knights, all clearly seen and presented in bright primary colours. He has little sense of proportion:7 he is careful to list all those who sat down to supper at Orthez on Christmas night 1388, or those who carried banners at the funeral of the Count of Flanders, but he is content to dismiss the deliberations at Nuremburg that resulted in the Emperor’s recognition of Edward III as Imperial Vicar with the words, “Pourquoi feroi-je lonch sermon de leurs parolles, ne de leurs requestes?”. What he takes an evident delight in and depicts supremely well are the picturesque externals of fourteenth-century life. He is willing, for example, to devote many pages to the celebra¬ tions that accompanied Isabella of Bavaria’s state entry into Paris as the bride of Charles VI. The order of the procession, with the ladies in their open litters, each with a cavalry escort, the tableaux at the various city gates, the banquets, the tight-rope walker at Notre-Dame, specially imported from Geneva for the occasion, the jousts, the gold plate presented by the citizens of Paris—all are recounted in loving detail. Froissart is dazzled by all this splendour, just as he had been at the sight of the one thousand three hundred and ninety-seven vessels assembled off the Flemish coast for the 7 M. Wilmotte points out in this connection that Froissart devotes a mere 20 pages to the vital and decisive battle of Poitiers, while more than 100 are given to minor skirmishes between Charles the Bad and the Duke of Normandy, simply because he happened to have more information about the latter (M. Wilmotte, Froissart (Brussels, 1948, p. 64).

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abortive invasion of 1385. After listing all the provisions, arms, cooking equipment and clothing assembled ready for embarkation, and describing the prefabricated movable fort, designed to enable knights to sleep in comfort while in England, he exclaims, Sachies que la noblesse du veoyr et la plaisance du considerer estoient si grandes que qui eust eu les fievres ou la mal de dens, il eust perdu sa maladie pour aler de l’un a l’autre. (K. de Lettenhove, XI, p. 361.)

The success of Froissart’s technique is effectively demonstrated by comparing his story of the battle of Crecy with that of Jean le Bel. The earlier writer gives a clear and workman-like account; from him it is possible to learn all the essential facts about the engagement. He tells us that he received his information from John of Hainaut, his master and one of the King’s close advisers, from the entourage of the King of Bohemia and from a few English and German knights who had fought on the other side. Froissart has evidently collected many more reminiscences, particularly from those who fought on the English side, and in his account we find the bare bones of Jean le Bel’s narrative everywhere clothed with details that make every phase of the battle real and vividly alive. Before the battle, Edward III, having arranged his three battalions and given them clear instructions, inspected his troops. Jean le Bel tells the reader briefly how this raised the English morale: II ala tout autor en les ammonestant en riant que chascun s’efforchat de faire son debvoir, et si doucement les prioit et ammonestoit que ung couard en fu devenu hardi. (Jean le Bel, II, p. 107.)

Froissart, however, adds details of the King’s appearance and demeanour, so that the scene is sharply focussed and indelibly printed on the reader’s mind, as it evidently had been on the minds of those who told the story to Froissart: Li dis rois d’Engleterre monta sus un petit palefroi blanch, un blanc baston en sa main, adestres de ses deux mareschaux: et puis ala tout le pas, de rench en rench, en amonestant et priant les contes, les barons et les chevaliers, que ils volsissent entendre et penser pour se honneur garder, et a deffendre son droit. Et leur disoit ces langaiges en riant, si doucement et de si lie chiere, que qui fust tous desconfortes, se se peuist il reconforter, en lui oant et regardant. (Soc. de 1 Hist, de France, III, p. 170.)

The French were relying on a large detachment of Genoese archers, who were to stand in the front rank and begin the engage-

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ment. Jean le Bel explains how this scheme failed because of the complete lack of discipline among the French cavalry, who insisted on surging forward until, wounded by arrows from their own side, they attempted to retreat and total confusion reigned. Froissart, too, describes this melee, but he also takes us behind the scenes and reveals the bad feeling that existed between the French command and the Italian bowmen. The Genoese at first refused to fight because they said they were tired after a long march with full equipment. This roused the Duke of Alenin to fury; Froissart tells us that he exclaimed, “On se doit bien cargier de tel ribaudaille qui fallent au plus grant besoin!”—adding, in the final version of the Chronicle, II ne sont bon, fors a la table!” When the Italians were finally persuaded to begin the engagement, they tried to terrify the enemy by loud shouting. When they found them unmoved by these tactics and received a storm of arrows from the English and Welsh bowmen they immediately gave in, some cutting the strings of their bows and others throwing them on the ground. Philip of Valois, trembling with rage, ordered them to be killed on the spot: “Or tos, or tos, tues toute ceste ribaudaille: il nous ensonnient et tiennent le voie sans raison. In this dramatic account, the hysteria of the desperate king and his advisers is conveyed through Froissart’s characteristic use of direct speech and the scene given actuality by the eye-witness details of the actions of the temperamental Genoese. Such examples of Froissart’s technique and its remarkable effect in bringing the battle before our eyes abound throughout the account of the battle. Among the dead, we learn from Jean le Bel, was the gentle and beloved blind King of Bohemia. Froissart again fills in the background to this stark fact, this time with poignant effect. The king had sent to ask how the battle went, and then requested that he might take part in it. Despite his blindness, he laid about him bravely; his devoted followers, in an endeavour to keep close and to protect him, rode on either side of him, with the bridles of their horses tied together. Next morning their bodies were all found, still close together, and the horses with their bridles still joined. As a final example, there is the scene at the castle of Labroye where, Jean le Bel tells us, Philip, in flight from Crecy, spent the night on

JEAN FROISSART

141

his way to Amiens. Froissart shows the king arriving at the castle after dark when the drawbridge was up, reduced to calling out to reveal his identity: “Ouvres, ouvres, chastellain, c’est li infortunes rois de France.” At his best then, in scenes of noise, movement and colour that show the feudal world in action, Froissart is an artist of considerable merit; but no romantic historical novelist, viewing the Middle Ages with rose-tinted nostalgia, could present a more partial or idealized picture than this contemporary chronicler. H. A. L. Fisher has remarked8 that: “All through the fourteenth century, the nobility of France lived in a kind of feudal honeymoon, learning nothing, forgetting nothing and foreseeing nothing.” In this Froissart accepts and endorses the opinion of his masters. He is an historian of an entirely different order from Chastellain, who continually views the events of his day sub specie aeternitatis; and he is to be read and valued not for his rather perfunctory animadversions on the muta¬ bility of Fortune as exemplified by the battle of Poitiers and the fate of Richard II, but for his skill in bringing to life the personalities of his day and the manner in which they lived. He has been criticized for the lack of natural description in his chronicle and for the super¬ ficiality of his thought. But the background of nature and the moral or philosophical implications of events are alike irrelevant to his theme. If he has the faults of the journalist—a lack of perspective and a certain shallowness of approach—he has also his merits. Froissart took part in many of the events he describes, and we see them as he did, accurately observed with an eye for the amusing or significant detail, and recapture, through such descriptions and through the conversations he records or invents, the atmosphere in which he moved. Despite his reference to “bel langaige” his style is free of the rhetorical elaborations, allegorical figures and moral reflections that encumber so much of the prose of his contemporaries. He had the advantage over them, once he had freed himself from Jean le Bel, in working on completely new material, and was not obliged to disguise his poverty of matter with an elaborate orna¬ mental superstructure. The result is that we can read him today 8 H. A. L. Fisher, History of Europe (London, 1938), p. 316.

142

FRENCH PROSE WRITERS

much as he wished to be read; for he is conscious of writing for posterity: Car bien s 1515 162 Charles VIII, King of France 158, 162 Charles the Bold, Duke of Burgundy 157, 158, 159, 161, 162, 208-11 Chartier, Alain x, xi, 99, 106, no, 112-26, 144, 163, 195-9 Chastellain, Georges x, xi, 69, I4C 143-56, 163, 164, 204-7 Chaucer, Geoffrey 16 Commynes, Philippe de xi, 157-66, 208-10

Dante 103, 108 Deschamps, Eustache

3, 54, 98

Edward III, King of England 137, 138, 139 Edward IV, King of England 165

130, 162,

Fabri, Pierre 112 Froissart, Jean ix, x, 70, 129-42, 144, 145, 163, 164, 200-3

153-4 Isabella of Bavaria, Queen of France 85, 88, 89, 91, 100, 130, 134, 138, 200-3

Joan of Arc 114 John II, King of France 30 John the Fearless, Duke of Bur¬ gundy 89, 90, 99, 143, 148 Joinville, Jean de ix Juvenal 66

La Marche, Olivier de 156, 161 La Sale, Antoine de xi, 44, 62, 70-82, 184-6 Latini, Brunetto x, 101 La Tour Landry, Chevalier de x, 3-14, 15, 16, 19, 23, 26, 33, 35, 39, 48, 169-70 Le Bel, Jean ix, x, 131, 134, 139-40, 141 Lefranc, Martin 98 Livres du Roy Modus et de la Royne Ratio ix, 24-35, 39, I74~7 Louis II of Anjou 70 Louis III of Anjou 71 Louis XI, King of France 113, 144, 151-2, 154, 157, 158, 159-60, 161, 164, 165, 208-11 Louis XII, King of France 158 Louis of Luxembourg see St Pol. Louis of Orleans 87, 89, 90, 100, 109

Macchiavelli, Niccolo 215

163

INDEX

216

Machaut, Guillaume de 3, 7 Margaret of Anjou, Queen of England 71, 153-5 Matheolus 54, 66 Mdlusine 39-53, 17s'80 Mdnagier de Paris, Le 15-23, 35, 39) I7I~3 Meun, Jean de 94-5, 102-3 Montaigne, Michel de 129, 132, 165 Montaigne de Contemplation, La 87n., 93*4) 96

Navarre, Marguerite de

2in.

Pasquier, Etienne n8n., 126 Petit Jehan de Saintre, Le 44, 7082, 164, 184-6 Petrarch, Francesco 16-7, 18 Philip the Bold, Duke of Burgundy 99, 107, 109 Philip V (The Fair), King of France 30 Philip the Good, Duke of Burgundy 143, 144, 151, 152, 153-5, 204-7 Philip VI of Valois, King of France 30, 140

Philippa of Hainaut, Queen of England 130 Phoebus, Gaston, Count of Foix 130, 132, 134, 137 Pisan, Christine de x, 95, 98-111, 191-4

Quinze Joyes de Mari age, Les 62, 63, 66, 69, 181-3

54-

Rene, King of Anjou 71 Richard II, King of England 131, 133, 141, 154 Richard III, King of England 163 Roman de la Rose, Le 18, 39, 85, 86, 94-6, 99, 102-3, 104

St. Pol, Count of

71

Valerius Maximus Visconti, Galeazzo

74, 101 99

Wenceslas, King of Bohemia 139) 140

8

59

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Ferrier, Janet Mackay French prose vrriters of the fourteenth and fifteenth

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Ferrier, Janet Mackay French prose writers of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. c1st ed.

In the fourteenth arid fifteenth centuries in France prose emerged as a dominant literary form. The first part of this book contains critical accounts of the principal prose writers of the later Middle Ages in France, under the headings of Chronicles, Moral Writings, Works of Instruction, and Fiction. The second part provides lengthy illustrative extracts from the works of the writers concerned. The authors presentation enables the student to acquire a useful background knowledge of the period and to make a personal assessment of the style and content of the works. This book is intended for students pursuing a French Honours Course.