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Title: A Short History of French Literature

Author: George Saintsbury

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*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK A SHORT
HISTORY OF FRENCH LITERATURE ***

London

HENRY FROWDE
Oxford University Press Warehouse

Amen Corner, E.C.

New York

112 Fourth Avenue

Clarendon Press Series

A SHORT HISTORY
OF

FRENCH LITERATURE
BY

GEORGE SAINTSBURY
FOURTH EDITION

Oxford
AT THE CLARENDON PRESS
1892

Oxford

HORACE HART, PRINTER TO THE UNIVERSITY

PREFACE.
An attempt to present to students a succinct history of the course of French
literature compiled from an examination of that literature itself, and not
merely from previous accounts of it is, I believe, a new one in English.
There will be observed in the parts of this Short History a considerable
difference of method; and as such a difference is not usual in works of the
kind, it may be well to state the reasons which have induced me to adopt it.
Early French literature is to a great extent anonymous. Moreover, even
where it is not, the authors were usually more influenced by certain
prevalent styles or forms than by anything else. Into these forms they threw
without considerations of congruity whatever they had to say. Nothing, for
instance, can be less suitable for historical or scientific disquisition than the
octosyllabic metre of a satiric poem. But Jean de Meung and one at least of
the authors of Renart le Contrefait[1] do not think of composing prose
diatribes. At one moment and place the form of the Chanson de Geste is all-
absorbing, at another the form of the Roman d'Aventures, at another the
form of the Fabliau. In Book I. I shall therefore proceed by these forms,
giving an account of each separately.
After Villon the case changes. Instead of classes of chroniclers, trouvères,
jongleurs, we get individual authors of eminence and individuality striking
out their own way and saying their own say in the manner not that is
fashionable but that seems best to them. During this time, therefore, and
especially during that brilliant age of French literature, the sixteenth
century, I shall proceed by authors, taking the most remarkable individually,
and grouping their followers around them.
From the time of Malherbe the system of schools begins, divided according
to subjects. The poet, the dramatist, the historian, have their predecessors,
and either intentionally copy them or intentionally innovate upon them.
Malherbe and Delille, Corneille and Lemercier, Sarrasin and Rulhière,
whatever the difference of merit, stand to one another in a definite relation,
and the later writers represent more or less the accepted traditions each of
his school. In this part, therefore, I shall proceed by subjects, taking

historians, poets, dramatists, etc., together. One difference will be noticed
between the third and fourth Books, dealing respectively with the
seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. It has seemed unnecessary to allot a
special chapter to theological and ecclesiastical writing in the latter, or to
scientific writing in the former.
Almost all writers who have attempted literary histories in a small compass
have recognised the difficulty, or rather impossibility, of treating
contemporary or recent work on the same scale as older authors. In treating,
therefore, of literature subsequent to the appearance of the Romantic
movement, I shall content myself with giving a rapid sketch of the principal
literary developments and their exponents.
There are doubtless objections to this quadripartite arrangement; but it
appears to me better suited for the purpose of laying the foundations of an
acquaintance with French literature than a more uniform plan.
The space at my disposal does not admit of combining full information as to
the literature with elaborate literary comment upon its characteristics, and
there can be no doubt that in such a book as this, destined for purposes of
education chiefly, the latter must be sacrificed to the former. As an instance
of the sacrifice I may refer to Bk. I. Ch. II. There are some forty or fifty
Chansons de Gestes in print, all of which save two or three I have read, and
almost every one of which presents points on which it would be most
interesting to me to comment. But to do this in the limits would be
impossible. Nor is it easy to enter upon disputed literary questions, however
tempting they may be. On such points as the relations of Northern to
Provençal poetry, the origin of the Chansons and the Arthurian romances,
the successive versions of Froissart, the authenticity of the last book of
Rabelais, it is only possible here to indicate the most probable conclusions.
Generally speaking, the scale of treatment will be found to be adjusted to
the system of division already stated. In the middle ages, where the
importance of the general form surpasses that of the individual
practitioners, comparatively small space is given to these individuals, and
little attempt is made to follow up the scanty and often conjectural
particulars of their lives. In the later books I have endeavoured (departing in
this respect from the system of my two former sketches of the subject, the
article on 'French Literature' in the ninth edition of the Encyclopædia

Britannica and the Primer which has preceded this work in the Clarendon
Press Series) to deal more fully with the greater names whose work is most
instructive, and as to whom most curiosity is likely to be felt.
If, as seems very likely, these explanations should not content some of my
critics, I can only say that the passages which they may miss here would
have been far easier and far pleasanter for me to write than the passages
which they will here find. This volume attempts to be, not a series of
causeries on the literary history of France, but a Short History of French
Literature. Two things only I have uniformly aimed at, accuracy as absolute
as I could secure, and completeness as thorough as space would allow. In
the pursuit of the former object I have thought it well to take no fact or
opinion at second-hand where the originals were accessible to me.
Manuscript sources I do not pretend to have consulted; but any judgment
which is passed in this book may be taken as founded on personal
acquaintance with the book or author unless the contrary be stated. Some
familiarity with the subject has convinced me that nowhere are opinions of
doubtful accuracy more frequently adopted and handed on without enquiry
than in the history of literature.
Those who read this book for purposes of study will, it is hoped, be already
acquainted with the Primer, which is, in effect, an introduction to it, and
which contains what may be called a bird's-eye view of the subject. But, lest
the wood should be lost sight of for the trees, notes or interchapters have
been inserted between the several books, indicating the general lines of
development followed by the great literature which I have attempted to
survey. To these I have for the most part confined generalisations as distinct
from facts.
I have, I believe, given in the notes a sufficient list of authorities which
those who desire to follow up the subject may consult. I have not been
indiscriminately lavish in indicating editions of authors, though I believe
that full information will be found as to those necessary for a scholarly
working knowledge of French literature. I had originally hoped to illustrate
the whole book with extracts; but I discovered that such a course would
either swell it to an undesirable bulk, or else would provide passages too
short and too few to be of much use. I have therefore confined the extracts
to the mediaeval period, which can be illustrated by selections of moderate

length, and in which such illustration, from the general resemblance
between the individuals of each class, and the comparative rarity of the
original texts, is specially desirable. To avoid the serious drawback of the
difference of principle on which old French reprints have been constructed,
as many of these extracts as possible have been printed from Herr Karl
Bartsch's admirable Chrestomathie. But in cases where extracts were either
not to be found there, or were not, in my judgment, sufficiently
characteristic, I have departed from this plan. The illustration, by extracts,
of the later literature, which requires more space, has been reserved for a
separate volume.
I had also intended to subjoin some tabular views of the chief literary
forms, authors, and books of the successive centuries. But when I formed
this intention I was not aware that such tables already existed in a book very
likely to be in the hands of those who use this work, M. Gustave Masson's
French Dictionary. Although the plan I had formed was not quite identical
with his, and though the execution might have differed in detail, it seemed
both unnecessary and to a certain extent ungracious to trespass on the same
field. With regard to dates the Index will, it is believed, be found to contain
the date of the birth and death, or, if these be not obtainable, the floruit of
every deceased author of any importance who is mentioned in the book. It
has not seemed necessary invariably to duplicate this information in the
text. I have also availed myself of this Index (for the compilation of which I
owe many thanks to Miss S. A. Ingham) to insert a very few particulars,
which seemed to find a better place there than in the body of the volume, as
being not strictly literary.
In conclusion, I think it well to say that the composition of this book has,
owing to the constant pressure of unavoidable occupations, been spread
over a considerable period, and has sometimes been interrupted for many
weeks or even months. This being the case, I fear that there may be some
omissions, perhaps some inconsistencies, not improbably some downright
errors. I do not ask indulgence for these, because that no author who
voluntarily publishes a book has a right to ask, nor, perhaps, have critics a
right to give it. But if any critic will point out to me any errors of fact, I can
promise repentance, as speedy amendment as may be, and what is more,
gratitude.

(1882.)

Preface to the Second Edition.—In the second edition the text has been very
carefully revised. All corrections of fact indicated by critics and private
correspondents, both English and French (among whom I owe especial
thanks to M. A. Beljame), have, after verification, been made. A
considerable number of additional dates of the publication of important
books have been inserted in the text, and the Index has undergone a strict
examination, resulting in the correction of some faults which were due not
to the original compiler but to myself. On the suggestion of several
competent authorities a Conclusion, following the lines of the Interchapters,
is now added. If less deference is shown to some strictures which have been
passed on the plan of the work and the author's literary views, it is due
merely to the conviction that a writer must write his own book in his own
way if it is to be of any good to anybody. But in a few places modifications
of phrases which seemed to have been misconceived or to be capable of
misconception have been made. I have only to add sincere thanks to my
critics for the very general and, I fear, scarcely deserved approval with
which this Short History of a long subject has been received, and to my
readers for the promptness with which a second edition of it has been
demanded.

(1884.)

Preface to the Third Edition.—In making, once more, an examination of
this book for the purposes of a third edition I have again done my best to
correct such mistakes as must (I think I may say inevitably) occur in a very
large number of compressed statements about matter often in itself of great
minuteness and complexity. I have found some such mistakes, and I make
no doubt that I have left some.
In the process of examination I have had the assistance of two detailed
reviews of parts of the book by two French critics, each of very high repute
in his way. The first of these, by M. Gaston Paris, in Romania (XII, 602
sqq.), devoted to the mediæval section only, actually appeared before my
second edition: but accident prevented my availing myself of it fully,
though some important corrections suggested by it were made on a slip
inserted in most of the copies of that issue. The assistance thus given by M.

Paris (whose forbearance in using his great learning as a specialist I have
most cordially to acknowledge) has been supplemented by the appearance,
quite recently, of an admirable condensed sketch of his own[2], which,
compact as it is, is a very storehouse of information on the subject. If in this
book I have not invariably accepted M. Paris' views or embodied his
corrections, it is merely because in points of opinion and inference as
opposed to ascertained fact, the use of independent judgment seems to me
always advisable.
The other criticism (in this case of the later part of my book), by M.
Edmond Scherer, would not seem to have been written in the same spirit.
M. Scherer holds very different views from mine on literature in general
and French literature in particular; he seems (which is perhaps natural) not
to be able to forgive me the difference, and to imagine (which if not
unnatural is perhaps a little unreasonable, a little uncharitable, and even,
considering an express statement in my preface, a little impolite) that I
cannot have read the works on which we differ. I am however grateful to
him for showing that a decidedly hostile examination, conducted with great
minuteness and carefully confined to those parts of the subject with which
the critic is best acquainted, resulted in nothing but the discovery of about
half a dozen or a dozen misprints and slips of fact[3]. One only of these (the
very unpardonable blunder of letting Madame de Staël's Considérations
appear as an early work, which I do not know how I came either to commit
or to overlook) is of real importance. Such slips I have corrected with due
gratitude. But I have not altered passages where M. Scherer mistakes facts
or mistakes me. I need hardly say that I have made no alterations in
criticism, and that the passage referring to M. Scherer himself (with the
exception of a superfluous accent) stands precisely as it did.
Some additions have been made to the latter part of the book, but not very
many: for the attempt to 'write up' such a history to date every few years
can only lead to confusion and disproportion. I have had, during the decade
which has passed since the book was first planned, rather unusual
opportunities of acquainting myself with all new French books of any
importance, but a history is not a periodical, and I have thought it best to
give rather grudging than free admittance to new-comers. On the other
hand, I have endeavoured, as far as possible, to obliterate chronological
references which the effluxion of time has rendered, or may render,

misleading. The notes to which it seemed most important to attract
attention, as modifying or enlarging some statement in the text, are
specially headed 'Notes to Third Edition': but they represent only a small
part of the labour which has been expended on the text. I have also again
overhauled and very considerably enlarged the index; while the
amplification of the 'Contents' by subjoining to each chapter-heading a list
of the side-headings of the paragraphs it contains, will, I think, be found an
advantage. And so I commend the book once more to readers and to
students[4].

FOOTNOTES:
[1] Note to Third Edition.—M. Gaston Paris expresses some surprise at my
saying 'one of the authors,' and attributes both versions to the Troyes clerk (see
pp. 52, 53). I can only say that so long as Renart le Contrefait is unpublished, if
not longer, such a question is difficult to decide: and that the accepted
monograph on the subject (that of Wolf) left on my mind the impression of
plural authorship as probable.
[2] La Littérature Française du Moyen Age (Paris, 1888).
[3] A preface is but an ill place for controversy. As however M. Scherer, thanks
chiefly to the late Mr. Matthew Arnold, enjoys some repute in England, I may
give an example of his censure. He accuses me roundly of giving in my thirty
dates of Corneille's plays 'une dizaine de fausses,' and he quotes (as I do) M.
Marty-Laveaux. As since the beginning, years ago, of my Cornelian studies, I
have constantly used that excellent edition, though, now as always, reserving my
own judgment on points of opinion, I verified M. Scherer's appeal with some
alarm at first, and more amusement afterwards. The eminent critic of the Temps
had apparently contented himself with turning to the half-titles of the plays and
noting the dates given, which in ten instances do differ from mine. Had his
patience been equal to consulting the learned editor's Notices, he would have
found in every case but one the reasons which prevailed and prevail with me
given by M. Marty-Laveaux himself. The one exception I admit. I was guilty of
the iniquity of confusing the date of the publication of Othon with the date of its
production, and printing 1665 instead of 1664. So dangerous is it to digest and
weigh an editor's arguments, instead of simply copying his dates. Had I done the
latter, I had 'scaped M. Scherer's tooth.
[4] The remarks on M. Scherer in this preface (and I need hardly say still more
those which occur in the body of the book with reference to a few others of his
criticisms) were written long before his fatal illness, and had been sent finally to
press some time before the announcement of his death. I had at first thought of
endeavouring to suppress those which could be recalled. But it seemed to me on
reflection that the best compliment to the memory of a man who was himself
nothing if not uncompromising, and towards whom, whether alive or dead, I am

not conscious of having entertained any ill-feeling, would be to print them
exactly as they stood, with the brief addition that I have not known a critic more
acute within his range, or more honest according to what he saw, than M.
Edmond Scherer. (March 20, 1889.)

CONTENTS.
PAGE

Preface v

BOOK I.

Mediaeval Literature.

Chap. I. The Origins 1

Relation of French to Latin. Influence of Latin Literature. Early
Monuments. Dialects and Provincial Literatures. Beginning of Literature
proper. Cantilenae. Trouvères and Jongleurs.

II. Chansons de Gestes 10

Origin of Chansons de Gestes. Definition. Period of
Composition. Chanson de Roland. Amis et Amiles.
Other principal Chansons. Social and Literary Characteristics.
Authorship. Style and Language. Later History.

III. Provençal Literature 26

Langue d'Oc. Range and characteristics. Periods of
Provençal Literature. First Period. Second Period.
Forms of Troubadour Poetry. Third Period. Literary
Relation of Provençal and French. Defects of Provençal
Literature.

IV. Romances of Arthur and of Antiquity 34

The Tale of Arthur. Its Origin. Order of French Arthurian
Cycle. Chrestien de Troyes. Spirit and Literary
value of Arthurian Romances. Romances of Antiquity.
Chanson d'Alixandre. Roman de Troie. Other Romances
on Classical subjects.

V. Fabliaux. The Roman du Renart 47

Foreign Elements in Early French Literature. The Esprit
Gaulois makes its appearance. Definition of Fabliaux.
Subjects and character of Fabliaux. Sources of Fabliaux.
The Roman du Renart. The Ancien Renart. Le Couronnement
Renart. Renart le Nouvel. Renart le Contrefait.
Fauvel.

VI. Early Lyrics 62

Early and Later Lyrics. Origins of Lyric. Romances
and Pastourelles. Thirteenth Century. Changes in Lyric.
Traces of Lyric in the Thirteenth Century. Quesnes de
Bethune. Thibaut de Champagne. Minor Singers. Adam
de la Halle. Rutebœuf. Lais. Marie de France.

VII. Serious and Allegorical Poetry 75

Verse Chronicles. Miscellaneous Satirical Verse. Didactic
verse. Philippe de Thaun. Moral and Theological verse.
Allegorical verse. The Roman de la Rose. Popularity
of the Roman de la Rose. Imitations.

VIII. Romans D'Aventures 91

Distinguishing features of Romans d'Aventures. Looser
application of the term. Classes of Romans d'Aventures.
Adenès le Roi. Raoul de Houdenc. Chief Romans
d'Aventures. General Character. Last Chansons. Baudouin
de Sebourc.

IX. Later Songs and Poems 100

The Artificial Forms of Northern France. General Character.
Varieties. Jehannot de Lescurel. Guillaume de
Machault. Eustache Deschamps. Froissart. Christine
de Pisan. Alain Chartier.

X. The Drama 110

Origins of the Drama. Earliest Vernacular Dramatic
Forms. Mysteries and Miracles. Miracles de la Vierge.
Heterogeneous Character of Mysteries. Argument of a
Miracle Play. Profane Drama. Adam de la Halle.
Monologues. Farces. Moralities. Soties. Profane
Mysteries. Societies of Actors.

XI. Prose Chronicles 127

Beginning of Prose Chronicles. Grandes Chroniques de
France. Villehardouin. Minor Chroniclers between Villehardouin
and Joinville. Joinville. Froissart. Fifteenth-Century
Chroniclers.

XII. Miscellaneous Prose 140

General use of Prose. Prose Sermons. St. Bernard.
Maurice de Sully. Later Preachers. Gerson. Moral and
Devotional Treatises. Translators. Political and Polemical
Works. Codes and Legal Treatises. Miscellanies
and Didactic Works. Fiction. Antoine de la Salle.

Interchapter I. Summary of Mediaeval Literature 151

BOOK II.

The Renaissance.

Chap. I. Villon, Comines, and the later Fifteenth Century 155

The Middle Ages and the Renaissance. Characteristics
of Fifteenth-century Literature. Villon. Comines. Coquillart.
Baude. Martial d'Auvergne. The Rhétoriqueurs.
Chansons du xvème Siècle. Preachers.

II. Marot and his Contemporaries 168

Hybrid School of Poetry. Jean le Maire. Jehan du
Pontalais. Roger de Collérye. Minor Predecessors of Marot.
Clément Marot. The School of Marot. Mellin de Saint-Gelais.
Miscellaneous Verse. Anciennes Poésies Françaises.

III. Rabelais and his Followers 183

Fiction at the beginning of the Sixteenth Century. Rabelais.
Bonaventure des Périers. The Heptameron. Noel du
Fail. G. Bouchet. Cholières. Apologie pour Hérodote.

Moyen de Parvenir.

IV. The Pléiade 196

Character and Effects of the Pléiade Movement. Ronsard.
The Défense et Illustration de la Langue Française. Du
Bellay. Belleau. Baïf. Daurat, Jodelle, Pontus de
Tyard. Magny. Tahureau. Minor Ronsardists. Du
Bartas. D'Aubigné. Desportes. Bertaut.

V. The Theatre from Gringore to Garnier 216

Gringore. The last Age of the Mediaeval Theatre. Beginnings
of the Classical Drama. Jodelle. Minor Pléiade
Dramatists. Garnier. Defects of the Pléiade Tragedy.
Pléiade Comedy. Larivey.

VI. Calvin and Amyot 228

Prose Writers of the Renaissance. Calvin. Minor Reformers
and Controversialists. Preachers of the League.
Amyot. Minor Translators. Dolet. Fauchet. Pasquier.
Henri Estienne. Herberay. Palissy. Paré. Olivier de Serres.

VII. Montaigne and Brantôme 241

Disenchantment of the late Renaissance. Montaigne.
Charron. Du Vair. Bodin and other Political Writers.
Brantôme. Montluc. La Noue. Agrippa d'Aubigné.
Marguerite de Valois. Vieilleville. Palma-Cayet. Pierre
de l'Estoile. D'Ossat. Sully. Jeannin. Minor Memoir-writers.
General Historians.

VIII. The Satyre Ménippée. Regnier 259

Satyre Ménippée. Regnier.

Interchapter II. Summary of Renaissance Literature 270

BOOK III.

The Seventeenth Century.

Chap. I. Poets 274

Malherbe. The School of Malherbe. Vers de Société.
Voiture. Epic School. Chapelain. Bacchanalian School.
Saint Amant. La Fontaine. Boileau. Minor Poets of the
Seventeenth Century.

II. Dramatists 290

Montchrestien. Hardy. Minor predecessors of Corneille.
Rotrou. Corneille. Racine. Minor Tragedians. Development
of Comedy. Molière. Contemporaries of
Molière. The School of Molière. Regnard. Characteristics
of Molièresque Comedy.

III. Novelists 319

D'Urfé. The Heroic Romances. Scarron. Cyrano de
Bergerac. Furetière. Madame de la Fayette. Fairy
Tales. Perrault.

IV. Historians, Memoir-writers, Letter-writers 332

General Historians. Mézeray. Historical Essayists.
St. Réal. Memoir-writers. Rohan. Bassompierre.
Madame de Motteville. Cardinal de Retz. Mademoiselle.
La Rochefoucauld. Saint Simon. Madame de Sévigné.
Tallemant des Réaux. Historical Antiquaries. Du Cange.

V. Essayists, Minor Moralists, Critics 354

Balzac. Pascal. La Rochefoucauld. La Bruyère.

VI. Philosophers 368

Descartes. Port Royal. Bayle. Malebranche.

VII. Theologians and Preachers 379

St. François de Sales. Bossuet. Fénelon. Massillon.
Bourdaloue. Minor Preachers.

Interchapter III. Summary of Seventeenth-century Literature 391

BOOK IV.

The Eighteenth Century.

Chap. I. Poets 395

Literary Degeneracy of the Eighteenth Century, especially

manifest in Poetry. J. B. Rousseau. Voltaire. Descriptive
Poets. Delille. Lebrun. Parny. Chénier. Minor
Poets. Light Verse. Piron. Désaugiers.

Chap. II. Dramatists 406

Divisions of Drama. La Motte. Crébillon the Elder.
Voltaire and his followers. Lesage. Comédie Larmoyante.
La Chaussée. Diderot. Marivaux. Beaumarchais. Characteristics
of Eighteenth-century Drama.

III. Novelists 416

Lesage. Marivaux. Prévost. Voltaire. Diderot. Rousseau.
Crébillon the Younger. Bernardin de St. Pierre. Restif
de la Bretonne. Chateaubriand. Madame de Staël.
Xavier de Maistre. Benjamin Constant.

IV. Historians, Memoir-writers, Letter-writers 436

Characteristics and Divisions of Eighteenth-century History.
Rollin. Dubos. Boulainvilliers. Voltaire. Mably.
Rulhière. Memoirs. Mme. de Staal-Delaunay. Duclos.
Bésenval. Madame d'Epinay. Minor Memoirs. Memoirs
of the Revolutionary Period. Abundance of Letter-writers.
Mademoiselle Aïssé. Madame du Deffand. Mademoiselle
de Lespinasse. Voltaire. Diderot. Galiani.

V. Essayists, Minor Moralists, Critics 452

Occasional Writing in the Eighteenth-century. Periodicals.
Fontenelle. La Motte. Vauvenargues. D'Aguesseau.
Duclos. Marmontel. La Harpe. Thomas. Orthodox

Apologists. Fréron. Philosophe Criticism. D'Alembert.
Diderot. Les Feuilles de Grimm. Diderot's Salons. His
General Criticism. Newspapers of the Revolution. The
Influence of Journalism. Chamfort. Rivarol. Joubert.
Courier. Sénancour.

VI. Philosophers 473

The philosophe movement. Montesquieu. Lettres Persanes.
Grandeur et Décadence des Romains. Esprit des
Lois. Voltaire. The Encyclopædia. Diderot. D'Alembert.
Rousseau. Political Economists. Vauban, Quesnay,
etc. Turgot. Condorcet. Volney. La Mettrie. Helvétius.
Système de la Nature. Condillac. Joseph de
Maistre. Bonald.

VII. Scientific Writers 499

Buffon. Lesser Scientific Writers. Voyages and Travels.
Linguistic and Literary Study.

Interchapter IV. Summary of Eighteenth-century Literature 504

BOOK V.

The Nineteenth Century 510

The Romantic Movement. Writers of the later Transition.
Béranger. Lamartine. Lamennais. Victor Cousin. Beyle.
Nodier. Delavigne. Soumet. The Romantic Propaganda
in Periodicals. Victor Hugo. Sainte-Beuve. His Method.
Dangers of the Method. Dumas the Elder. Honoré de
Balzac. George Sand. Mérimée. Théophile Gautier.

Alfred de Musset. Influence of the Romantic Leaders.
Minor Poets of 1830. Alfred de Vigny. Auguste Barbier.
Gérard de Nerval. Curiosités Romantiques. Pétrus Borel.
Louis Bertrand. Second Group of Romantic Poets.
Théodore de Banville. Leconte de Lisle. Charles Baudelaire.
Minor Poets of the Second Romantic Group.
Dupont. The Parnasse. Minor and later Dramatists.
Scribe. Ponsard. Emile Augier. Eugène Labiche. Dumas
the Younger. Victorien Sardou. Classes of Nineteenth-century
Fiction. Minor and later Novelists. Jules Janin.
Charles de Bernard. Jules Sandeau. Octave Feuillet.
Murger. Edmond About. Feydeau. Gustave Droz.
Flaubert. The Naturalists. Emile Zola. Journalists
and Critics. Paul de St. Victor. Hippolyte Taine.
Academic Critics. Linguistic and Literary Study of
French. Philosophical Writers. Comte. Theological
Writers. Montalembert. Ozanam. Lacordaire. Ernest
Renan. Historians. Thierry. Thiers. Guizot. Mignet.
Michelet. Quinet. Tocqueville. Minor Historians.

Conclusion 579

Index 591

BOOK I.
MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE.

CHAPTER I.
THE ORIGINS.

Of all European literatures the French is, by general
consent, that which possesses the most uniformly fertile, Relation of French
to Latin.
brilliant, and unbroken history. In actual age it may
possibly yield to others, but the connection between the language of the
oldest and the language of the newest French literature is far closer than in
these other cases, and the fecundity of mediaeval writers in France far
exceeds that of their rivals elsewhere. For something like three centuries
England, Germany, Italy, and more doubtfully and to a smaller extent,
Spain, were content for the most part to borrow the matter and the manner
of their literary work from France. This brilliant literature was however
long before it assumed a regularly organized form, and in order that it might
do so a previous literature and a previous language had to be dissolved and
precipitated anew. With a few exceptions, to be presently noticed, French
literature is not to be found till after the year 1000, that is to say until a
greater lapse of time had passed since Caesar's campaigns than has passed
from the later date to the present day. Taking the earliest of all monuments,
the Strasburg Oaths, as starting-point, we may say that French language and
French literature were nine hundred years in process of formation. The
result was a remarkable one in linguistic history. French is unquestionably a
daughter of Latin, yet it is not such a daughter as Italian or Spanish. A
knowledge of the older language would enable a reader who knew no other
to spell out, more or less painfully, the meaning of most pages of the two
Peninsular languages; it would hardly enable him to do more than guess at
the meaning of a page of French. The long process of gestation transformed
the appearance of the new tongue completely, though its grammatical forms
and the bulk of its vocabulary are beyond all question Latin. The history of
this process belongs to the head of language, not of literature, and must be
sought elsewhere. It is sufficient to say that the first mention of a lingua
romana rustica is found in the seventh century, while allusions in Latin
documents show us its gradual use in pulpit and market-place, and even as a

vehicle for the rude songs of the minstrel, long before any trace of written
French can be found.
Meanwhile, however, Latin was doing more than merely
furnishing the materials of the new language. The Influence of Latin
literary faculty of the Gauls was early noticed, and Literature.
before their subjection had long been completed they were adepts at using
the language of the conquerors. It does not fall within our plan to notice in
detail the Latin literature of Gaul and early France, but the later varieties of
that literature deserve some little attention, because of the influence which
they undoubtedly exercised on the literary forms of the new language. In
early French there is little trace of the influence of the Latin forms which
we call classical. It was the forms of the language which has been said to
have 'dived under ground with Naevius and come up again with Prudentius'
that really influenced the youthful tongue. Ecclesiastical Latin, and
especially the wonderful melody of the early Latin hymn-writers, had by far
the greatest effect upon it. Ingenious and not wholly groundless efforts have
been made to trace the principal forms of early French writing to the
services and service-books of the church, the chronicle to the sacred
histories, the lyric to the psalm and the hymn, the mystery to the elaborate
and dramatic ritual of the church. The Chanson de Geste, indeed, displays
in its matter and style many traces of Germanic origin, but the metre with
its regular iambic cadence and its rigid caesura testifies to Latin influence.
The service thus performed to the literature was not unlike the service
performed to the language. In the one case the scaffolding, or rather the
skeleton, was furnished in the shape of grammar; in the other a similar
skeleton, in the shape of prosody, was supplied. Important additions were
indeed made by the fresh elements introduced. Rhyme Latin had itself
acquired. But of the musical refrains which are among the most charming
features of early French lyric poetry we find no vestige in the older tongue.
The history of the French language, as far as concerns
literature, from the seventh to the eleventh century, can Early Monuments.
be rapidly given. The earliest mention of the Romance
tongue as distinguished from Latin and from German dialect refers to 659,
and occurs in the life of St. Mummolinus or Momolenus, bishop of Noyon,
who was chosen for that office because of his knowledge of the two
languages, Teutonic and Romanic[5]. We may therefore assume that

Mummolinus preached in the lingua Romana. To the same century is
referred the song of St. Faron, bishop of Meaux[6], but this only exists in
Latin, and a Romance original is inferred rather than proved. In the eighth
century the Romance eloquence of St. Adalbert is commended[7], and to the
same period are referred the glossaries of Reichenau and Cassel, lists
containing in the first case Latin and Romance equivalents, in the second
Teutonic and Romance[8]. By the beginning of the ninth century it was
compulsory for bishops to preach in Romance, and to translate such Latin
homilies as they read[9]; and to this same era has been referred a
fragmentary commentary on the Book of Jonah[10], included in the latest
collection of 'Monuments[11].' In 842 we have the Strasburg Oaths,
celebrated alike in French history and French literature. The text of the MS.
of Nithard which contains them is of the tenth century.
We now come to documents less shapeless. The tenth century itself gives us
the song of St. Eulalie, a poem on the Passion, a life of St. Leger, and
perhaps a poem on Boethius. These four documents are of the highest
interest. Not merely has the language assumed a tolerably regular form, but
its great division into Langue d'Oc and Langue d'Oil is already made, and
grammar, prosody, and other necessities or ornaments of bookwriting, are
present. The following extracts will illustrate this part of French literature.
The Romance oaths and the 'St. Eulalie' are given in full, the 'Passion' and
the 'St. Leger' in extract; it will be observed that the interval between the
first and the others is of very considerable width. This interval probably
represents a century of active change, and of this unfortunately we have no
monuments to mark the progress accurately.

Les Serments de Strasbourg de 842.

Pro deo amur et pro christian poblo et nostro commun
salvament, d'ist di in avant, in quant deus savir et podir me
dunat, si salvarai eo cist meon fradre Karlo et in aiudha et in
cadhuna cosa, si cum on per dreit son fradra salvar dist, in o
quid il mi altresi fazet, et ab Ludher nul plaid nunqua prindrai,
qui meon vol cist meon fradre Karle in damno sit.

Si Lodhuvigs sagrament, quæ son fradre Karlo jurat, conservat,
et Karlus meos sendra de sua part nun los tanit, si io returnar
nun l'int pois, ne io ne nëuls, cui eo returnar int pois, in nulla
aiudha contra Lodhuwig nun li iv er.

Cantilène de Sainte Eulalie.

Buona pulcella fut Eulalia,
bel auret corps, bellezour anima.
Voldrent la veintre li deo inimi,
voldrent la faire dïaule servir.
Elle non eskoltet les mals conselliers,
qu'elle deo raneiet, chi maent sus en ciel,
Ne por or ned argent ne paramenz,
por manatce regiel ne preiement.
Nïule cose non la pouret omque pleier,
la polle sempre non amast lo deo menestier.
E poro fut presentede Maximiien,
chi rex eret a cels dis sovre pagiens
El li enortet, dont lei nonque chielt.
qued elle fuiet lo nom christiien.
Ell' ent adunet lo suon element,
melz sostendreiet les empedementz,
Qu'elle perdesse sa virginitet:
poros furet morte a grand honestet.
Enz enl fou la getterent, com arde tost.
elle colpes non auret, poro nos coist.
A ezo nos voldret concreidre li rex pagiens;
ad une spede li roveret tolir lo chief.
La domnizelle celle kose non contredist,
volt lo seule lazsier, si ruovet Krist.
In figure de colomb volat a ciel.
tuit orem, que por nos deguet preier,
Qued auuisset de nos Christus mercit
post la mort et a lui nos laist venir
Par souue clementia.

La Passion Du Christ.

Christus Jhesus den s'en leved,
Gehsesmani vil' es n'anez.
toz sos fidels seder rovet,
avan orar sols en anet.
Grant fu li dois, fort marrimenz.
si condormirent tuit adés.
Jhesus cum veg los esveled,
trestoz orar ben los manded.
E dunc orar cum el anned,
si fort sudor dunques suded,
que cum lo sangs a terra curren
de sa sudor las sanctas gutas.
Als sos fidels cum repadred,
tam benlement los conforted
li fel Judas ja s'aproismed
ab gran cumpannie dels judeus.
Jhesus cum vidra los judeus,
zo lor demandet que querént.
il li respondent tuit adun
'Jhesum querem Nazarenum.'
'Eu soi aquel,' zo dis Jhesus.
tuit li felun cadegren jos.
terce ves lor o demanded,
a totas treis chedent envers.

Vie de Saint Léger.

Domine deu devemps lauder
et a sus sancz honor porter;
in su' amor cantomps dels sanz
quæ por lui augrent granz aanz;
et or es temps et si est biens
quæ nos cantumps de sant Lethgier.
Primos didrai vos dels honors
quie il auuret ab duos seniors;

apres ditrai vos dels aanz
que li suos corps susting si granz,
et Evvruïns, cil deumentiz,
qui lui a grand torment occist.
Quant infans fud, donc a ciels temps
al rei lo duistrent soi parent,
qui donc regnevet a ciel di:
cio fud Lothiers fils Baldequi.
il le amat; deu lo covit;
rovat que litteras apresist.
Considering the great extent and the political divisions Dialects and
of the country called France, it is not surprising that the Provincial
language which was so slowly formed should have Literatures.
shown considerable dialectic variations. The characteristics of these
dialects, Norman, Picard, Walloon, Champenois, Angevin, and so forth,
have been much debated by philologists. But it so happens that the different
provinces displayed in point of literature considerable idiosyncrasy, which
it is scarcely possible to dispute. Hardly a district of France but contributed
something special to her wide and varied literature. The South, though its
direct influence was not great, undoubtedly set the example of attention to
lyrical form and cadence. Britanny contributed the wonderfully suggestive
Arthurian legends, and the peculiar music and style of the lai. The border
districts of Flanders seem to deserve the credit of originating the great
beast-epic of Reynard the Fox; Picardy, Eastern Normandy, and the Isle of
France were peculiarly rich in the fabliau; Champagne was the special
home of the lighter lyric poetry, while almost all northern France had a
share in the Chansons de Gestes, many districts, such as Lorraine and the
Cambrésis, having a special geste of their own.
It is however with the eleventh century that the history
of French literature properly so called begins. We have Beginning of
Literature proper.
indeed few Romance manuscripts so early as this, the
date of most of them not being earlier than the twelfth. But by the eleventh
century not merely were laws written in French (charters and other formal
documents were somewhat later), not merely were sermons constantly
composed and preached in that tongue, but also works of definite literature
were produced in it. The Chanson de Roland is our only instance of its epic

literature, but is not likely to have stood alone: the mystery of The Ten
Virgins, a medley of French and Latin, has been (but perhaps falsely)
ascribed to the same date; and lyric poetry, even putting aside the obscure
and doubtful Cantilènes, was certainly indulged in to a considerable extent.
From this date it is therefore possible to abandon generalities, and taking
the successive forms and developments of literature, to deal with them in
detail.
Before however we attempt a systematic account of French literature as it
has been actually handed down to us, it is necessary to deal very briefly
with two questions, one of which concerns the antecedence of possible
ballad literature to the existing Chansons de Gestes, the other the machinery
of diffusion to which this and all the early historical developments of the
written French language owed much.
It has been held by many scholars, whose opinions
deserve respect, that an extensive literature of Cantilenae.
Cantilenae[12], or short historical ballads, preceded the
lengthy epics which we now possess, and was to a certain extent worked up
in these compositions. It is hardly necessary to say that this depends in part
upon a much larger question—the question, namely, of the general origins
of epic poetry. There are indeed certain references[13] to these Cantilenae
upon which the theories alluded to have been built. But the Cantilenae
themselves have, as one of the best of French literary historians, the late M.
Paulin Paris, remarks of another debated product, the Provençal epic, only
one defect, 'le défaut d'être perdu,' and investigation on the subject is
therefore more curious than profitable. No remnant of them survives save
the already-mentioned Latin prose canticle of St. Faron, in which vestiges
of a French and versified original are thought to be visible, and the ballad of
Saucourt, a rough song in a Teutonic dialect[14]. In default of direct
evidence an argument has been sought to be founded on the constant
transitions, repetitions, and other peculiarities of the Chansons, some of
which (and especially Roland, the most famous of all) present traces of
repeated handlings of the same subject, such as might be expected in work
which was merely that of a diaskeuast[15] of existing lays.
It is however probable that the explanation of this phenomenon need not be
sought further than in the circumstances of the composition and publication

of these poems, circumstances which also had a very
considerable influence on the whole course and Trouvères and
Jongleurs.
character of early French literature. We know nothing of
the rise or origin of the two classes of Trouveurs and Jongleurs. The former
(which it is needless to say is the same word as Troubadour, and Trobador,
and Trovatore) is the term for the composing class, the latter for the
performing one. But the separation was not sharp or absolute, and there are
abundant instances of Trouvères[16] who performed their own works, and of
Jongleurs who aspired to the glories if not of original authorship, at any rate
of alteration and revision of the legends they sang or recited. The natural
consequence of this irregular form of publication was a good deal of
repetition in the works published. Different versions of the legends easily
enough got mixed together by the copyist, who it must be remembered was
frequently a mere mechanical reproducer, and neither Trouvère nor
Jongleur; nor should it be forgotten that, so long as recitation was general,
repetitions of this kind were almost inevitable as a rest to the reciter's
memory, and were scarcely likely to attract unfavourable remark or
criticism from the audience. We may therefore conclude, without entering
further into the details of a debate unsuitable to the plan of this history, that,
while but scanty evidence has been shown of the existence previous to the
Chansons de Gestes of a ballad literature identical in subject with those
compositions, at the same time the existence of such a literature is neither
impossible nor improbable. It is otherwise with the hypothesis of the
existence of prose chronicles, from which the early epics (and Roland in
particular) are also held to have derived their origin. But this subject will be
better handled when we come to treat of the beginnings of French prose.
For the present it is sufficient to say that, with the exception of the scattered
fragments already commented upon, there is no department of French
literature before the eleventh century and the Chansons de Gestes, which
possesses historical existence proved by actual monuments, and thus
demands or deserves treatment here.

FOOTNOTES:
[5] 'Fama bonorum operum, quia praevalebat non tantum in Teutonica sed in
Romana lingua, Lotharii regis ad aures usque perveniente,' says his life. The
chronicler Sigebert confirms the statement that he was made bishop 'quod

Romanam non minus quam Teutonicam calleret linguam.' Lingua Latina and
Lingua Romana are from this time distinguished.
[6] The Latin form of the song is given by Helgaire, Bishop of Meaux, who
wrote a life of St. Faron, his predecessor, towards the end of the ninth century.
Helgaire uses the words 'juxta rusticitatem,' 'carmen rusticum;' and Lingua
Rustica is usually if not universally synonymous with Lingua Romana.
[7] 'Si vulgari id est romana lingua loqueretur omnium aliarum putares inscium.'
[8] The Reichenau Glossary is at Carlsruhe. It was published in 1863 by
Holtzmann. The Cassel Glossary, which came from Fulda, was published in the
last century (1729).
[9] Ordered by the Councils of Tours, Rheims, and Arles (813-851).
[10] In the Library at Valenciennes.
[11] Les plus anciens Monuments de la Langue Française. Paris, 1875.
[12] The subject of the Cantilenae is discussed at great length by M. Léon
Gautier, Les Epopées Françaises, Ed. 2, vol. i. caps. 8-13. Paris, 1878.
[13] These, which are for the most part very vague and not very early, will be
found fully quoted and discussed in Gautier, l. c.
[14] Published by Hoffmann von Fallersleben (1837).
[15] This word (= arranger or putter-in-order) is familiar in Homeric discussion,
and therefore seems appropriate. M. Gaston Paris speaks with apparent
confidence of the pre-existing chants, and, in matter of authority, no one speaks
with more than he: but it can hardly be said that there is proof of the fact.
[16] The older and in this case more usual form.

CHAPTER II.
THE CHANSONS DE GESTES.

The earliest form which finished literature took in France was that of epic
or narrative poetry. Towards the middle of the eleventh century certainly,
and probably some half-century earlier, poems of regular construction and
considerable length began to be written. These are the Chansons de Gestes,
so called from their dealing with the Gestes[17], or heroic families of
legendary or historical France. It is remarkable that this class of
composition, notwithstanding its age, its merits, and the abundant examples
of it which have been preserved, was one of the latest to receive recognition
in modern times. The matter of many of the Chansons, under their later
form of verse or prose romances of chivalry, was indeed more or less
known in the eighteenth century. But an appreciation of their real age,
value, and interest has been the reward of the literary investigations of our
own time. It was not till 1837 that the oldest and the most remarkable of
them was first edited from the manuscript found in the Bodleian Library[18].
Since that time investigation has been constant and fruitful, and there are
now more than one hundred of these interesting poems known.
The origin and sources of the Chansons de Gestes have
been made a matter of much controversy. We have Origin of Chansons
de Gestes.
already seen how, from the testimony of historians and
the existence of a few fragments, it appears that rude lays or ballads in the
different vernacular tongues of the country were composed and sung if not
written down at very early dates. According to one theory, we are to look
for the origin of the long and regular epics of the eleventh and subsequent
centuries in these rude compositions, first produced independently, then
strung together, and lastly subjected to some process of editing and union. It
has been sought to find proof of this in the frequent repetitions which take
place in the Chansons, and which sometimes amount to the telling of the
same incident over and over again in slightly varying words. Others have
seen in this peculiarity only a result of improvisation in the first place, and

unskilful or at least uncritical copying in the second. This, however, is a
question rather interesting than important. What is certain is that no literary
source of the Chansons is now actually in existence, and that we have no
authentic information as to any such originals. At a certain period—
approximately given above—the fashion of narrative poems on the great
scale seems to have arisen in France. It spread rapidly, and was eagerly
copied by other nations.
The definition of a Chanson de Geste is as follows. It is
a narrative poem, dealing with a subject connected with Definition.
French history, written in verses of ten or twelve
syllables, which verses are arranged in stanzas of arbitrary length, each
stanza possessing a distinguishing assonance or rhyme in the last syllable of
each line. The assonance, which is characteristic of the earlier Chansons, is
an imperfect rhyme, in which identity of vowel sound is all that is
necessary. Thus traitor, felon, compaingnons, manons, noz, the first, fourth,
and fifth of which have no character of rhyme whatever in modern poetry,
are sufficient terminations for an assonanced poem, because the last vowel
sound, o, is identical. There is moreover in this versification a regular
caesura, sometimes after the fourth, sometimes after the sixth syllable; and
in a few of the older examples the stanzas, or as they are sometimes called
laisses, terminate in a shorter line than usual, which is not assonanced. This
metrical system, it will be observed, is of a fairly elaborate character, a
character which has been used as an argument by those who insist on the
existence of a body of ballad literature anterior to the Chansons. We shall
see in the following chapters how this double definition of a Chanson de
Geste, by matter and by form, serves to exclude from the title other
important and interesting classes of compositions slightly later in date.
The period of composition of these poems extended,
speaking roughly, over three centuries. In the eleventh Period of
they began, but the beginnings are represented only by Composition.
Roland, the Voyage de Charlemagne, and perhaps Le Roi Louis. Most and
nearly all the best date from the twelfth. The thirteenth century also
produces them in great numbers, but by this time a sensible change has
come over their manner, and after the beginning of the fourteenth only a
few pieces deserving the title are written. They then undergo transformation
rather than neglect, and we shall meet them at a later period in other forms.

Before dealing with other general characteristics of the early epics of
France it will be well to give some notion of them by actual selection and
narrative. For this purpose we shall take two Chansons typical of two out of
the three stages through which they passed. Roland will serve as a sample
of the earliest, Amis et Amiles of the second. Of the third, as less
characteristic in itself and less marked by uniform features, it will be
sufficient to give some account when we come to the compositions which
chiefly influenced it, namely the romances of Arthur and of antiquity.
The Chanson de Roland, the most ancient and
characteristic of these poems, though extremely popular Chanson de Roland.
in the middle ages[19], passed with them into obscurity.
The earliest allusion to the Oxford MS., which alone represents its earliest
form, was made by Tyrwhitt a century ago. Conybeare forty years later
dealt with it in the Gentleman's Magazine of 1817, and by degrees the
reviving interest of France in her older literature attracted French scholars
to this most important monument of the oldest French. It was first published
as a whole by M. F. Michel in 1837, and since that time it has been the
subject of a very great amount of study. Its length is 4001 decasyllabic
lines, and it concludes with an obscure assertion of authorship, publication
or transcription by a certain Turoldus[20]. The date of the Oxford MS. is
probably the middle of the twelfth century, but its text is attributed by the
best authorities to the end of the eleventh. There are other MSS., but they
are all either mutilated or of much later date. The argument of the poem is
as follows:—
Charlemagne has warred seven years in Spain, but king Marsile of
Saragossa still resists the Christian conqueror. Unable however to meet
Charlemagne in the field, he sends an embassy with presents and a feigned
submission, requesting that prince to return to France, whither he will
follow him and do homage. Roland opposes the reception of these offers,
Ganelon speaks in their favour, and so does Duke Naimes. Then the
question is who shall go to Saragossa to settle the terms. Roland offers to go
himself, but being rejected as too impetuous, suggests Ganelon—a
suggestion which bitterly annoys that knight and by irritating him against
Roland sows the seeds of his future treachery. Ganelon goes to Marsile, and
at first bears himself truthfully and gallantly. The heathen king however
undermines his faith, and a treacherous assault on the French rearguard

when Charlemagne shall be too far off to succour it is resolved on and
planned. Then the traitor returns to Charles with hostages and mighty gifts.
The return to France begins; Roland is stationed to his great wrath in the
fatal place, the rest of the army marches through the Pyrenees, and
meanwhile Marsile gathers an enormous host to fall upon the isolated
rearguard. There is a long catalogue of the felon and miscreant knights and
princes that follow the Spanish king. The pagan host, travelling by cross
paths of the mountains, soon reaches and surrounds Roland and the peers.
Oliver entreats Roland to sound his horn that Charles may hear it and come
to the rescue, but the eager and inflexible hero refuses. Archbishop Turpin
blesses the doomed host, and bids them as the price of his absolution strike
hard. The battle begins and all its incidents are told. The French kill
thousands, but thousands more succeed. Peer after peer falls, and when at
last Roland blows the horn it is too late. Charlemagne hears it and turns
back in an agony of sorrow and haste. But long before he reaches
Roncevaux Roland has died last of his host, and alone, for all the Pagans
have fallen or fled before him.
The arrival of Charlemagne, his grief, and his vengeance on the Pagans,
should perhaps conclude the poem. There is however a sort of afterpiece, in
which the traitor Ganelon is tried, his fate being decided by a single combat
between his kinsman Pinabel and a champion named Thierry, and is
ruthlessly put to death with all his clansmen who have stood surety for him.
Episodes properly so called the poem has none, though the character of
Oliver is finely brought out as contrasted with Roland's somewhat
unreasoning valour, and there is one touching incident when the poet tells
how the Lady Aude, Oliver's sister and Roland's betrothed, falls dead
without a word when the king tells her of the fatal fight at Roncevaux. The
following passage will give an idea of the style of this famous poem. It may
be noticed that the curious refrain Aoi has puzzled all commentators, though
in calling it a refrain we have given the most probable explanation:—

Rollanz s'en turnet, par le camp vait tut suls
cercet les vals e si cercet les munz;
iloec truvat Ivorie et Ivun,
truvat Gerin, Gerer sun cumpaignun,
iloec truvat Engeler le Gascun
e si truvat Berenger e Orun,

iloec truvat Anseïs e Sansun,
truvat Gérard le veill de Russillun:
par un e un les ad pris le barun,
al arcevesque en est venuz atut,
sis mist en reng dedevant ses genuilz.
li arcevesque ne poet muër n'en plurt;
lievet sa main, fait sa beneïçun;
aprés ad dit 'mare fustes, seignurs!
tutes voz anmes ait deus li glorïus!
en pareïs les mete en seintes flurs!
la meie mort me rent si anguissus,
ja ne verrai le riche emperëur.'
Rollanz s'en turnet, le camp vait recercer;
desoz un pin e folut e ramer
sun cumpaignun ad truved Oliver,
cuntre sun piz estreit l'ad enbracet.
si cum il poet al arcevesque en vent,
sur un escut l'ad as altres culchet;
e l'arcevesque l'ad asols e seignet.
idonc agreget le doel e la pitet.
ço dit Rollanz 'bels cumpainz Oliver,
vos fustes filz al bon cunte Reiner,
ki tint la marche de Genes desur mer;
pur hanste freindre e pur escuz pecier
e pur osberc e rompre e desmailler,
[pur orgoillos veintre e esmaier]
e pur prozdomes tenir e conseiller
e pur glutuns e veintre e esmaier
en nule terre n'ot meillor chevaler.'
Li quens Rollanz, quant il veit morz ses pers
e Oliver, qu'il tant poeit amer,
tendrur en out, cumencet a plurer,
en sun visage fut mult desculurez.
si grant doel out que mais ne pout ester,
voeillet o nun, a terre chet pasmet.
dist l'arcevesques 'tant mare fustes, ber.'
Li arcevesques quant vit pasmer Rollant,

dunc out tel doel, unkes mais n'out si grant;
tendit sa main, si ad pris l'olifan.
en Rencesvals ad une ewe curant;
aler i volt, si'n durrat a Rollant.
tant s'esforçat qu'il se mist en estant,
sun petit pas s'en turnet cancelant,
il est si fieble qu'il ne poet en avant,
nen ad vertut, trop ad perdut del sanc.
einz que om alast un sul arpent de camp,
fait li le coer, si est chaeit avant:
la sue mort li vait mult angoissant.
Li quenz Rollanz revient de pasmeisuns,
sur piez se drecet, mais il ad grant dulur;
guardet aval e si guardet amunt:
sur l'erbe verte, ultre ses cumpaignuns,
la veit gesir le nobilie barun,
ço est l'arcevesque que deus mist en sun num;
cleimet sa culpe, si reguardet amunt,
cuntre le ciel amsdous ses mains ad juinz,
si prïet deu que pareïs li duinst.
morz est Turpin le guerreier Charlun.
par granz batailles e par mult bels sermons
cuntre paiens fut tuz tens campïuns.
deus li otreit seinte beneïçun! Aoi.
Quant Rollanz vit l'arcevesque qu'est morz,
senz Oliver une mais n'out si grant dol,
e dist un mot que destrenche le cor:
'Carles de France chevalce cum il pot;
en Rencesvals damage i ad des noz;
li reis Marsilie ad sa gent perdut tot,
cuntre un des noz ad ben quarante morz.'
Li quenz Rollanz veit l'arcevesque a terre,
defors sun cors veit gesir la buëlle,
desuz le frunt li buillit la cervelle.
desur sun piz, entre les dous furcelles,
cruisiedes ad ses blanches mains, les belles.
forment le pleint a la lei de sa terre.

'e, gentilz hom, chevaler de bon aire,
hoi te cumant al glorïus celeste:
ja mais n'ert hume plus volenters le serve.
des les apostles ne fut honc tel prophete
pur lei tenir e pur humes atraire.
ja la vostre anme nen ait doel ne sufraite!
de pareïs li seit la porte uverte!'
As Roland is by far the most interesting of those Amis et Amiles.
Chansons which describe the wars with the Saracens, so
Amis et Amiles[21] may be taken as representing those where the interest is
mainly domestic. Amis et Amiles is the earliest vernacular form of a story
which attained extraordinary popularity in the middle ages, being found in
every language and in most literary forms, prose and verse, narrative and
dramatic. This popularity may partly be assigned to the religious and
marvellous elements which it contains, but is due also to the intrinsic merits
of the story. The Chanson contains 3500 lines, dates probably from the
twelfth century, and is written, like Roland, in decasyllabic verse, but,
unlike Roland, has a shorter line of six syllables and not assonanced at the
end of each stanza. Its story is as follows:—
Amis and Amiles were two noble knights, born and baptized on the same
day, who had the Pope for sponsor, and whose comradeship was specially
sanctioned by a divine message, and by the miraculous likeness which
existed between them. They were however brought up, the one in Berri, the
other in Auvergne, and did not meet till both had received knighthood. As
soon as they had joined company, they resolved to offer their services to
Charles, and did him great service against rebels. Here the action proper
begins. The friends arouse the jealousy of Hardré, a felon knight, of
Ganelon's lineage and likeness. Hardré engages Gombaud of Lorraine, an
enemy of the Emperor, to attack the two friends; but the treason does not
succeed, and the traitor, to escape unpleasant enquiries, recommends
Charles to bestow his own niece Lubias on Amiles. The latter declares that
Amis deserves her better, and to Amis she is married, bearing however no
good-will to Amiles for his resignation of her and for his firm hold on her
husband's affection. Meanwhile, the daughter of Charles, Bellicent,
conceives a violent passion for Amiles, and the traitor Hardré unfortunately
becomes aware of the matter. He at once accuses Amiles of treason, and the

knight is too conscious of the dubiousness of his cause to be very willing to
accept the wager of battle. From this difficulty he is saved by Amis, who
comes to Paris from his distant seignory of Blaivies (Blaye), and fights the
battle in the name and armour of his friend, while the latter goes to Blaye
and plays the part of his preserver. Both ventures are made easier by the
extraordinary resemblance of the pair. Amis is successful; he slays Hardré,
and then has no little difficulty in saving himself from a forced marriage
with Bellicent. This embroglio is smoothed out, and Amiles and Bellicent
are happily united. The generous Amis however has not been able to avoid
forswearing himself while playing the part of Amiles; and this sin is
punished, according to a divine warning, by an attack of leprosy. His wife
Lubias seizes the opportunity, procures a separation from him, and almost
starves him, or would do so but for two faithful servants and his little son.
At last a means of cure is revealed to him. If Amiles and Bellicent will
allow their two sons to be slain the blood will recover Amis of his leprosy.
The stricken knight journeys painfully to his friend and tells him the hard
condition. Amiles does not hesitate, and the following passage tells his
deed:—

Li cuens Amiles un petit s'atarja,
vers les anfans pas por pas en ala,
dormans les treuve, moult par les resgarda,
s'espee lieve, ocirre les voldra;
mais de ferir un petit se tarja.
li ainznés freres de l'effroi s'esveilla
que li cuens mainne qui en la chambre entra,
l'anfes se torne, son pere ravisa,
s'espee voit, moult grant paor en a,
son pere apelle, si l'en arraisonna:
'biax sire peres, por deu qui tout forma,
que volez faire? nel me celez vos ja.
ainz mais nus peres tel chose ne pensa.'
'biaux sire fiuls, ocirre vos voil ja
et le tien frere qui delez toi esta;
car mes compains Amis qui moult m'ama,
dou sanc de vos li siens cors garistra,
que gietez est dou siecle.'

'Biax tres douz peres,' dist l'anfes erramment,
'quant vos compains avra garissement,
se de nos sans a sor soi lavement,
nos sommes vostre de vostre engenrement,
faire en poëz del tout a vo talent.
or nos copez les chiés isnellement;
car dex de glorie nos avra en present,
en paradis en irommes chantant
et proierommes Jhesu cui tout apent
que dou pechié vos face tensement,
vos et Ami, vostre compaingnon gent;
mais nostre mere, la bele Belissant,
nos saluëz por deu omnipotent.'
li cuens l'oït, moult grans pitiés l'en prent
que touz pasmez a la terre s'estent.
quant se redresce, si reprinst hardement.
or orroiz ja merveilles, bonne gent,
que tex n'oïstes en tout vostre vivant.
li cuens Amiles vint vers le lit esrant,
hauce l'espee, li fiuls le col estent.
or est merveilles se li cuers ne li ment.
la teste cope li peres son anfant,
le sanc reciut et cler bacin d'argent:
a poi ne chiet a terre.
No sooner has the blood touched Amis than he is cured, and the knights
solemnly visit the church where Bellicent and the people are assembled.
The story is told and the mother, in despair, rushes to the chamber where
her dead children are lying. But she finds them living and in full health, for
a miracle has been wrought to reward the faithfulness of the friends now
that suffering has purged them of their sin.
This story, touching in itself, is most touchingly told in the Chanson. No
poem of the kind is more vivid in description, or fuller of details of the
manners of the time, than Amis et Amiles. Bellicent and Lubias, the former
passionate and impulsive but loving and faithful, the latter treacherous,
revengeful, and cold-hearted, give perhaps the earliest finished portraits of
feminine character to be found in French literature. Amis and Amiles

themselves are presented to us under so many more aspects than Roland
and Oliver that they dwell better in the memory. The undercurrent of
savagery which distinguished mediæval times, and the rapid changes of
fortune which were possible therein, are also well brought out. Not even the
immolation of Ganelon's hostages is so striking as the calm ferocity with
which Charlemagne dooms his wife and son as well as his daughter to pay
with their lives the penalty of Bellicent's fault; while the sudden lapse of
Amis from his position of feudal lordship at Blaye to that of a miserable
outcast, smitten and marked out for public scorn and ill-treatment by the
visitation of God, is unusually dramatic. Amis et Amiles bears to Roland
something not at all unlike the relation of the Odyssey to the Iliad. Its
continuation, Jourdains de Blaivies, adds the element of foreign travel and
adventure; but that element is perhaps more characteristically represented,
and the representation has certainly been more generally popular, in Huon
de Bordeaux.
Of the remaining Chansons, the following are the most
remarkable. Aliscans (twelfth century) deals with the Other principal
Chansons.
contest between William of Orange, the great Christian
hero of the south of France, and the Saracens. This poem forms, according
to custom, the centre of a whole group of Chansons dealing with the earlier
and later adventures of the hero, his ancestors, and descendants. Such are Le
Couronnement Loys, La Prise d'Orange, Le Charroi de Nimes, Le Moniage
Guillaume. The series formed by these and others[22] is among the most
interesting of these groups. Le Chevalier au Cygne is a title applied directly
to a somewhat late version of an old folk-tale, and more generally to a
series of poems connected with the House of Bouillon and the Crusades.
The members of this bear the separate headings Antioche[23], Les Chétifs,
Les Enfances Godefroy, etc. Antioche, the first of these, which describes the
exploits of the Christian host, first in attacking and then in defending that
city, is one of the finest of the Chansons, and is probably in its original form
not much later than the events it describes, being written by an eye-witness.
The variety of its personages, the vivid picture of the alternations of
fortune, the vigour of the verse, are all remarkable. This group is terminated
by Baudouin de Sebourc[24], a very late but very important Chanson, which
falls in with the poetry of the fourteenth century, and the Bastart de
Bouillon[25]. La Chevalerie Ogier de Danemarche[26] is the oldest form in

which the adventures of one of the most popular and romantic of
Charlemagne's heroes are related. Fierabras had also a very wide
popularity, and contains some of the liveliest pictures of manners to be
found in these poems, in its description of the rough horse-play of the
knights and the unfilial behaviour of the converted Saracen princess. This
poem is also of much interest philologically[27]. Garin le Loherain[28] is the
centre of a remarkable group dealing not directly with Charlemagne, but
with the provincial disputes and feuds of the nobility of Lorraine. Raoul de
Cambrai[29] is another of the Chansons which deal with 'minor houses,' as
they are called, in contradistinction to the main Carlovingian cycle. Gérard
de Roussillon[30] ranks as a poem with the best of all the Chansons. Hugues
Capet[31], though very late, is attractive by reason of the glimpses it gives
us of a new spirit supplanting that of chivalry proper. In it the heroic
distinctly gives place to the burlesque. Macaire[32], besides being written in
a singular dialect, in which French is mingled with Italian, supplies the
original of the well-known dog of Montargis. Huon de Bordeaux[33],
already mentioned, was not only more than usually popular at the time of its
appearance, but has supplied Shakespeare with some of the dramatis
personae of A Midsummer Night's Dream, and Wieland and Weber with the
plot of a well-known poem and opera. Jourdains de Blaivies, the sequel to
Amis et Amiles, contains, besides much other interesting matter, the incident
which forms the centre of the plot of Pericles. Les Quatre Fils Aymon or
Renaut de Montauban[34] is the foundation of one of the most popular
French chap-books. Les Saisnes[35] deals with Charlemagne's wars with
Witekind. Berte aus grans Piés[36] is a very graceful story of womanly
innocence. Doon de Mayence[37], though not early, includes a charming
love-episode. Gérard de Viane[38] contains the famous battle of Roland and
Oliver. The Voyage de Charlemagne à Constantinople[39] is semi-burlesque
in tone and one of the earliest in which that tone is perceptible.
In these numerous poems there is recognisable in the
first place a distinct family likeness which is common to Social and Literary
Characteristics.
the earliest and latest, and in the second, the natural
difference of manners which the lapse of three hundred years might be
expected to occasion. There is a sameness which almost amounts to
monotony in the plot of most Chansons de Gestes: the hero is almost always

either falsely accused of some crime, or else treacherously exposed to the
attacks of Saracens, or of his own countrymen. The agents of this treachery
are commonly of the blood of the arch-traitor Ganelon, and are almost
invariably discomfited by the good knight or his friends and avengers. The
part[40] which Charlemagne plays in these poems is not usually dignified:
he is represented as easily gulled, capricious, and almost ferocious in
temper, ungrateful, and ready to accept bribes and gifts. His good angel is
always Duke Naimes of Bavaria, the Nestor of the Carlovingian epic. In the
earliest Chansons the part played by women is not so conspicuous as in the
later, but in all except Roland it has considerable prominence. Sometimes
the heroine is the wife, daughter, or niece of Charlemagne, sometimes a
Saracen princess. But in either case she is apt to respond without much
delay to the hero's advances, which, indeed, she sometimes anticipates. The
conduct of knights to their ladies is also far from being what we now
consider chivalrous. Blows are very common, and seem to be taken by the
weaker sex as matters of course. The prevailing legal forms are simple and
rather sanguinary. The judgment of God, as shown by ordeal of battle,
settles all disputes; but battle is not permitted unless several nobles of
weight and substance come forward as sponsors for each champion; and
sponsors as well as principal risk their lives in case of the principal's defeat,
unless they can tempt the king's cupidity. These common features are
necessarily in the case of so large a number of poems mixed with much
individual difference, nor are the Chansons by any means monotonous
reading. Their versification is pleasing to the ear, and their language,
considering its age, is of surprising strength, expressiveness, and even
wealth. Though they lack the variety, the pathos, the romantic chivalry, and
the mystical attractions of the Arthurian romances, there is little doubt that
they paint, far more accurately than their successors, an actually existing
state of society, that which prevailed in the palmy time of the feudal system,
when war and religion were deemed the sole subjects worthy to occupy
seriously men of station and birth. In giving utterance to this warlike and
religious sentiment, few periods and classes of literature have been more
strikingly successful. Nowhere is the mere fury of battle better rendered
than in Roland and Fierabras. Nowhere is the valiant indignation of the
beaten warrior, and, at the same time, his humble submission to providence,
better given than in Aliscans. Nowhere do we find the mediæval spirit of
feudal enmity and private war more strikingly depicted than in the cycle of

the Lorrainers, and in Raoul de Cambrai. Nowhere is the devout sentiment
and belief of the same time more fully drawn than in Amis et Amiles.
The method of composition and publication of these
poems was peculiar. Ordinarily, though not always, they Authorship.
were composed by the Trouvère, and performed by the
Jongleur. Sometimes the Trouvère condescended to performance, and
sometimes the Jongleur aspired to composition, but not usually. The poet
was commonly a man of priestly or knightly rank, the performer (who
might be of either sex) was probably of no particular station. The Jongleur,
or Jongleresse, wandered from castle to castle, reciting the poems, and
interpolating in them recommendations of the quality of the wares, requests
to the audience to be silent, and often appeals to their generosity. Some of
the manuscripts which we now possess were originally used by Jongleurs,
and it was only in this way that the early Chanson de Geste was intended to
be read. The process of hawking about naturally interfered with the
preservation of the poems in their original purity, and even with the
preservation of the author's name. In very few cases[41] is the latter known
to us.
The question whether the Chansons de Gestes were originally written in
northern or southern French has often been hotly debated. The facts are
these. Only three Chansons exist in Provençal. Two of these[42] are admitted
translations or imitations of Northern originals. The third, Girartz de
Rossilho, is undoubtedly original, but is written in the northernmost dialect
of the Southern tongue. The inference appears to be clear that the Chanson
de Geste is properly a product of northern France. The opposite conclusion
necessitates the supposition that either in the Albigensian war, or by some
inexplicable concatenation of accidents, a body of original Provençal
Chansons has been totally destroyed, with all allusions to, and traditions of,
these poems. Such a hypothesis is evidently unreasonable, and would
probably never have been started had not some of the earliest students of
Old French been committed by local feeling to the championship of the
language of the Troubadours. On the other hand, almost all the dialects of
Northern French are represented, Norman and Picard being perhaps the
commonest[43].

The language of these poems, as the extracts given will
partly show, is neither poor in vocabulary, nor lacking in Style and
harmony of sound. It is indeed, more sonorous and Language.
stately than classical French language was from the seventeenth century to
the days of Victor Hugo, and abounds in picturesque terms which have
since dropped out of use. The massive castles of the baronage, with their
ranges of marble steps leading up to the hall, where feasting is held by day
and where the knights sleep at night, are often described. Dress is
mentioned with peculiar lavishness. Pelisses of ermine, ornaments of gold
and silver, silken underclothing, seem to give the poets special pleasure in
recording them. In no language are what have been called 'perpetual'
epithets more usual, though the abundance of the recurring phrases prevents
monotony. The 'clear countenances' of the ladies, the 'steely brands' of the
knights, their 'marble palaces,' the 'flowing beard' of Charlemagne, the
'guileful tongue' of the traitors, are constant features of the verbal
landscape. From so great a mass of poetry it would be vain in any space
here available to attempt to arrange specimen 'jewels five words long.' But
those who actually read the Chansons will be surprised at the abundance of
fresh striking and poetic phrase.
Before quitting the subject of the Chansons de Gestes, it
may be well to give briefly their subsequent literary Later History.
history. They were at first frequently re-edited, the
tendency always being to increase their length, so that in some cases the
latest versions extant run to thirty or forty thousand lines. As soon as this
limit was reached, they began to be turned into prose, the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries being the special period of this change. The art of
printing came in time to assist the spread of these prose versions, and for
some centuries they were almost the only form in which the Chansons de
Gestes, under the general title of romances of chivalry, were known. The
verse originals remained for the most part in manuscript, but the prose
romances gained an enduring circulation among the peasantry in France.
From the seventeenth century their vogue was mainly restricted to this
class. But in the middle of the eighteenth the Comte de Tressan was induced
to attempt their revival for the Bibliothèque des Romans. His versions were
executed entirely in the spirit of the day, and did not render any of the
characteristic features of the old Epics. But they drew attention to them, and

by the end of the century, University Professors began to lecture on old
French poetry. The exertions of M. Paulin Paris, of M. Francisque Michel,
and of some German scholars first brought about the re-editing of the
Chansons in their original form about half a century ago; and since that time
they have received steady attention, and a large number have been
published—a number to which additions are yearly being made. Rather
more than half the known total are now in print.

FOOTNOTES:
[17] Gesta or Geste has three senses: (a) the deeds of a hero; (b) the chronicle of
those deeds; and (c) the family which that chronicle illustrates. The three chief
gestes are those of the King, of Doon de Mayence, and of Garin de Montglane.
Each of these is composed of many poems. Contrasted with these are the 'petites
gestes,' which include only a few Chansons.
[18] La Chanson de Roland, ed. Fr. Michel, Paris, 1837. The MS. is in the
Bodleian Library (Digby 23). Another, of much later date in point of writing but
representing the same text, exists at Venice. Of later versions there are six
manuscripts extant. The Chanson de Roland has since its editio princeps been
repeatedly re-edited, translated, and commented. The most exact edition is that
of Prof. Stengel, Heilbronn, 1878, who has given the Bodleian Manuscript both
in print and in photographic facsimile. The best for general use is that of Léon
Gautier (seventh edition), 1877.
[19] Wace (Roman de Rou, iii. 8038 Andresen) speaks of the Norman Taillefer
as singing at Hastings 'De Karlemaigne et de Rollant.' It has been sought, but
perhaps fancifully, to identify this song with the existing chanson.
[20] 'Ci falt la geste que Turoldus declinet.' The sense of the word declinet is
quite uncertain, and the attempts made to identify Turoldus are futile.
[21] Amis et Amiles, ed. Hoffmann. Erlangen, 1852.
[22] This series is given, sometimes in whole, sometimes in extracts, by Dr.
Jonckbloet, Guillaume d'Orange. The Hague, 1854.
[23] Ed. P. Paris. Paris, 1848.
[24] Ed. Boca. Valenciennes, 1841.
[25] Ed. Schéler. Brussels, 1877.
[26] Ed. Barrois. Paris, 1842.
[27] There exists a Provençal version of it, evidently translated from the French.
The most convenient edition is that of Kroeber and Servois, Paris, 1860. There is
an English fourteenth-century version published by Mr. Herrtage for the Early
English Text Society, 1879.

[28] Published partially by MM. P. Paris and E. du Méril and by Herr Stengel.
[29] Ed. Le Glay. Paris, 1840.
[30] Ed. Michel. Paris, 1856.
[31] Ed. La Grange. Paris, 1864.
[32] Ed. Guessard. Paris, 1866.
[33] Ed. Guessard et Grandmaison. Paris, 1860.
[34] Ed. Michelant. Stuttgart, 1862.
[35] Ed. Michel. Paris, 1839.
[36] Ed. Schéler. Brussels, 1874.
[37] Ed. Pey. Paris, 1859.
[38] Ed. Tarbé. Rheims, 1850.
[39] Ed. Michel. London, 1836.
[40] It is very commonly said that this feature is confined to the later Chansons.
This is scarcely the fact, unless by 'later' we are to understand all except Roland.
In Roland itself the presentment is by no means wholly complimentary.
[41] The Turoldus of Roland has been already noticed. Of certain or tolerably
certain authors, Graindor de Douai (revisions of the early crusading Chansons of
'Richard the Pilgrim,' Antioche, &c.), Jean de Flagy (Garin), Bodel (Les
Saisnes), and Adenès le Roi, a fertile author or adapter of the thirteenth century,
are the most noted.
[42] Ferabras and Betonnet d'Hanstone. M. Paul Meyer has recently edited this
latter poem under the title of Daurel et Beton (Paris, 1880). To these should be
added a fragment, Aigar et Maurin, which seems to rank with Girartz.
[43] There has been some reaction of late years against the scepticism which
questioned the 'Provençal Epic.' I cannot however say, though I admit a certain
disqualification for judgment (see note at beginning of next chapter), that I see
any valid reason for this reaction.

CHAPTER III.
PROVENÇAL LITERATURE.

The Romance language, spoken in the country now
called France, has two great divisions, the Langue d'Oc Langue d'Oc.
and the Langue d'Oil[44], which stand to one another in
hardly more intimate relationship than the first of them does to Spanish or
Italian. In strictness, the Langue d'Oc ought not to be called French at all,
inasmuch as those who spoke it applied that term exclusively to Northern
speech, calling their own Limousin, or Provençal, or Auvergnat. At the
time, moreover, when Provençal literature flourished, the districts which
contributed to it were in very loose relationship with the kingdom of
France; and when that relationship was drawn tighter, Provençal literature
began to wither and die. Yet it is not possible to avoid giving some sketch of
the literary developments of Southern France in any history of French
literature, as well because of the connection which subsisted between the
two branches, as because of the altogether mistaken views which have been
not unfrequently held as to that connection. Lord Macaulay[45] speaks of
Provençal in the twelfth century as 'the only one of the vernacular
languages of Europe which had yet been extensively employed for literary
purposes;' and the ignorance of their older literature which, until a very
recent period, distinguished Frenchmen has made it common for writers in
France to speak of the Troubadours as their own literary ancestors. We have
already seen that this supposition as applied to Epic poetry is entirely false;
we shall see hereafter that, except as regards some lyrical developments,
and those not the most characteristic, it is equally ill-grounded as to other
kinds of composition. But the literature of the South is quite interesting
enough in itself without borrowing what does not belong to it, and it
exhibits not a few characteristics which were afterwards blended with those
of the literature of the kingdom at large.
The domain of the Langue d'Oc is included between two
lines, the northernmost of which starts from the Atlantic Range and

coast at or about the Charente, follows the northern characteristics.
boundaries of the old provinces of Perigord, Limousin,
Auvergne, and Dauphiné, and overlaps Savoy and a small portion of
Switzerland. The southern limit is formed by the Pyrenees, the Gulf of
Lyons, and the Alps, while Catalonia is overlapped to the south-west just as
Savoy is taken in on the north-east. This wide district gives room for not a
few dialectic varieties with which we need not here busy ourselves. The
general language is distinguished from northern French by the survival to a
greater degree of the vowel character of Latin. The vocabulary is less
dissolved and corroded by foreign influence, and the inflections remain
more distinct. The result, as in Spanish and Italian, is a language more
harmonious, softer, and more cunningly cadenced than northern French, but
endowed with far less vigour, variety, and freshness. The separate
development of the two tongues must have begun at a very early period. A
few early monuments, such as the Passion of Christ[46] and the Mystery of
the Ten Virgins[47], contain mixed dialects. But the earliest piece of
literature in pure Provençal is assigned in its original form to the tenth
century, and is entirely different from northern French[48]. It is arranged in
laisses and assonanced. The uniformity, however, of the terminations of
Provençal makes the assonances more closely approach rhyme than is the
case in northern poetry. Of the eleventh century the principal monuments
are a few charters, a translation of part of St. John's Gospel, and several
religious pieces in prose and verse. Not till the extreme end of this century
does the Troubadour begin to make himself heard. The earliest of these
minstrels whose songs we possess is William IX, Count of Poitiers. With
him Provençal literature, properly so called, begins.
The admirable historian of Provençal literature, Karl
Bartsch, divides its products into three periods; the first Periods of
Provençal
reaching to the end of the eleventh century, and Literature.
comprising the beginnings and experiments of the
language as a literary medium; the second covering the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, the most flourishing time of the Troubadour poetry, and
possessing also specimens of many other forms of literary composition; the
third, the period of decadence, including the fourteenth and fifteenth
centuries, and remarkable chiefly for some religious literature, and for the
contests of the Toulouse school of poets. In a complete history of Provençal

literature notice would also have to be taken of the fitful and spasmodic
attempts of the last four centuries to restore the dialect to the rank of a
literary language, attempts which have never been made with greater energy
and success than in our own time[49], but which hardly call for notice here.
The most remarkable works of the first period have been
already alluded to. This period may possibly have First Period.
produced original epics of the Chanson form, though, as
has been pointed out, no indications of any such exist, except in the solitary
instance of Girartz de Rossilho. The important poem of Auberi of Besançon
on Alexander is lost, except the first hundred verses. It is thought to be the
oldest vernacular poem on the subject, and is in a mixed dialect partaking of
the forms both of north and south. Hymns, sometimes in mixed Latin and
Provençal, sometimes entirely in the latter, are found early. A single prose
monument remains in the shape of a fragmentary translation of the Gospel
of St. John. But by far the most important example of this period is the
Boethius. The poem, as we have it, extends to 238 decasyllabic verses
arranged on the fashion of a Chanson de Geste, and dates from the eleventh
century, or at latest from the beginning of the twelfth, but is thought to be a
rehandling of another poem which may have been written nearly two
centuries earlier. The narrative part of the work is a mere introduction, the
bulk of it consisting of moral reflections taken from the De Consolatione.
It is only in the second period that Provençal literature
becomes of real importance. The stimulus which brought Second Period.
it to perfection has been generally taken to be that of the
crusades, aided by the great development of peaceful civilisation at home
which Provence and Languedoc then saw. The spirit of chivalry rose and
was diffused all over Europe at this time, and in some of its aspects it
received a greater welcome in Provence than anywhere else. For the
mystical, the adventurous, and other sides of the chivalrous character, we
must look to the North, and especially to the Arthurian legends, and the
Romans d'Aventures which they influenced. But, for what has been well
called 'la passion souveraine, aveugle, idolâtre, qui éclipse tous les autres
sentiments, qui dédaigne tous les devoirs, qui se moque de l'enfer et du ciel,
qui absorbe et possède l'âme entière[50],' we must come to the literature of
the south of France. Passion is indeed not the only motive of the
Troubadours, but it is their favourite motive, and their most successful. The

connection of this predominant instinct with the elaborate and unmatched
attention to form which characterises them is a psychological question very
interesting to discuss, but hardly suitable to these pages. It is sufficient here
to say that these various motives and influences produced the Troubadours
and their literature. This literature was chiefly lyrical in form, but also
included many other kinds, of which a short account may be given.
Girartz de Rossilho belongs in all probability to the earliest years of the
period, though the only Provençal manuscript in existence dates from the
end of the thirteenth century. In the third decade of the twelfth Guillem
Bechada had written a poem on the conquest of Jerusalem by the Crusaders,
which, however, has perished, though the northern cycle of the Chevalier au
Cygne may represent it in part. Guillem of Poitiers also wrote a historical
poem on the Crusades with similar ill fate. But the most famous of
historical poems in Provençal has fortunately been preserved to us. This is
the chronicle of the Albigensian War, written in Alexandrines by William of
Tudela and an anonymous writer. We also possess a rhymed chronicle of the
war of 1276-77 in Navarre, by Guillem Anelier. In connection with the
Arthurian cycle there exists a Provençal Roman d'Aventures, entitled
Jaufré. The testimony of Wolfram von Eschenbach would appear to be
decisive as to the existence of a Provençal continuation of Chrestien's
Percevale by a certain Kiot or Guyot, but nothing more is known of this.
Blandin de Cornoalha is another existing romance, and so is the far more
interesting Flamenca, a lively picture of manners dating from the middle of
the thirteenth century. In shorter and slighter narrative poems Provençal is
still less fruitful, though Raimon Vidal, Arnaut de Zurcasses, and one or two
other writers have left work of this kind. A very few narrative poems of a
sacred character are also found, and vestiges of drama may be traced. But,
as we have said, the real importance of the period consists in its lyrical
poetry, the poetry of the Troubadours. The names of 460 separate poets are
given, and 251 pieces have come down to us without the names of their
writers. We have here no space for dwelling on individual persons; it is
sufficient to mention as the most celebrated Arnaut Daniel, Bernart de
Ventadorn, Bertran de Born, Cercamon, Folquet de Marseilha, Gaucelm
Faidit, Guillem of Poitiers, Guillem de Cabestanh, Guiraut de Borneilh,
Guiraut Riquier, Jaufre Rudel, Marcabrun, Peire Cardenal, Peire Vidal,
Peirol, Raimbaut de Vaqueiras, Sordel.

The chief forms in which these poets exercised their
ingenuity were as follows. The simplest and oldest was Forms of
Troubadour Poetry.
called simply vers; it had few artificial rules, was written
in octosyllabic lines, and arranged in stanzas. From this was developed the
canso, the most usual of Provençal forms. Here the rhymes were interlaced,
and the alternation of masculine and feminine by degrees observed. The
length of the lines varied. Both these forms were consecrated to love verse;
the Sirvente, on the other hand, is panegyrical or satirical, its meaning being
literally 'Song of Service.' It consisted for the most part of short stanzas,
simply rhyme, and corresponding exactly to one another. The planh or
Complaint was a dirge or funeral song written generally in decasyllabics.
The tenson or debate is in dialogue form, and when there are more than two
disputants is called torneijamens. The narrative Romance existed in
Provençal as well as the balada or three-stanza poem, usually with refrain.
The retroensa is a longer refrain poem of later date, but in neither is the
return of the same rhyme in each stanza necessarily observed, as in the
French ballade. The alba is a leave-taking poem at morning, and the serena
(if it can be called a form, for scarcely more than a single example exists) a
poem of remembrance and longing at eventide. The pastorela, which had
numerous sub-divisions, explains itself. The descort is a poem something
like the irregular ode, which varies the structure of its stanzas. The sextine,
in six stanzas of identical and complicated versification, is the stateliest of
all Provençal forms. Not merely the rhymes but the words which rhyme are
repeated on a regular scheme. The breu-doble (double-short) is a curious
little form on three rhymes, two of which are repeated twice in three four-
lined stanzas, and given once in a concluding couplet, while the third
finishes each quatrain. Other forms are often mentioned and given, but they
are not of much consequence.
The prose of the best period of Provençal literature is of little importance.
Its most considerable remains, besides religious works and a few scientific
and grammatical treatises, are a prose version of the Chanson des Albigeois,
and an interesting collection of contemporary lives of the Troubadours.
The productiveness of the last two centuries of
Provençal literature proper has been spoken of by the Third Period.
highest living authority as at most an aftermath. At the
beginning of the fourteenth century, Arnaut Vidal wrote a Roman

d'Aventures entitled Guillem de la Barra. This poet, like most of the other
literary names of the period, belongs to the school of Toulouse, a somewhat
artificial band of writers who flourished throughout the fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries, held poetical tournaments on the first Sunday in May,
invented or adopted the famous phrase gai saber for their pursuits, and
received, if they were successful, the equally famous Golden Violet and
minor trinkets of the same sort. The brotherhood directed itself by an art of
poetry in which the half-forgotten traditions of more spontaneous times
were gathered up.
To this period, and to its latter part, the Waldensian writings entitled La
Nobla Leyczon, to which ignorance and sectarian enthusiasm had given a
much earlier date, are now assigned. There is also a considerable mass of
miscellaneous literature, but nothing of great value, or having much to do
with the only point which is here of importance, the distinctive character of
Provençal literature, and the influence of that literature upon the
development of letters in France generally. With a few words on these two
points this chapter may be concluded.
It may be regarded as not proven that any initial
influence was exercised over northern French literature Literary Relation of
Provençal and
by the literature of the South, and more than this, it may French.
be held to be unlikely that any such influence was
exerted. For in the first place all the more important Defects of
developments of the latter, the Epic, the Drama, the Provençal
Fabliau, are distinctly of northern birth, and either do not Literature.
exist in Provençal at all, or exist for the most part as
imitations of northern originals. With regard to lyric poetry the case is
rather different. The earliest existing lyrics of the North are somewhat later
than the earliest songs of the Troubadours, and no great lyrical variety or
elegance is reached until the Troubadours' work had, by means of Thibaut
de Champagne and others, had an opportunity of penetrating into northern
France. On the other hand, the forms which finished lyric adopted in the
North are by no means identical with those of the Troubadours. The
scientific and melodious figures of the Ballade, the Rondeau, the Chant-
royal, the Rondel, and the Villanelle, cannot by any ingenuity be deduced
from Canso or Balada, Retroensa or Breu-Doble. The Alba and the
Pastorela agree in subject with the Aubade and the Pastourelle, but have no

necessary or obvious connection of form. It would, however, be almost as
great a mistake to deny the influence of the spirit of Provençal literature
over French, as to regard the two as standing in the position of mother and
daughter. The Troubadours undoubtedly preceded their Northern brethren in
scrupulous attention to poetical form, and in elaborate devices for ensuring
such attention. They preceded them too in recognising that quality in poetry
for which there is perhaps no other word than elegance. There can be little
doubt that they sacrificed to these two divinities, elegance and the formal
limitation of verse, matters almost equally if not more important. The
motives of their poems are few, and the treatment of those motives
monotonous. Love, war, and personal enmity, with a certain amount of
more or less frigid didactics, almost complete the list. In dealing with the
first and the most fruitful, they fell into the deadly error of stereotyping
their manner of expression. Objection has sometimes been taken to the
'eternal hawthorn and nightingale' of Provençal poetry. The objection would
hardly be fatal, if this eternity did not extend to a great many things besides
hawthorn and nightingales. In the later Troubadours especially, the fault
which has been urged against French dramatic literature just before the
Romantic movement was conspicuously anticipated. Every mood, every
situation of passion, was catalogued and analysed, and the proper method of
treatment, with similes and metaphors complete, was assigned. There was
no freshness and no variety, and in the absence of variety and freshness, that
of vigour was necessarily implied. It may even be doubted whether the
influence of this hot-house verse on the more natural literature of the North
was not injurious rather than beneficial. Certain it is that the artificial poetry
of the Trouvères went (in the persons of the Rondeau and Ballade-writing
Rhétoriqueurs of the fifteenth century) the same way and came to the same
end, that its elder sister had already trodden and reached with the
competitors for the Violet, the Eglantine, and the Marigold of Toulouse.

FOOTNOTES:
[44] Oc and oil (hoc and hoc illud), the respective terms indicating affirmation.
In this chapter the information given is based on a smaller acquaintance at first
hand with the subject than is the case in the chapters on French proper. Herr Karl
Bartsch has been the guide chiefly followed.
[45] Essay on Ranke's History of the Popes.

[46] See chap. i.
[47] See chap. x.
[48] The poem on Boethius. See chap. i.
[49] By the school of the so-called Félibres, of whom Mistral and Aubanel are
the chief.
[50] Moland and Héricault's Introduction to Aucassin et Nicolette. Paris, 1856.

CHAPTER IV.
ROMANCES OF ARTHUR AND OF ANTIQUITY.

The passion for narrative poetry, which at first contented
itself with stories drawn from the history or tradition of The Tale of Arthur.
Its Origins.
France, took before very long a wider range. The origin
of the Legend of King Arthur, of the Round Table, of the Holy Graal, and of
all the adventures and traditions connected with these centres, is one of the
most intricate questions in the history of mediaeval literature. It would be
beyond the scope of this book to attempt to deal with it at length. It is
sufficient for our purpose, in the first place, to point out that the question of
the actual existence and acts of Arthur has very little to do with the question
of the origin of the Arthurian cycle. The history of mediaeval literature, as
distinguished from the history of the Middle Ages, need not concern itself
with any conflict between the invaders and the older inhabitants of England.
The question which is of historical literary interest is, whether the traditions
which Geoffrey of Monmouth, Walter Map, Chrestien de Troyes, and their
followers, wrought into a fabric of such astounding extent and complexity,
are due to Breton originals, or whether their authority is nothing but the
ingenuity of Geoffrey working upon the meagre data of Nennius[51]. As far
as this question concerns French literature, the chief champions of these
rival opinions were till lately M. de la Villemarqué and M. Paulin Paris. In
no instance was the former able to produce Breton or Celtic originals of
early date. On the other hand, M. Paris showed that Nennius is sufficient to
account for Geoffrey, and that Geoffrey is sufficient to account for the
purely Arthurian part of subsequent romances and chronicles. The religious
element of the cycle has a different origin, and may possibly not be Celtic at
all. Lastly, we must take into account a large body of Breton and Welsh
poetry from which, especially in the parts of the legend which deal with
Tristram, with King Mark, &c., amplifications have been devised. It must,
however, still be admitted that the extraordinary rapidity with which so vast
a growth of literature was produced, apparently from the slenderest stock, is
one of the most surprising things in literary history. Before the middle of

the twelfth century little or nothing is heard of Arthur. Before that century
closed at least a dozen poems and romances in prose, many of them of great
length, had elaborated the whole legend as it was thenceforward received,
and as we have it condensed and Englished in Malory's well-known book
two centuries and a half later.
The probable genesis of the Arthurian legend, in so far
as it concerns French literature, appears to be as follows. Order of French
First in order of composition, and also in order of Arthurian Cycle.
thought, comes the Legend of Joseph of Arimathea, sometimes called the
'Little St. Graal.' This we have both in verse and prose, and one or both of
these versions is the work of Robert de Borron, a knight and trouvère
possessed of lands in the Gâtinais[52]. There is nothing in this work which is
directly connected with Arthur. By some it has been attributed to a Latin,
but not now producible, 'Book of the Graal,' by others to Byzantine
originals. Anyhow it fell into the hands of the well-known Walter Map[53],
and his exhaustless energy and invention at once seized upon it. He
produced the 'Great St. Graal,' a very much extended version of the early
history of the sacred vase, still keeping clear of definite connection with
Arthur, though tending in that direction. From this, in its turn, sprang the
original form of Percevale, which represents a quest for the vessel by a
knight who has not originally anything to do with the Round Table. The link
of connection between the two stories is to be found in the Merlin,
attributed also to Robert de Borron, wherein the Welsh legends begin to
have more definite influence. This, in its turn, leads to Artus, which gives
the early history of the great king. Then comes the most famous, most
extensive, and finest of all the romances, that of Lancelot du Lac, which is
pretty certainly in part, and perhaps in great part, the work of Map; as is
also the mystical and melancholy but highly poetical Quest of the Saint
Graal, a quest of which Galahad and Lancelot, not, as in the earlier legends,
Percival, are the heroes. To this succeeds the Mort Artus, which forms the
conclusion of the whole, properly speaking. This, however, does not
entirely complete the cycle. Later than Borron, Map, and their unknown
fellow-workers (if such they had), arose one or more trouvères, who worked
up the ancient Celtic legends and lays of Tristram into the Romance of
Tristan, connecting this, more or less clumsily, with the main legend of the
Round Table. Other legends were worked up into the omnium gatherum of

Giron le Courtois, and with this the cycle proper ceases. The later poems
are attributed to two persons, called Luce de Gast and Hélie de Borron. But
not the slightest testimony can be adduced to show that any such persons
ever had existence[54].
These prose romances form for the most part the original literature of the
Arthurian story. But the vogue of this story was very largely increased by a
trouvère who used not prose but octosyllabic verse for his medium.

As is the case with most of these early writers, little or
nothing is known of Chrestien de Troyes but his name. Chrestien de
He lived in the last half of the twelfth century, he was Troyes.
attached to the courts of Flanders, Hainault, and Champagne, and he wrote
most of his works for the lords of these fiefs. Besides his Arthurian work he
translated Ovid, and wrote some short poems. Chrestien de Troyes deserves
a higher place in literature than has sometimes been given to him. His
versification is so exceedingly easy and fluent as to appear almost
pedestrian at times; and his Chevalier à la Charrette, by which he is
perhaps most generally known, contrasts unfavourably in its prolixity with
the nervous and picturesque prose to which it corresponds. But Percevale
and the Chevalier au Lyon are very charming poems, deeply imbued with
the peculiar characteristics of the cycle—religious mysticism, passionate
gallantry, and refined courtesy of manners. Chrestien de Troyes
undoubtedly contributed not a little to the popularity of the Arthurian
legends. Although, by a singular chance, which has not yet been fully
explained, the originals appear to have been for the most part in prose, the
times were by no means ripe for the general enjoyment of work in such a
form. The reciter was still the general if not the only publisher, and
recitation almost of necessity implied poetical form. Chrestien did not
throw the whole of the work of his contemporaries into verse, but he did so
throw a considerable portion of it. His Arthurian works consist of Le
Chevalier à la Charrette, a very close rendering of an episode of Map's
Lancelot; Le Chevalier au Lyon, resting probably upon some previous work
not now in existence; Erec et Énide, the legend which every English reader
knows in Mr. Tennyson's Enid, and which seems to be purely Welsh; Cligès,
which may be called the first Roman d'Aventures; and lastly, Percevale, a
work of vast extent, continued by successive versifiers to the extent of some
fifty thousand lines, and probably representing in part a work of Robert de
Borron, which has only recently been printed by M. Hucher. Percevale is,
perhaps, the best example of Chrestien's fashion of composition. The work
of Borron is very short, amounting in all to some ninety pages in the reprint.
The Percevale le Gallois of Chrestien and his continuators, on the other
hand, contains, as has been said, more than forty-five thousand verses. This
amplification is produced partly by the importation of incidents and

episodes from other works, but still more by indulging in constant
diffuseness and what we must perhaps call commonplaces.
From a literary point of view the prose romances rank
far higher, especially those in which Map is known or Spirit and Literary
suspected to have had a hand. The peculiarity of what value
of Arthurian
Romances.
may be called their atmosphere is marked. An elaborate
and romantic system of mystical religious sentiment, finding vent in
imaginative and allegorical narrative, a remarkable refinement of manners,
and a combination of delight in battle with devotion to ladies, distinguish
them. This is, in short, the romantic spirit, or, as it is sometimes called, the
spirit of chivalry; and it cannot be too positively asserted that the Arthurian
romances communicate it to literature for the first time, and that nothing
like it is found in the classics. In the work of Map and his contemporaries it
is clearly perceivable. The most important element in this—courtesy—is, as
we have already noticed, almost entirely absent from the Chansons de
Gestes, and where it is present at all it is between persons who are
connected by some natural or artificial relation of comradeship or kin. Nor
are there many traces of it in such fragments and indications as we possess
of the Celtic originals, which may have helped in the production of the
Arthurian romances. No Carlovingian knight would have felt the horror of
Sir Bors when the Lady of Hungerford exercises her undoubted right by
flinging the body of her captive enemy on the camp of his uncle. Even the
chiefs who are presented in the Chanson d'Antioche as joking over the
cannibal banquet of the Roi des Tafurs, and permitting the dead bodies of
Saracens to be torn from the cemeteries and flung into the beleaguered city,
would have very much applauded the deed. Gallantry, again, is as much
absent from the Chansons as clemency and courtesy. The scene in Lancelot,
where Galahault first introduces the Queen and Lancelot to one another,
contrasts in the strongest manner with the downright courtship by which the
Bellicents and Nicolettes of the Carlovingian cycle are won. No doubt Map
represents to a great extent the sentiments of the polished court of England.
But he deserves the credit of having been the first, or almost the first, to
express such manners and sentiments, perhaps also of having being among
the first to conceive them.
These originals are not all equally represented in Malory's English
compilation. Of Robert de Borron's work little survives except by allusion.

Lancelot du Lac itself, the most popular of all the romances, is very
disproportionately drawn upon. Of the youth of Lancelot, of the winning of
Dolorous Gard, of the war with the Saxons, and of the very curious episode
of the false Guinevere, there is nothing; while the most charming story of
Lancelot's relations with Galahault of Sorelois disappears, except in a few
passing allusions to the 'haughty prince.' On the other hand, the Quest of the
Saint Graal, the Mort Artus, some episodes of Lancelot (such as the
Chevalier à la Charrette), and many parts of Tristan and Giron le Courtois,
are given almost in full.
It seems also probable that considerable portions of the original form of the
Arthurian legends are as yet unknown, and have altogether perished. The
very interesting discovery in the Brussels Library, of a prose Percevale not
impossibly older than Chrestien, and quite different from that of Borron, is
an indication of this fact. So also is the discovery by Dr. Jonckbloet in the
Flemish Lancelot, which he has edited, of passages not to be found in the
existing and recognised French originals. The truth would appear to be that
the fascination of the subject, the unusual genius of those who first treated
it, and the tendency of the middle ages to favour imitation, produced in a
very short space of time (the last quarter or half of the twelfth century) an
immense amount of original handling of Geoffrey's theme. To this original
period succeeded one of greater length, in which the legends were
developed not merely by French followers and imitators of Chrestien, but
by his great German adapters, Wolfram von Eschenbach, Gottfried of
Strasburg, Hartmann von der Aue, and by other imitators at home and
abroad. Lastly, as we shall see in a future chapter, come Romans
d'Aventures, connecting themselves by links more or less immediate with
the Round Table cycle, but independent and often quite separate in their
main incidents and catastrophes.
The great number, length, and diversity of the Arthurian romances make it
impossible in the space at our command to abstract all of them, and useless
to select any one, inasmuch as no single poem is (as in the case of the
Chansons) typical of the group. The style, however, of the prose and verse
divisions may be seen in the following extracts from the Chevalier à la
Charrette of Map, and the verse of Chrestien:—

Atant sont venu li chevalier jusqu'au pont: lors commencent à
plorer top durement tuit ensamble. Et Lanceloz lor demande
porquoi il plorent et font tel duel? Et il dient que c'est por l'amor
de lui, que trop est perillox li ponz. Atant esgarde Lanceloz l'ève
de çà et de là: si voit que ele est noire et coranz. Si avint que sa
véue torna devers la cité, si vit la tor où la raïne estoit as
fenestres. Lanceloz demande quel vile c'est là?—'Sire, font-il,
c'est le leus où la raïne est.' Si li noment la cité. Et il lor dit: 'Or
n'aiez garde de moi, que ge dont mains le pont que ge onques
mès ne fis, nè il n'est pas si périlleux d'assez comme ge cuidoie.
Mès moult a de là outre bele tor, et s'il m'i voloient hébergier il
m'i auroient encor ennuit à hoste.' Lors descent et les conforte
toz moult durement, et lor dit que il soient ausinc tout asséur
comme il est. Il li lacent les pans de son hauberc ensenble et li
cousent à gros fil de fer qu'il avoient aporté, et ses manches
méesmes li cousent dedenz ses mains, et les piez desoz; et à
bone poiz chaude li ont péez les manicles et tant d'espès comme
il ot entre les cuisses. Et ce fu por miauz tenir contre le trenchant
de l'espée.
Quant il orent Lancelot atorné et bien et bel si lor prie que il s'en
aillent. Et il s'en vont, et le font naigier outre l'ève, et il
enmainent son cheval. Et il vient à la planche droit: puis esgarde
vers la tor où la raïne estoit en prison, si li encline. Après fet le
signe de la verroie croiz enmi son vis, et met son escu derriers
son dos, qu'il ne li nuise. Lors se met desor la planche en
chevauchons, si se traïne par desus si armez comme il estoit, car
il ne li faut ne hauberc ne espée ne chauces ne heaume ne escu.
Et cil de la tor qui le véoient en sont tuit esbahï, ne il n'i a nul ne
nule qui saiche veroiement qui il est; mès qu'il voient qu'il traïne
pardesus l'espée trenchant à la force des braz et à l'enpaignement
des genouz; si ne remaint pas por les filz de fer que des piez et
des mains et des genous ne saille li sanz. Mès por cel péril de
l'espée qui trenche et por l'ève noire et bruiant et parfonde ne
remaint que plus ne resgart vers la tor que vers l'ève, ne plaie ne
angoisse qu'il ait ne prise naient; car se il à cele tor pooit venir il

garroit tot maintenant de ses max. Tant s'est hertiez et traïnez
qu'il est venuz jusqu'à terre.
This becomes in the poem a passage more than 100 lines long, of which the
beginning and end may be given:—

Le droit chemin vont cheminant,
Tant que li jors vet déclinant,
Et vienent au pon de l'espée
Après none, vers la vesprée.
Au pié del' pont, qui molt est max,
Sont descendu de lor chevax,
Et voient l'ève félenesse
Noire et bruiant, roide et espesse,
Tant leide et tant espoantable
Com se fust li fluns au déable;
Et tant périlleuse et parfonde
Qu'il n'est riens nule an tot le monde
S'ele i chéoit, ne fust alée
Ausi com an la mer betée.
Et li ponz qui est an travers
Estoit de toz autres divers,
Qu'ainz tex ne fu ne jamès n'iert.
Einz ne fu, qui voir m'an requiert,
Si max pont ne si male planche:
D'une espée forbie et blanche
Estoit li ponz sor l'ève froide.
Mès l'espée estoit forz et roide,
Et avoit deus lances de lonc.
De chasque part ot uns grant tronc
Où l'espée estoit cloffichiée.
Jà nus ne dot que il i chiée.
Porce que ele brist ne ploit.
Si ne sanble-il pas qui la voit
Qu'ele puisse grant fès porter.
Ce feisoit molt desconforter
Les deus chevaliers qui estoient
Avoec le tierz, que il cuidoient

Que dui lyon ou dui liepart
Au chief del' pont de l'autre part
Fussent lié à un perron.
L'ève et li ponz et li lyon
Les metent an itel fréor
Que il tranblent tuit de péor.

* * * * * *

Cil ne li sèvent plus que dire,
Mès de pitié plore et sopire
Li uns et li autres molt fort.
Et cil de trespasser le gort
Au mialz que il set s'aparoille,
Et fet molt estrange mervoille,
Que ses piez désire et ses mains.
N'iert mie toz antiers nè sains
Quant de l'autre part iert venuz.
Bien s'iert sor l'espée tenuz,
Qui plus estoit tranchanz que fauz,
As mains nues et si deschauz
Que il ne s'est lessiez an pié
Souler nè chauce n'avanpié.
De ce guères ne s'esmaioit
S'ès mains et ès piez se plaioit;
Mialz se voloit-il mahaignier
Que chéoir el pont et baignier
An l'ève dont jamès n'issist.
A la grant dolor con li sist
S'an passe outre et à grant destrece:
Mains et genolz et piez se blece.
Mès tot le rasoage et sainne
Amors qui le conduist et mainne:
Si li estoit à sofrir dolz.
A mains, à piez et à genolz
Fet tant que de l'autre part vient.

About the same time as the flourishing of the Arthurian
cycle there began to be written the third great division of Romances of
Antiquity. Chanson
Jean Bodel, 'la matière de Rome la grant[55].' The most d'Alixandre.
important beyond all question of the poems which go to
make up this cycle (as it is sometimes called, though in reality its members
are quite independent one of the other) is the Romance of Alixandre. Of the
earliest French poem on this subject only a few fragments exist. This is
supposed to have been a work of the eleventh or very early twelfth century,
composed in octosyllabic verses, and in the mixed dialect common at the
time in the south-east, by Alberic or Auberi of Besançon or Briançon. The
Chanson d'Alixandre is, however, in all probability a much more important
work than Alberic's. It is in form a regular Chanson de Geste, written in
twelve-syllabled verse, of such strength and grace that the term Alexandrine
has cleaved ever since to the metre. Its length, as we have it[56], is 22,606
verses, and it is assigned to two authors, Lambert the Short[57] and
Alexander of Bernay, though doubt has been expressed whether any of the
present poem is due to Lambert; if we have any of his work, it is not later
than the ninth decade of the twelfth century. Lambert, Alexander, and
perhaps others, are thought to have known not Alberic, but a later ten-
syllabled version into Northern French by Simon of Poitiers. The remoter
sources are various. Foremost among them may undoubtedly be placed the
Pseudo-Callisthenes, an unknown Alexandrian writer translated into Latin
about the fourth century by Julius Valerius, who fathered upon the
philosopher a collection of stories partly gathered from Plutarch, Quintus
Curtius, and a hundred other authorities, partly elaborated according to the
fashion of Greek romancers. Some oriental traditions of Alexander were
also in the possession of western Europe. Out of all these, and with a
considerable admixture of the floating fables of the time, Lambert and
Alexander wove their work. There is, of course, not the slightest attempt at
antiquity of colour. Alexander has twelve peers, he learns the favourite
studies of the middle ages, he is dubbed knight, and so forth. Many
interesting legends, such as that of the Fountain of Perpetual Youth, make
their first appearance in the poem, and it is altogether one of extraordinary
merit. A specimen laisse may be given:—

En icele forest, dont vos m'oëz conter,
nesune male choze ne puet laianz entrer.

li home ne les bestes n'i ozent converser,
onques en nesun tans ne vit hon yverner
ne trop froit ne trop chaut ne neger ne geler.
ce conte l'escripture que hom n'i doit entrer,
se il nen at talent de conquerre ou d'amer.
les deuesses d'amors i doivent habiter,
car c'est lor paradix ou el doivent entrer,
li rois de Macedoine en a oï parler,
qui cercha les merveilles dou mont et de la mer,
et ce fist il meïsmes enz ou fons avaler
en un vessel de voirre, ce ne puet n'on fausser,
qu'il fist faire il meïsmes fort et rëont et cler
et enclorre de fer qu'il ne pëust quasser,
s'il l'estëust a roche ou aillors ahurter,
et si que il poet bien par mi outre esgarder,
por vëoir les poissons tornoier et joster
et faire lor agaiz et sovent cembeler.
et quant il vint a terre, nou mist a oublïer:
la prist la sapïence dou mont a conquester
et faire ses agaiz et sa gent ordener
et conduire les oz et sagement mener,
car ce fust toz li mieudres qui ainz pëust monter
en cheval por conquerre ne de lance joster,
li gentiz et li larges et ii prex por doner.
la forest des puceles ot oï deviser,
cil qui tot volt conquerre i ot talent d'aler:
souz ciel n'a home en terre qui l'en pëust torner.
While the figure of Alexander served as centre to one group of fictions,
most of which were composed in Chanson form, the octosyllabic metre,
which had made the Arthurian romances its own, was used for the
versification of another numerous class, most of which dealt with the tale of
Troy divine.
Here also the poems were neither entirely fictitious, nor
on the other hand based upon the best authorities. Dares Roman de Troie.
Phrygius and Dictys Cretensis, with some epitomes of
Homer, were the chief sources of information. The principal poem of this

class is the Roman de Troie of Benoist de Sainte More (c. 1160). This
work[58], which extends to more than thirty thousand verses, has the
redundancy and the long-windedness which characterise many, if not most,
early French poems written in its metre. But it has one merit which ought to
conciliate English readers to Benoist. It contains the undoubted original of
Shakespeare's Cressida. The fortunes of Cressid (or Briseida, as the French
trouvère names her) have been carefully traced out by MM. Moland,
Héricault[59], and Joly, and form a very curious chapter of literary history.
Nor is this episode the only one of merit in Benoist. His verse is always
fluent and facile, and not seldom picturesque, as the following extract
(Andromache's remonstrance with Hector) will show:—

Quant elle voit qe nëant iert,
o ses dous poinz granz cous se fiert,
fier duel demaine e fier martire,
ses cheveus trait e ront e tire.
bien resemble feme desvee:
tote enragiee, eschevelee,
e trestote fors de son sen
court pour son fil Asternaten.
des eux plore molt tendrement,
entre ses braz l'encharge e prent.
vint el palés atot arieres,
o il chauçoit ses genoillieres.
as piez li met e si li dit
'sire, por cest enfant petit
qe tu engendras de ta char
te pri nel tiegnes a eschar
ce qe je t'ai dit e nuncié.
aies de cest enfant pitié:
jamés des euz ne te verra.
s'ui assembles a ceux de la,
hui est ta mort, hui est ta fins.
de toi remandra orfenins.
cruëlz de cuer, lous enragiez,
par qoi ne vos en prent pitiez?
par qoi volez si tost morir?

par qoi volez si tost guerpir
et moi e li e vostre pere
e voz serors e vostre mere?
par qoi nos laisseroiz perir?
coment porrons sens vos gerir?
lasse, com male destinee!'
a icest not chaï pasmee
a cas desus le paviment.
celle l'en lieve isnelement
qi estrange duel en demeine:
c'est sa seroge, dame Heleine.
The poems of the Cycle of Antiquity have hitherto been Other Romances on
less diligently studied and reprinted than those of the Classical subjects.
other two. Few of them, with the exception of Alixandre
and Troie, are to be read even in fragments, save in manuscript. Le Roman
d'Enéas, which is attributed to Benoist, is much shorter than the Roman de
Troie, and, with some omissions, follows Virgil pretty closely. Like many
other French poems, it was adapted in German by a Minnesinger, Heinrich
von Veldeke. Le Roman de Thèbes, of which there is some chance of an
edition, stands to Statius in the same relation as Enéas to Virgil. And Le
Roman de Jules César paraphrases, though not directly, Lucan. To these
must be added Athis et Prophilias (Porphyrias), or the Siege of Athens, a
work which has been assigned to many authors, and the origin of which is
not clear, though it enjoyed great popularity in the middle ages. The
Protesilaus of Hugues de Rotelande is the only other poem of this series
worth the mentioning.
Neither of these two classes of poems possesses the value of the Chansons
as documents for social history. The picture of manners in them is much
more artificial. But the Arthurian romances disclose partially and at
intervals a state of society decidedly more advanced than that of the
Chansons. The bourgeois, the country gentleman who is not of full baronial
rank, and other novel personages appear.

Note to Third Edition.—Since the second edition was published M. Gaston
Paris has sketched in Romania and summarised in his Manuel, but has not
developed in book form, a view of the Arthurian romances different from
his father's and from that given in the text. In this view the importance of
'Celtic' originals is much increased, and that of Geoffrey diminished, Walter
Map disappears almost entirely to make room for divers unknown French
trouvères, the order of composition is altered, and on the whole a lower
estimate is formed of the literary value of the cycle. The 'Celtic' view has
also been maintained in a book of much learning and value, Studies on the
Legend of the Holy Grail (London, 1888), by Mr. Alfred Nutt. I have not
attempted to incorporate or to combat these views in the text for two
reasons, partly because they will most probably be superseded by others,
and partly because the evidence does not seem to me sufficient to establish
any of them certainly. But having given some years to comparative literary
criticism in different languages and periods, I think I may be entitled to give
a somewhat decided opinion against the 'Celtic' theory, and in favour of that
which assigns the special characteristics of the Arthurian cycle and all but a
very small part of its structure of incident to the literary imagination of the
trouvères, French and English, of the twelfth century. And I may add that as
a whole it seems to me quite the greatest literary creation of the Middle
Ages, except the Divina Commedia, though of course it has the necessary
inferiority of a collection by a great number of different hands to a work of
individual genius.

FOOTNOTES:
[51] Nennius, a Breton monk of the ninth century, has left a brief Latin
Chronicle in which is the earliest authentic account of the Legend of Arthur.
Geoffrey of Monmouth, circa 1140, produced a Historia Britonum, avowedly
based on a book brought from Britanny by Walter, Archdeacon of Oxford. No
trace of this book, unless it be Nennius, can be found. See note at end of chapter.
[52] Department of Seine-et-Marne, near Fontainebleau.
[53] Map as a person belongs rather to English than to French history. He lived
in the last three quarters of the twelfth century.
[54] These various Romances are not by any means equally open to study in
satisfactory critical editions. To take them chronologically, M. Hucher has
published Robert de Borron's Little Saint Graal in prose, his Percevale, and the
Great Saint Graal, with full and valuable if not incontestable notes, 3 vols.; Le

Mans, 1875-1878. The verse form of the Little Saint Graal was published by M.
F. Michel in 1841. An edition of Artus was promised by M. Paulin Paris, but
interrupted or prevented by his death. The great works of Map, Lancelot and the
Quest, as well as the Mort Artus, have never been critically edited in full; and the
sixteenth-century editions being rare and exceedingly costly, as well as
uncritical, they are not easily accessible, except in M. Paris' Abstract and
Commentary, Les Romans de la Table Ronde, 5 vols., 1869-1877. Tristan was
published partially forty years ago by M. F. Michel. Merlin was edited in 1886
by M. G. Paris and M. Ulrich. A complete edition of Chrestien de Troyes has
been undertaken by Dr. Wendelin Förster and has preceded to its second volume
(Yvain). This under its second title of Le Chevalier au Lyon has also been edited
by Dr. Holland (third edition 1886). Besides this there is the great Romance of
Percevale (continued by others, especially a certain Manessier), of which M.
Potvin has given an excellent edition, 6 vols., Mons, 1867-1872, including in it a
previously unknown prose version of the Romance of very early date; Le
Chevalier à la Charrette, continued by Godefroy de Lagny, and edited, with the
original prose from Lancelot du Lac, by Dr. Jonckbloet (The Hague, 1850); and
Erec et Énide, by M. Haupt (Berlin, 1860). This piecemeal condition of the texts,
and the practical inaccessibility of many of them, make independent judgment in
the matter very difficult. What is wanted first of all is a book on the plan of M.
Léon Gautier's Epopées Françaises, giving a complete account of all the existing
texts—for the entire editing of these latter must necessarily take a very long
time. The statements made above represent the opinions which appear most
probable to the writer, not merely from the comparison of authorities on the
subject, but from the actual study of the texts as far as they are open to him. (See
note at end of Chapter.)
[55] This expression occurs in the Chanson des Saisnes, i. 6. 7: 'Ne sont que iij
matières a nul home atandant, De France et de Bretaigne et de Rome la grant.'
[56] Ed. Michelant. Stuttgart, 1846.
[57] Li Cors, otherwise li tors 'the crooked.' Since this book was first written M.
Paul Meyer has treated the whole subject of the paragraph in an admirable
monograph, Alexandre le Grand dans la Littérature Française du Moyen Age, 2
vols. Paris, 1886.
[58] Ed. Joly. Rouen, 1870.

[59] Moland and Héricault's Nouvelles du XIVème Siècle. Paris, 1857. Joly, Op.
cit. See also P. Stapfer, Shakespeare et l'Antiquité. 2 vols. Paris, 1880.

CHAPTER V.
FABLIAUX. THE ROMAN DU RENART.

Singular as the statement may appear, no one of the
branches of literature hitherto discussed represents what Foreign Elements in
Early French
may be called a specially French spirit. Despite the Literature.
astonishing popularity and extent of the Chansons de
Gestes, they are, as is admitted by the most patriotic French students,
Teutonic in origin probably, and certainly in genius. The Arthurian legends
have at least a tinge both of Celtic and Oriental character; while the greater
number of them were probably written by Englishmen, and their
distinguishing spirit is pretty clearly Anglo-Norman rather than French. On
the other hand, Provençal poetry represents a temperament and a disposition
which find their full development rather in Spanish and Italian literature and
character than in the literature and character of France. All these divisions,
moreover, have this of artificial about them, that they are obviously class
literature—the literature of courtly and knightly society, not that of the
nation at large. Provençal literature gives but scanty social information;
from the earlier Chansons at least it would be hard to tell that there were
any classes but those of nobles, priests, and fighting men; and though, as
has been said, a more complicated state of society appears in the Arthurian
legends, what may be called their atmosphere is even more artificial.
It is far otherwise with the division of literature which
we are now about to handle. The Fabliaux[60], or short The Esprit Gaulois
makes its
verse tales of old France, take in the whole of its society appearance.
from king to peasant with all the intervening classes, and
represent for the most part the view taken of those classes by each other.
Perhaps the bourgeois standpoint is most prominent in them, but it is by no
means the only one. Their tone too is of the kind which has ever since been
specially associated with the French genius. What is called by French
authors the esprit gaulois—a spirit of mischievous and free-spoken
jocularity—does not make its appearance at once, or in all kinds of work. In

most of the early departments of French literature there is a remarkable
deficiency of the comic element, or rather that element is very much kept
under. The comedy of the Chansons consists almost entirely in the roughest
horse-play; while the knightly notion of gabz or jests is exemplified in the
Voyage de Charlemagne à Constantinople, where it seems to be limited to
extravagant, and not always decent, boasts and gasconnades. More comic,
but still farcical in its comedy, is the curious running fire of exaggerated
expressions of poltroonery which the Red Lion keeps up in Antioche, while
the names and virtues of the Christian leaders are being catalogued to
Corbaran. In the Arthurian Romances also the comic element is scantily
represented, and still takes the same form of exaggeration and horse-play.
At the same time it is proper to say that both these classes of compositions
are distinguished, at least in their earlier examples, by a very strict and
remarkable decency of language.
In the Fabliaux the state of things is quite different. The attitude is always a
mocking one, not often going the length of serious satire or moral
indignation, but contenting itself with the peculiar ludicrous presentation of
life and humanity of which the French have ever since been the masters. In
the Fabliaux begins that long course of scoffing at the weaknesses of the
feminine sex which has never been interrupted since. In the Fabliaux is to
be found for the first time satirical delineation of the frailties of churchmen
instead of adoring celebration of the mysteries of the Church. All classes
come in by turns for ridicule—knights, burghers, peasants. Unfortunately
this freedom in choice of subject is accompanied by a still greater freedom
in the choice of language. The coarseness of expression in many of the
Fabliaux equals, if it does not exceed, that to be found in any other branch
of Western literature.
The interest of the Fabliaux as a literary study is
increased by the precision with which they can be Definition of
defined, and the well-marked period of their Fabliaux.
composition. According to the excellent definition of its latest editor, the
Fabliau[61] is 'le récit, le plus souvent comique, d'une aventure réelle ou
possible, qui se passe dans les données moyennes de la vie humaine,' the
recital, for the most part comic, of a real or possible event occurring in the
ordinary conditions of human life. M. de Montaiglon, to be rigidly accurate,
should have added that it must be in verse, and, with very rare, if any,

exceptions, in octosyllabic couplets. Of such Fabliaux, properly so called,
we possess perhaps two hundred. They are of the most various length,
sometimes not extending to more than a score or so of lines, sometimes
containing several hundreds. They are, like most contemporary literature,
chiefly anonymous, or attributed to persons of whom nothing is known,
though some famous names, especially that of the Trouvère Rutebœuf,
appear among their authors. Their period of composition seems to have
extended from the latter half of the twelfth century to the latter half of the
fourteenth, no manuscript that we have of them being earlier than the
beginning of the thirteenth century, and none later than the beginning of the
fifteenth. If, however, their popularity in their original form ceased at the
latter period, their course was by no means run. They had passed early from
France into Italy (as indeed all the oldest French literature did), and the
stock-in-trade of all the Italian Novellieri from Boccaccio downwards was
supplied by them. In England they found an illustrious copyist in Chaucer,
whose Canterbury Tales are perfect Fabliaux, informed by greater art and
more poetical spirit than were possessed by their original authors. In France
itself the Fabliaux simply became farces or prose tales, as the wandering
reciter of verse gave way to the actor and the bookseller. They appear again
(sometimes after a roundabout journey through Italian versions) in the
pages of the French tale-tellers of the Renaissance, and finally, as far as
collected appearance is concerned, receive their last but not their least
brilliant transformation in the Contes of La Fontaine. In these the cycle is
curiously concluded by a return to the form of the original.
Until MM. de Montaiglon and Raynaud undertook their
edition, which has been slowly completed, the study of Subjects and
the Fabliaux was complicated by the somewhat chaotic character
Fabliaux.
of

conditions of the earlier collections. Barbazan and his
followers printed as Fabliaux almost everything that they found in verse
which was tolerably short. Thus, not merely the mediaeval poems called
dits and débats, descriptions of objects either in monologue or dialogue,
which come sometimes very close to the Fabliau proper, but moral
discourses, short romances, legends like the Lai d'Aristote, and such-like
things, were included. This interferes with a comprehension of the
remarkably characteristic and clearly marked peculiarities of the Fabliau
indicated in the definition given above. As according to this the Fabliau is a

short comic verse tale of ordinary life, it will be evident that the attempts
which have been made to classify Fabliaux according to their subjects were
not very happy. It is of course possible to take such headings as Priests,
Women, Villeins, Knights, etc., and arrange the existing Fabliaux under
them. But it is not obvious what is gained thereby. A better notion of the
genre may perhaps be obtained from a short view of the subjects of some of
the principal of those Fabliaux whose subjects are capable of description.
Les deux Bordeors Ribaux is a dispute between two Jongleurs who boast
their skill. It is remarkable for a very curious list of Chansons de Gestes
which the clumsy reciter quotes all wrong, and for a great number of the sly
hits at chivalry and the chivalrous romances which are characteristic of all
this literature. Thus one Jongleur, going through the list of his knightly
patrons, tells of Monseignor Augier Poupée—

'Qui à un seul coup de s'espee
Coupe bien à un chat l'oreille;'

and of Monseignor Rogier Ertaut, whose soundness in wind and limb is not
due to enchanted armour or skill in fight, but is accounted for thus—

'Quar onques ne ot cop feru' (for that never has he struck a
blow).

Le Vair Palefroi contains the story of a lover who carries off his beloved on
a palfrey grey from an aged wooer. La Housse Partie, a great favourite,
which appears in more than one form, tells the tale of an unnatural son who
turns his father out of doors, but is brought to a better mind by his own
child, who innocently gives him warning that he in turn will copy his
example. Sire Hain et Dame Anieuse is one of the innumerable stories of
rough correction of scolding wives. Brunain la Vache au Prestre recounts a
trick played on a covetous priest. In Le Dit des Perdrix, a greedy wife eats a
brace of partridges which her husband has destined for his own dinner, and
escapes his wrath by one of the endless stratagems which these tales delight
in assigning to womankind. Le sot Chevalier, though extremely indecorous,
deserves notice for the Chaucerian breadth of its farce, at which it is
impossible to help laughing. The two Englishmen and the Lamb is perhaps
the earliest example of English-French, and turns upon the mistake which
results in an ass's foal being bought instead of the required animal. Le

Mantel Mautaillié is the famous Arthurian story known in English as 'The
Boy and the Mantle.' Le Vilain Mire is the original of Molière's Médecin
malgré lui. Le Vilain qui conquist Paradis par Plaist is characteristic of the
curious irreverence which accompanied mediaeval devotion. A villein
comes to heaven's gate, is refused admission, and successively silences St.
Peter, St. Thomas, and St. Paul, by very pointed references to their earthly
weaknesses. As a last specimen may be mentioned the curiously simple
word-play of Estula. This is the name of a little dog which, being
pronounced, certain thieves take for 'Es tu là?'
Such are a very few, selected as well as may be for their
typical character, of these stories. It is not unimportant to Sources of
consider briefly the question of their origin. Many of Fabliaux.
them belong no doubt to that strange common fund of fiction which all
nations of the earth indiscriminately possess. A considerable number seem
to be of purely original and indigenous growth: but an actual literary source
is not wanting in many cases. The classics supplied some part of them, the
Scriptures and the lives of the saints another part; while not a little was due
to the importation of Eastern collections of stories resulting from the
Crusades. The chief of these collections were the fables of Bidpai or Pilpai,
in the form known as the romance of 'Calila and Dimna,' and the story of
Sendabar (in its Greek form Syntipas). This was immensely popular in
France under the verse form of Dolopathos, and the prose form of Les sept
Sages de Rome. The remarkable collection of stories called the Gesta
Romanorum is apparently of later date than most of the Fabliaux; but the
tales of which it was composed no doubt floated for some time in the
mouths of Jongleurs before the unknown and probably English author put
them together in Latin.
Closely connected with the Fabliaux is one of the most
singular works of mediaeval imagination, the Roman du The Roman du
Renart.
Renart[62]. This is no place to examine the origin or
antiquity of the custom of making animals the mouthpieces of moral and
satirical utterance on human affairs. It is sufficient that the practice is an
ancient one, and that the middle ages were early acquainted with Aesop and
his followers, as well as with Oriental examples of the same sort. The
original author, whoever he was, of the epic (for it is no less) of 'Reynard
the Fox,' had therefore examples of a certain sort before his eyes. But these

examples contented themselves for the most part with work of small
dimension, and had not attempted connected or continuous story. A fierce
battle has been fought as to the nationality of Reynard. The facts are these.
The oldest form of the story now extant is in Latin. It is succeeded at no
very great interval by German, Flemish, and French versions. Of these the
German as it stands is apparently the oldest, the Latin version being
probably of the second half of the twelfth century, and the German a little
later. But (and this is a capital point) the names of the more important beasts
are in all the versions French. From this and some minute local indications,
it seems likely that the original language of the epic is French, but French of
the Walloon or Picard dialect, and that it was written somewhere in the
district between the Seine and the Rhine. This, however, is a matter of the
very smallest literary importance. What is of great literary importance is the
fact that it is in France that the story receives its principal development, and
that it makes its home. The Latin, Flemish, and German Reynards, though
they all cover nearly the same ground, do not together amount to more than
five-and-twenty thousand lines. The French in its successive developments
amounts to more than ninety thousand in the texts already published or
abstracted; and this does not include the variants in the Vienna manuscript
of Renart le Contrefait, or the different developments of the Ancien Renart,
recently published by M. Ernest Martin.
The order and history of the building up of this vast
composition are as follows. The oldest known 'branches,' The Ancien Renart.
as the separate portions of the story are called, date from
the beginning of the thirteenth century. These are due to a named author,
Pierre de Saint Cloud. But it is impossible to say that they were actually the
first written in French: indeed it is extremely improbable that they were so.
However this may be, during the thirteenth century a very large number of
poets wrote pieces independent of each other in composition, but possessing
the same general design, and putting the same personages into play. In what
has hitherto been the standard edition of Renart, Méon published thirty-two
such poems, amounting in the aggregate to more than thirty thousand
verses. Chabaille added five more in his supplement, and M. Ernest Martin
has found yet another in an Italianised version. This last editor thinks that
eleven branches, which he has printed together, constitute an 'ancient
collection' within the Ancien Renart, and have a certain connection and

interdependence. However this may be, the general plan is extremely loose,
or rather non-existent. Everybody knows the outline of the story of
Reynard; how he is among the animals (Noble the lion, who is king,
Chanticleer the cock, Firapel the leopard, Grimbart the badger, Isengrin the
wolf, and the rest) the special representative of cunning and valour
tempered by discretion, while his enemy Isengrin is in the same way the
type of stupid headlong force, and many of the others have moral character
less strongly marked but tolerably well sustained. How this general idea is
illustrated the titles of the branches show better than the most elaborate
description. 'How Reynard ate the carrier's fish;' 'how Reynard made
Isengrin fish for eels;' 'how Reynard cut the tail of Tybert the cat;' 'how
Reynard made Isengrin go down the well;' 'of Isengrin and the mare;' 'how
Reynard and Tybert sang vespers and matins;' 'the pilgrimage of Reynard,'
and so forth. Written by different persons, and at different times, these
branches are of course by no means uniform in literary value. But the
uniformity of spirit in most, if not in all of them, is extremely remarkable.
What is most noticeable in this spirit is the perpetual undertone of satirical
comment on human life and its affairs which distinguishes it. The moral is
never obtrusively put forward, and it is especially noteworthy that in this
Ancien Renart, as contrasted with the later development of the poem, there
is no mere allegorising, and no attempt to make the animals men in
disguise. They are quite natural and distinct foxes, wolves, cats, and so
forth, acting after their kind, with the exception of their possession of
reason and language.
The next stage of the composition shows an alteration
and a degradation. Renart le Couronné, or Le Le Couronnement
Renart.
Couronnement Renart[63], is a poem of some 3400 lines,
which was once attributed to Marie de France, for no other reason than that
the manuscript which contains it subjoins her Ysopet or fables. It is,
however, certainly not hers, and is in all probability a little later than her
time. The main subject of it is the cunning of the fox, who first reconciles
the great preaching orders Franciscans and Dominicans; then himself
becomes a monk, and inculcates on them the art of Renardie; then repairs to
court as a confessor to the lion king Noble who is ill, and contrives to be
appointed his successor, after which he holds tournaments, journeys to
Palestine, and so forth. It is characteristic of the decline of taste that in the

list of his army a whole bestiary (or list of the real and fictitious beasts of
mediaeval zoology) is thrust in; and the very introduction of the abstract
term Renardie, or foxiness, is an evil sign of the abstracting and allegorising
which was about to spoil poetry for a time, and to make much of the
literature of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries tedious and heavy. The
poem is of little value or interest. The only chronological indication as to its
composition is the eulogy of William of Flanders, killed ('jadis,' says the
author) in 1251.
The next poem of the cycle is of much greater length,
and of at least proportionately greater value, though it Renart le Nouvel.
has not the freshness and verve of the earlier branches.
Renart le Nouvel was written in 1288 by Jacquemart Giélée, a Fleming.
This poem is in many ways interesting, though not much can be said for its
general conception, and though it suffers terribly from the allegorising
already alluded to. In its first book (it consists of more than 8000 lines,
divided into two books and many branches) Renart, in consequence of one
of his usual quarrels with Isengrin, gets into trouble with the king, and is
besieged in Maupertuis. But the sense of verisimilitude is now so far lost,
that Maupertuis, instead of being a fox's earth, is an actual feudal castle; and
more than this, the animals which attack and defend it are armed in panoply,
ride horses, and fight like knights of the period. Besides this the old familiar
and homely personages are mixed up with a very strange set of abstractions
in the shape of the seven deadly sins. All this is curiously blended with
reminiscences and rehandlings of the older and simpler adventures. Another
remarkable feature about Renart le Nouvel is that it is full of songs, chiefly
love songs, which are given with the music. Its descriptions, though prolix,
and injured by allegorical phrases, are sometimes vigorous.
The cycle was finally completed in the second quarter of
the fourteenth century by the singular work or works Renart le
Contrefait.
called Renart le Contrefait. This has, unfortunately,
never been printed in full, nor in any but the most meagre extracts and
abstracts. Its length is enormous; though, in the absence of opportunity for
examining it, it is not easy to tell how much is common to the three
manuscripts which contain it. Two of these are in Paris and one in Vienna,
the latter being apparently identical with one which Ménage saw and read
in the seventeenth century. One of the Parisian manuscripts contains about

32,000 verses, the other about 19,000; and the Vienna version seems to
consist of from 20,000 to 25,000 lines of verse, and about half that number
of prose. The author (who, in so far as he was a single person, appears to
have been a clerk of Troyes, in Champagne) wrote it, as he says, to avoid
idleness, and seems to have regarded it as a vast commonplace book, in
which to insert the result not merely of his satirical reflection, but of his
miscellaneous reading. A noteworthy point about this poem is that in one
place the writer expressly disowns any concealment of his satirical
intention. His book, he says, has nothing to do with the kind of fox that kills
pullets, has a big brush, and wears a red skin, but with the fox that has two
hands and, what is more, two faces under one hood[64]. Notwithstanding
this, however, there are many passages where the old 'common form' of the
epic is observed, and where the old personages make their appearance.
Indeed their former adventures are sometimes served up again with slight
alterations. Besides this there is a certain number of amusing stories and
fabliaux, the most frequently quoted of which is the tale of an ugly but wise
knight who married a silly but beautiful girl in hopes of having children
uniting the advantages of both parents, whereas the actual offspring of the
union were as ugly as the father and as silly as the mother. Combined with
these things are numerous allusions to the grievances of the peasants and
burghers of the time against the upper classes, with some striking legends
illustrative thereof, such as the story of a noble dame, who, hearing that a
vassal's wife had been buried in a large shroud of good stuff, had the body
taken up and seized the shroud to make horsecloths of. This original matter,
however, is drowned in a deluge not merely of moralising but of didactic
verse of all kinds. The history of Alexander is told in one version by
Reynard to the lion king in 7000 verses, and is preluded and followed by an
account of the history of the world on a scarcely smaller scale. This
proceeding, at least in the Vienna version, seems to be burdensome even to
Noble himself, who, at the reign of Augustus, suggests that Reynard should
exchange verse for prose, and 'compress.' The warning cannot be said to be
unnecessary: but works as long as Renart le Contrefait, and, as far as it is
possible to judge, not more interesting, have been printed of late years; and
it is very much to be wished that the publication of it might be undertaken
by some competent scholar.

Renart is not the only bestial personage who was made
at this time a vehicle of satire. In the days of Philippe le Fauvel.
Bel a certain François de Rues composed a poem
entitled Fauvel, from the name of the hero, a kind of Centaur, who
represents vice of all kinds. The direct object of the poem was to attack the
pope and the clergy.
Some extracts from the Fabliau of the Partridges and from Renart may
appropriately now be given:—

Por ce que fabliaus dire sueil,
en lieu de fable dire vueil
une aventure qui est vraie,
d'un vilain qui delés sa haie
prist deus pertris par aventure.
en l'atorner mist moult sa cure;
sa fame les fist au feu metre.
ele s'en sot bien entremetre:
le feu a fait, la haste atorne.
et li vilains tantost s'en torne,
por le prestre s'en va corant.
mais au revenir targa tant
que cuites furent les pertris.
la dame a le haste jus mis,
s'en pinça une pelëure,
quar molt ama la lechëure,
quant diex li dona a avoir.
ne bëoit pas a grant avoir,
mais a tos ses bons acomplir.
l'une pertris cort envaïr:
andeus les eles en menjue.
puis est alee en mi la rue
savoir se ses sires venoit.
quant ele venir ne le voit,
tantost arriere s'en retorne,
et le remanant tel atorne
mal du morsel qui remainsist.
adonc s'apenssa et si dist

que l'autre encore mengera.
moult tres bien set qu'ele dira,
s'on li demande que devindrent:
ele dira que li chat vindrent,
quant ele les ot arrier traites;
tost li orent des mains retraites,
et chascuns la seue en porta.

* * * * * *

Tant dura cele demoree
que la dame fu saoulee,
et li vilains ne targa mie:
a l'ostel vint, en haut s'escrie
'diva, sont cuites les pertris?'
'sire,' dist ele. 'ainçois va pis,
quar mengies les a li chas.'
li vilains saut isnel le pas,
seure li cort comme enragiés.
ja li ëust les iex sachiés,
quant el crie 'c'est gas, c'est gas.
fuiiés,' fet ele, 'Sathanas!
couvertes sont por tenir chaudes.'
(He accepts the excuse; bids her lay the table, and goes to sharpen his knife.
The priest arrives. She tells him that her husband is plotting outrage against
him, and as a proof shows him sharpening his knife. The priest flies, and
she tells her husband that he has run off with the partridges. The husband
pursues, but in vain, and the Fabliau thus concludes:—)

A l'ostel li vilains retorne,
et lors sa feme en araisone:
'diva,' fait il, 'et quar me dis
coment tu perdis les pertris?'
cele li dist 'se diex m'aït,
tantost que li prestres me vit,
si me prïa, se tant l'amasse,
que je les pertris li moustrasse,

quar moult volentiers les verroit
et je le menai la tout droit
ou je les avoie couvertes.
il ot tantost les mains ouvertes,
si les prist et si s'en fuï.
mes je gueres ne le sivi,
ains le vous fis moult tost savoir.'
cil respont 'bien pués dire voir
or le laissons a itant estre.'
ainsi fu engingniés le prestre
et Gombaus qui les pertris prist.
par example cis fabliaus dist:
fame est faite por decevoir.
mençonge fait devenir voir
et voir fait devenir mençonge.
cil n'i vout metre plus d'alonge
qui fist cest fablel et ces dis.
ci faut li fabliaus des pertris.
(Reynard and Isengrin go a-fishing.)

Ce fu un poi devant Noël
que l'en metoit bacons en sel,
li ciex fu clers et estelez,
et li vivier fu si gelez,
ou Ysengrin devoit peschier,
qu'on pooit par desus treschier,
fors tant c'un pertuis i avoit,
qui des vilains faiz i estoit,
ou il menoient lor atoivre
chascune nuit juër et boivre:
un seel i estoit laissiez.
la vint Renarz toz eslaissiez
et son compere apela.
'sire,' fait il, 'traiiez vos ça:
ci est la plenté des poissons
et li engins ou nos peschons
les anguiles et les barbiaus

et autres poissons bons et biaus.'
dist Ysengrins 'sire Renart,
or le prenez de l'une part,
sel me laciez bien a la qeue.'
Renarz le prent et si li neue
entor la qeue au miex qu'il puet.
'frere,' fait il, 'or vos estuet
moult sagement a maintenir
por les poissons avant venir.'
lors s'est en un buisson fichiez:
si mist son groing entre ses piez
tant que il voie que il face.
et Ysengrins est seur la glace
et li sëaus en la fontaine
plains de glaçons a bone estraine.
l'aive conmence a englacier
et li sëaus a enlacier
qui a la qeue fu noëz:
de glaçons fu bien serondez.
la qeue est en l'aive gelee
et en la glace seelee.
This chapter would be incomplete without a reference to the Ysopet of
Marie de France[65], which may be said to be a link of juncture between the
Fabliau and the Roman du Renart. Ysopet (diminutive of Aesop) became a
common term in the middle ages for a collection of fables. There is one
known as the Ysopet of Lyons, which was published not long ago[66]; but
that of Marie is by far the most important. It consists of 103 pieces, written
in octosyllabic couplets, with moralities, and a conclusion which informs us
that the author wrote it 'for the love of Count William' (supposed to be
Long-Sword), translating it from an English version of a Latin translation of
the Greek. Marie's graceful style and her easy versification are very
noticeable here, while her morals are often well deduced and sharply put.
The famous 'Wolf and Lamb' will serve as a specimen.

Ce dist dou leu e dou aignel,
qui beveient a un rossel:

li lox a lo sorse beveit
e li aigniaus aval esteit.
irieement parla li lus
ki mult esteit cuntralïus;
par mautalent palla a lui:
'tu m'as,' dist il, 'fet grant anui.'
li aignez li ad respundu
'sire, eh quei?' 'dunc ne veis tu?
tu m'as ci ceste aigue tourblee:
n'en puis beivre ma saolee.
autresi m'en irai, ce crei,
cum jeo ving, tut murant de sei.'
li aignelez adunc respunt
'sire, ja bevez vus amunt:
de vus me vient kankes j'ai beu.'
'qoi,' fist li lox, 'maldis me tu?'
l'aigneus respunt 'n'en ai voleir.'
lous li dit 'jeo sai de veir:
ce meïsme me fist tes pere
a ceste surce u od lui ere,
or ad sis meis, si cum jeo crei.'
'qu'en retraiez,' feit il, 'sor mei?
n'ere pas nez, si cum jeo cuit.'
'e cei pur ce,' li lus a dit:
'ja me fais tu ore cuntraire
e chose ke tu ne deiz faire.'
dunc prist li lox l'engnel petit,
as denz l'estrangle, si l'ocit.

Moralité.

Ci funt li riche robëur,
li vesconte e li jugëur,
de ceus k'il unt en lur justise.
fausse aqoison par cuveitise
truevent assez pur eus cunfundre.
suvent les funt as plaiz semundre,

la char lur tolent e la pel,
si cum li lox fist a l'aingnel.

FOOTNOTES:
[60] The first collection of Fabliaux was published by Barbazan in 1756. This
was re-edited by Méon in 1808, and reinforced by the same author with a fresh
collection in 1823. Meanwhile Le Grand d'Aussy had (1774-1781) given
extracts, abstracts, and translations into modern French of many of them.
Jubinal, Robert, and others enriched the collection further, and in vol. xxiii. of
the Histoire Littéraire M. V. Le Clerc published an excellent study of the subject.
A complete collection of Fabliaux has, however, only recently been attempted,
by M. M. A. de Montaiglon and G. Raynaud (6 vols., Paris, 1872-1888).
[61] Fabliau is, of course, the Latin fabula. The genealogy of the word is fabula,
fabella, fabel, fable, fablel, fableau, fabliau. All these last five forms exist.
[62] It should be noticed that this title, though consecrated by usage, is a
misnomer. It should be Roman de Renart, for this latter is a proper name. The
class name is goupil (vulpes). The standard edition is that of Méon (4 vols.,
Paris, 1826) with the supplement of Chabaille, 1835. This includes not merely
the Ancien Renart, but the Couronnement and Renart le Nouvel. Renart le
Contrefait has never been printed. Rothe (Paris, 1845) and Wolf (Vienna, 1861)
have given the best accounts of it. Recently M. Ernest Martin has given a new
critical edition of the Ancien Renart (3 vols., Strasburg and Paris, 1882-1887).
[63] The necessary expression of the genitive by de is later than this. Mediaeval
French retained the inflection of nouns, though in a dilapidated condition.
Properly speaking Renars is the nominative, Renart the general inflected case.
[64] This is a free translation of the last line of the original, which is as follows:
—

Pour renard qui gelines tue,
Qui a la rousse peau vestue,
Qui a grand queue et quatre piés,
N'est pas ce livre communiés;
Mais pour cellui qui a deux mains
Dont il sont en ce siècle mains,
Qui ont sous la chappe Faulx Semblant.

Wolf, Op. cit. p. 5.

The final allusion is to a personage of the Roman de la Rose.
[65] Ed. Roquefort, vol. ii. See next chapter.
[66] By Dr. W. Förster. Heilbronn, 1882.

CHAPTER VI.
EARLY LYRICS.

The lyric poetry of the middle ages in France divides
itself naturally into two periods, distinguished by very Early and Later
Lyrics.
strongly marked characteristics. The end of the
thirteenth century is the dividing point in this as in many other branches of
literature. After that we get the extremely interesting, if artificial, forms of
the Rondeau and Ballade, with their many varieties and congeners. With
these we shall not busy ourselves in the present chapter. But the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries are provided with a lyric growth, less perfect indeed in
form than that which occupied French singers from Machault to Marot, but
more spontaneous, fuller of individuality, variety, and vigour, and scarcely
less abundant in amount.
Before the twelfth century we find no traces of genuine
lyrical work in France. The ubiquitous Cantilenae Origins of Lyric.
indeed again make their appearance in the speculations
of literary historians, but here as elsewhere they have no Romances and
demonstrable historical existence. Except a few sacred Pastourelles.
songs, sometimes, as in the case of Saint Eulalie, in early Romance
language, sometimes in what the French call langue farcie, that is to say, a
mixture of French and Latin, nothing regularly lyrical is found up to the end
of the eleventh century. But soon afterwards lyric work becomes
exceedingly abundant. This is what forms the contents of Herr Karl
Bartsch's delightful volume of Romanzen und Pastourellen[67]. These are
the two earliest forms of French lyric poetry. They are recognised by the
Troubadour Raimon Vidal as the special property of the Northern tongue,
and no reasonable pretence has been put forward to show that they are other
than indigenous. The tendency of both is towards iambic rhythm, but it is
not exclusively manifested as in later verse. It is one of the most interesting
things in French literary history to see how early the estrangement of the
language from the anapaestic and dactylic measures natural to Teutonic

speech began to declare itself[68]. These early poems bubble over with
natural gaiety, their refrains, musical though semi-articulate as they are, are
sweet and manifold in cadence, but the main body of the versification is
either iambic or trochaic (it was long before the latter measure became
infrequent), and the freedom of the ballad-metres of England and Germany
is seldom present. The Romance differs in form and still more in subject
from the Pastourelle, and both differ very remarkably from the form and
manner of Provençal poetry. It has been observed by nearly all students,
that the love-poems of the latter language are almost always at once
personal and abstract in subject. The Romance and the Pastourelle, on the
contrary, are almost always dramatic. They tell a story, and often (though
not always in the case of the Pastourelle) they tell it of some one other than
the singer. The most common form of the Romance is that of a poem
varying from twenty lines long to ten times that length and divided into
stanzas. These stanzas consist of a certain number (not usually less than
three or more than eight) of lines of equal length capped with a refrain in a
different metre. By far the best, though by no means the earliest, of them
are those of Audefroy le Bastard, who, according to the late M. Paulin Paris,
may be fixed at the beginning of the thirteenth century. Audefroy's poems
are very much alike in plan, telling for the most part how the course of
some impeded true love at last ran smooth. They rank with the very best
mediaeval poetry in colour, in lively painting of manners and feelings, and
in grace of versification. Unfortunately they are one and all rather too long
for quotation here. The anonymous Romance of 'Bele Erembors' will
represent the class well enough. The rhyme still bears traces of assonance,
which is thought to have prevailed till Audefroy's time:—

Quant vient en mai, que l'on dit as lons jors,
Que Frans en France repairent de roi cort,
Reynauz repaire devant el premier front
Si s'en passa lez lo mes Arembor,
Ainz n'en designa le chief drecier a mont.
E Raynaut amis!

Bele Erembors a la fenestre au jor
Sor ses genolz tient paile de color;
Voit Frans de France qui repairent de cort,

E voit Raynaut devant el premier front:
En haut parole, si a dit sa raison.
E Raynaut amis!

'Amis Raynaut, j'ai ja veu cel jor
Se passisoiz selon mon pere tor,
Dolanz fussiez se ne parlasse a vos.'
'Ja mesfaistes, fille d'Empereor,
Autrui amastes, si obliastes nos.'
E Raynaut amis!

'Sire Raynaut, je m'en escondirai:
A cent puceles sor sainz vos jurerai,
A trente dames que avuec moi menrai,
C'onques nul hom fors vostre cors n'amai.
Prennez l'emmende et je vos baiserai.'
E Raynaut amis!

Li cuens Raynauz en monta lo degre,
Gros par espaules, greles par lo baudre;
Blonde ot lo poil, menu, recercele:
En nule terre n'ot so biau bacheler.
Voit l'Erembors, so comence a plorer.
E Raynaut amis!

Li cuens Raynauz est montez en la tor,
Si s'est assis en un lit point a flors,
Dejoste lui se siet bele Erembors.

* * * * * *

Lors recomencent lor premieres amors.
E Raynaut amis!
The Pastourelle is still more uniform in subject. It invariably represents the
knight or the poet riding past and seeing a fair shepherdess by his road-side.
He alights and woos her with or without success. In this class of poem the
stanzas are usually longer, and consist of shorter lines than is the case with

the Romances, while the refrains are more usually meaningless though
generally very musical. It is, however, well to add that the very great
diversity of metrical arrangement in this class makes it impossible to give a
general description of it. There are Pastourelles consisting merely of four-
lined stanzas with no refrain at all. The following is a good specimen of the
class:—

De Saint Quentin a Cambrai
Chevalchoie l'autre jour;
Les un boisson esgardai,
Touse i vi de bel atour.
La colour
Ot freche com rose en mai.
De cuer gai
Chantant la trovai
Ceste chansonnete
'En non deu, j'ai bel ami,
Cointe et joli,
Tant soie je brunete.'

Vers la pastoure tornai
Quant la vi en son destour;
Hautement la saluai
Et di 'deus vos doinst bon jour
Et honour.
Celle ke ci trove ai,
Sens delai
Ses amis serai.'
Dont dist la doucete
'En non deu, j'ai bel ami,
Cointe et joli,
Tant soie je brunete.'

Deles li seoir alai
Et li priai de s'amour,
Celle dist 'Je n'amerai
Vos ne autrui par nul tour,

Sens pastour,
Robin, ke fiencie l'ai.
Joie en ai,
Si en chanterai
Ceste chansonnete:
En non deu, j'ai bel ami,
Cointe et joli,
Tant soie je brunete.'
So various, notwithstanding the simplicity and apparent monotony of their
subjects, are these charming poems, that it is difficult to give, by mere
citation of any one or even of several, an idea of their beauty. In no part of
the literature of the middle ages are its lighter characteristics more
pleasantly shown. The childish freedom from care and afterthought, the half
unconscious delight in the beauty of flowers and the song of birds, the
innocent animal enjoyment of fine weather and the open country, are
nowhere so well represented. Chaucer may give English readers some idea
of all this, but even Chaucer is sophisticated in comparison with the
numerous, and for the most part nameless, singers who preceded him by
almost two centuries in France. As a purely formal and literary
characteristic, the use of the burden or refrain is perhaps their most
noteworthy peculiarity. Herr Bartsch has collected five hundred of these
refrains, all different. There is nothing like this to be found in any other
literature; and, as readers of Béranger know, the fashion was preserved in
France long after it had been given up elsewhere.
After the twelfth century the early lyrical literature of
France undergoes some changes. In the first place it Thirteenth Century.
ceases to be anonymous, and individual singers—some
of them, like Thibaut of Champagne, of very great merit Changes in Lyric.
and individuality—make their appearance. In the second
place it becomes more varied but at the same time more artificial in form,
and exhibits evident marks of the communication between troubadour and
trouvère, and of the imitation by the latter of the stricter forms of Provençal
poetry. The Romance and the Pastourelle are still cultivated, but by their
side grow up French versions, often adapted with considerable
independence, of the forms of the South[69]. Such, for instance, is the
chanson d'amour, a form less artfully regulated indeed than the

corresponding canzon or sestine of the troubadours, but still of some
intricacy. It consists of five or six stanzas, each of which has two interlaced
rhymes, and concludes with an Envoi, which, however, is often omitted.
Chansonnettes on a reduced scale are also found. In these pieces the
alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes, which was ultimately to
become the chief distinguishing feature of French prosody, is observable,
though it is by no means universal. To the Provençal tenson corresponds the
jeu parti or verse dialogue, which is sometimes arranged in the form of a
Chanson. The salut d'amour is a kind of epistle, sometimes of very great
length and usually in octosyllabic verse, the decasyllable being more
commonly used in the Chanson. Of this the complainte is only a variety.
Again, the Provençal sirvente is represented by the northern serventois, a
poem in Chanson form, but occupied instead of love with war, satire,
religion, and miscellaneous matters. It has even been doubted whether the
serventois is not the forerunner of the sirvente instead of the reverse being
the case. Other forms are motets, rotruenges, aubades. Poems called
rondeaux and ballades also make their appearance, but they are loose in
construction and undecided in form. The thirteenth century is, moreover, the
palmy time of the Pastourelle. Most of those which we possess belong to
this period, and exhibit to the full the already indicated characteristics of
that graceful form. But the lyric forms of the thirteenth century are to some
extent rather imitated than indigenous, and it is no doubt to the fact of this
imitation that the common ascription of general poetical priority to the
Langue d'Oc, unfounded as it has been sufficiently shown to be, is due in
the main. The most courageous defenders of the North have wished to
maintain its claims wholly intact even in this instance, but probability, if not
evidence, is against them.
It has been said that the number of song writers from the
end of the twelfth century to the end of the thirteenth is Traces of Lyric in
the Thirteenth
extremely large. M. Paulin Paris, whose elaborate Century.
chapter in the Histoire Littéraire is still the great
authority on the subject, has enumerated nearly two
Quesnes de
hundred, to whose work have to be added hundreds of Bethune.
anonymous pieces. It would seem indeed that during a
considerable period the practice of song writing was Thibaut de
almost as incumbent on the French gentleman of the Champagne.

thirteenth century as that of sonnetteering on the English gentleman of the
sixteenth. There are, however, not a few names which deserve separate
notice. The first of these in point of time, and not the last in point of literary
importance, is that of Quesnes de Bethune, the ancestor of Sully, and
himself a famous warrior, statesman, and poet. His epitaph by a poet not
usually remarkable for eloquence[70] is a very striking one. It gives us
approximately the date of his death, 1224; and the word vieux is supposed
to show that Quesnes must have been born at least as early as the middle of
the twelfth century. He took part in two crusades, that of Philip Augustus
and that which Villehardouin has chronicled. His poems[71] are of all
classes, historical, satirical, and amorous, some of last being addressed to
Marie, Countess of Champagne; and his Chansons are, in the technical
sense, some of the earliest we possess. Contemporary with Quesnes
apparently was the personage who is known under the title of Châtelain de
Coucy, and whose love for the Lady of Fayel resulted in an interchange of
very tender and beautiful verse; the poem known as the lady's own is one of
the very best of its kind. Long afterwards lover and lady became the hero
and heroine of a romance, which has led some persons to throw doubt upon
their historical existence, and the Lady of Fayel has even been deprived of
her poem by a well-known kind of criticism. Of more importance is Thibaut
de Champagne, King of Navarre, who is indeed the most important single
figure of early French lyrical poetry. He was born in 1201, and died in
1253. His high position as a feudal prince in both north and south, the
minority of St. Louis, and the intimate relations which existed between the
King's mother, Blanche of Castille, and Thibaut, made him the mark for a
good deal of satirical invective. There is a tradition that he was Blanche's
lover, the only objection to which is that the Queen was thirty years his
senior. Thibaut's poems have been more than once reprinted, the last edition
being that of M. Tarbé[72]; this contains eighty-one pieces, not a few of
which, however, are probably the work of others. The majority of them are
Chansons d'Amour, of the kind just defined. There are, however, a good
many Jeux-Partis, and a certain number of nondescript poems on
miscellaneous subjects. There is more reason for the common opinion
which attributes to Thibaut the marriage of the poetical qualities of northern
and southern France, than the mere fact of his having been both Count of
Champagne and King of Navarre. His poems have in reality something of
the freshness and the individuality of the Trouvères, mixed with a great deal

of the formal grace and elegance of the Troubadours. The following may
serve as an example:—

Contre le tens qui desbrise
Yvers, et revient este,
Et la mauvis se desguise,
Qui de lonc tens n'a chante
Ferai chanson. Car a gre
Me vient que j'aie en pense
Amor, qui en moi s'est mise.
Bien m'a droit son dart gete.

Douce dame, de franchise,
N'ai je point en vos trove:
S'ele ne s'i est puis mise
Que je ne vos esgarde,
Trop avez vers moi fierte.
Mais ce fait vostre biaute,
Ou il n'i a pas de devise,
Tant en i a grand plante.

En moi n'a point d'astenance
Que je puisse aillors penser,
Pors que la, ou conoissance
Ne merci ne puis trover.
Bien fui fait por li amer;
Car ne m'en puis saoler.
Et quant plus aurai cheance,
Plus la me convendra douter.

D'une riens sui en doutance,
Que je ne puis plus celer,
Qu'en li n'ait un po d'enfance.
Ce me fait deconforter,
Que s'a moi a bon penser
Ne l'ose ele desmontrer.
Si feist qu'a sa semblance
Le poisse deviner.

Des que je li fis priere
Et la pris a esgarder,
Me fist amors la lumiere
Des iels par le cuer passer.
Cil conduit me fait grever:
Dont je ne me soi garder:
Ne ne puet torner arriere
Mon cuer; miex voudrait crever.

Dame, a vos m'estuet clamer,
Et que merci vos requiere.
Diex m'i laist pitie trover!
Besides Thibaut there are not a few other song writers of Minor Singers.
the thirteenth century, who rise out of the crowd named
by M. Paulin Paris. Some of these, as might be expected, Adam de la Halle.
are famous for their achievements in other departments
of literature. Such are Adam de la Halle, Jean Bodel, Guyot de Provins.
There are, however, two, Gace Brulé and Colin Muset, who survive solely
but worthily as song writers. Gace Brulé was a knight of Champagne, Colin
Muset a professed minstrel. The former chiefly composed sentimental
work; the latter, with the proverbial or professional gaiety of his class, drew
nearer to the satirical tone of the Fabliau writers. His best-known and most
usually quoted work describes the different welcome which he receives
from his family on his return from professional tours, according to the
success or ill-success with which he has met. Two other poets, Adam de la
Halle and Rutebœuf, are far more prominent in literary history. Adam de la
Halle[73] bore the surname 'Le Bossu d'Arras,' from his native town, though
the term hunchback seems to have had no literal application to him. His
exact date is not known, but it must probably have been from the fourth to
the ninth decade of the thirteenth century. His dramatic works, which are of
signal importance, will be noticed elsewhere. But besides these he has left
some seventy or eighty lyrical pieces of one kind or another. Adam's life
was not uneventful; he was at first a monk, but left his convent and married.
Then he proved as faithless to his temporal as he had been to his spiritual
vows. He lampooned his wife, his family, his townsmen, and, shaking the
dust of Arras from his feet, retired first to Douai and then to the court of

Robert of Artois, whom he accompanied to Italy. He died in that country
about 1288. The style of Adam de la Halle varies from the coarsest satire to
the most graceful tenderness. Of the latter the following song is a good
specimen:—

Diex!
Comment porroie
Trouver voie
D'aler a chelui
Cui amiete je sui?
Chainturelle, va-i
En lieu de mi;
Car tu fus sieue aussi,
Si m'en conquerra miex.

Mais comment serai sans ti?
Dieus!
Chainturelle, mar vous vi;
Au deschaindre m'ochies;
De mes grietes a vous me confortoie,
Quant je vous sentoie,
Ai mi!
A le saveur de mon ami.
Ne pour quant d'autres en ai,
A cleus d'argent et de soie,
Pour men user.
Mais lasse! comment porroie
Sans cheli durer
Qui me tient en joie?

Canchonnete, chelui proie
Qui le m'envoya,
Puis que jou ne puis aler la.
Qu'il en viengne a moi,
Chi droit,
A jour failli,
Pour faire tous ses boins,

Et il m'orra,
Quant il ert joins,
Canter a haute vois:
Par chi va la mignotise,
Par chi ou je vois.
Rutebœuf (whose name appears to be a nickname only) Rutebœuf
has been more fortunate than most of the poets of early
France in leaving a considerable and varied work behind him, and in having
it well and collectively edited[74]. Little or nothing, however, is known
about him, except from allusions in his own verse. He was probably born
about 1230; he was certainly married in 1260; there is no allusion in his
poems to any event later than 1285. By birth he may have been either a
Burgundian or a Parisian. His work which, as has been said, is not
inconsiderable in volume, falls into three well-marked divisions in point of
subject. The first consists of personal and of comic poems; the second of
poems sometimes satirical, sometimes panegyrical, on public personages
and events; the third, which is apparently with reason assigned to the latest
period of his life, of devotional poems. In the first division La Pauvreté
Rutebœuf, Le Mariage Rutebœuf, etc., are complaints of his woeful
condition; complaints, however, in which there is nearly as much satire as
appeal. Others, such as Renart le Bestourné, Le Dit des Cordeliers, Frère
Denise, Le Dit de l'Erberie, are poems of the Fabliau kind. In all these there
are many lively strokes of satire, and not a little of the reckless gaiety,
chequered here and there with deeper feeling, which has always been a
characteristic of a certain number of French poets. Rutebœuf's sarcasm is
especially directed towards the monastic orders. The second class of poems,
which is numerous, displays a more elevated strain of thought. Many of
these poems are complaintes or elaborate elegies (often composed on
commission) for distinguished persons, such as Geoffroy de Sargines and
Guillaume de Saint Amour. Others, such as the Complainte d'Outremer, the
Complainte de Constantinople, the Dit de la Voie de Tunes, the Débat du
Croisé et du Décroisé, are comments on the politics and history of the time,
for the most part strongly in favour of the crusading spirit, and reproaching
the nobility of France with their degeneracy. 'Mort sont Ogier et
Charlemagne' is an often-quoted exclamation of Rutebœuf in this sense.
The third class includes La Mort Rutebœuf, otherwise La Repentance

Rutebœuf, La Voie de Paradis, various poems to the Virgin, the lives of St.
Mary of Egypt and St. Elizabeth of Hungary, and the miracle play of
Théophile. Rutebœuf's favourite metres are either the continuous
octosyllabic couplet, or else a stanza composed of an octosyllabic couplet
and a line of four syllables, the termination of the latter being caught up by
the succeeding couplet. In this the Mariage is written, of which a specimen
may be given:—

En l'an de l'incarnacïon,
VIII jors aprés la nascïon
Jhesu qui soufri passïon,
en l'an soissante,
qu'arbres n'a foille, oisel ne chante,
fis je toute la rien dolante
que de cuer m'aime:
nis li musarz musart me claime.
or puis filer, qu'il me faut traime;
mult ai a faire.
deus ne fist cuer tant de pute aire,
tant li aie fait de contraire
ne de martire,
s'il en mon martire se mire,
qui ne doie de bon cuer dire
'je te claim cuite.'
envoier un home en Egypte,
ceste dolor est plus petite
que n'est la moie;
je n'en puis mais se je m'esmoie.
l'en dit que fous qui ne foloie
pert sa saison:
sui je marïez sanz raison?
or n'ai ne borde ne maison.
encor plus fort:
por plus doner de reconfort
a ceus qui me heent de mort,
tel fame ai prise
que nus fors moi n'aime ne prise,

et s'estoit povre et entreprise,
quant je la pris.
a ci marïage de pris,
c'or sui povres et entrepris
ausi comme ele,
et si n'est pas gente ne bele.
cinquante anz a en s'escuële,
s'est maigre et seche:
n'ai pas paor qu'ele me treche.
despuis que fu nez en la greche
deus de Marie,
ne fu mais tele espouserie.
je sui toz plains d'envoiserie:
bien pert a l'uevre.
Though he has less of the 'lyrical cry' than some others, Rutebœuf is
perhaps the most vigorous poet of his time.
There is one division of early poetry which may also be
noticed under this head, though it is sometimes dealt Lais. Marie de
France.
with as a kind of miniature epic. This is the lai, a term
which is used in old French poetry with two different significations. The
Trouvères of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries made of it a regular
lyrical form. But the most famous of its examples, those which now pass
under the name of Marie de France, are narrative poems in octosyllabic
verse and varying in length considerably. It is agreed that the term and the
thing are of Breton origin; and the opinion which seems most probable is
that the word originally had reference rather to the style of music with
which the harper accompanied his verse, than to the measure, arrangement,
or subject of the latter. As to Marie herself[75], nothing is known about her
with certainty. She lived in England in the reign of Henry III, and often
gives English equivalents for her French words. The lais which we possess,
written by her and attributed to her, are fourteen in number. They bear the
titles of Gugemer, Equitan, Le Fresne, Le Bisclaveret, Lanval, Les Deux
Amants, Ywenec, Le Laustic, Milun, Le Chaitivel, Le Chèvrefeuille, Eliduc,
Graalent and L'Espine. Mr. O'Shaughnessy has paraphrased several of these
in English[76]; they are all narrative in character. Their distinguishing
features are fluent and melodious versification, pure and graceful language

—among the purest and most graceful, though decidedly Norman in
character, of the time—true poetical feeling, and a lively faculty of
invention and description. After Marie there was a tendency to approximate
the lai to the Provençal descort, and at last, as we have said, it acquired
rules and a form quite alien from those of its earlier examples. There is a
general though not a universal inclination to melancholy of subject in the
early lays, a few of which are anonymous.

Note to Third Edition.—M. Gaston Paris has expressed some surprise at my
remarks on metre (p. 63). This from so accomplished a scholar is a curious
instance of the difficulty which Frenchmen seem to feel in appreciating
quantity. To an English eye and ear which have been trained to classical
prosody the trochaic rhythm of, for instance, the Pastourelle quoted on p.
65, is unmistakable, and there are anapaestic metres to be found here and
there in early poems of the same kind. Indeed, all French poetry is easily
scanned quantitatively, though the usual authorities protest against such
scansion. Voltaire, it is said, took Turgot's hexameters for prose, and the
significance of this is the same whether the mistake, as is probable, was
mischievous or whether it was genuine.

FOOTNOTES:
[67] Leipsic, 1870.
[68] See note at end of chapter.
[69] This miscellaneous lyric for the most part awaits collection and publication.
M. G. Raynaud has given a valuable Bibliographie des Chansonniers Français
des XIIIe et XIVe siècles. 2 vols., Paris, 1884. Also a collection of motets. Paris,
1881.
[70] Philippe Mouskès. This is it:

La terre fut pis en cest an
Quar li vieux Quesnes estoit mors.

[71] The best edition is in Schéler's Trouvères Belges. Brussels, 1876.
[72] Rheims, 1851.

[73] The most convenient place to look for Adam's history and work is Le
Théâtre Français au Moyen Age. Par Monmerqué et Michel. Paris, 1874. There
are also separate editions of him by Coussemaker, and more recently by A.
Rambeau. Marburg, 1886.
[74] By A. Jubinal. 2nd edition. 3 vols. Paris, 1874.
[75] Ed. Roquefort. 2 vols. Paris, 1820. The first volume contains the lays; the
later the fables, which have been noticed in the last chapter. Later edition,
Warnke. Halle, 1885. Marie also wrote a poem on the Purgatory of St. Patrick.
Three other lays, Tidorel, Gringamor, and Tiolet have been attributed to her, and
are printed in Romania, vol. viii.
[76] Lays of France, London, 1872.

CHAPTER VII.
SERIOUS AND ALLEGORICAL POETRY.

In consequence of the slowness with which prose was used for any regular
literary purpose in France, verse continued to do duty for it until a
comparatively late period in almost all departments of literature. By the
very earliest years of the twelfth century, and probably much earlier (though
we have no certain evidence of this latter fact), documents of all kinds
began to be written in verse of various forms. Among the earliest serious
verse that was written rank, as we might expect, verse chronicles. It was not
till 1200 at soonest that long translations from the Latin in French prose
were made, but such translations, and original works as well, were written
in French verse long before.
The rhymed Chronicles were numerous, but, with rare
exceptions, they cannot be said to be of any very great Verse Chronicles.
literary importance. Whether they were imitated directly
from the Chansons de Gestes, or vice versa, is a question which, as it
happens, can be settled without difficulty. For they are almost all in
octosyllabic couplets, a metre certainly later than the assonanced
decasyllabics of the earliest Chansons. The latter form and the somewhat
later dodecasyllable or Alexandrine are rarely used for Verse Chronicles, the
most remarkable exception being the spirited Combat des Trente[77], which
is however very late, and the Chronique de du Guesclin of the same date.
There are earlier examples of history in Alexandrines (some are found in
the twelfth century, such as the account of Henry the Second's Scotch Wars
by Jordan Fantome, Chancellor of the diocese of Winchester), but they are
not numerous or important. It is not unworthy of notice that the majority of
the early Verse Chronicles are English or Anglo-Norman. The first of
importance is that of Geoffrey Gaymar, whose Chronicle of English history
was written about 1146. Gaymar was followed by a much better known
writer, the Jerseyman Wace[78], who not only, as has been mentioned,
versified Geoffrey of Monmouth into the Brut[79], but produced the

important Roman de Rou[80], giving the history of the Dukes of Normandy
and of the Conquest of England. The date of the Brut is 1155, of the Rou
1160. This latter is the better of the two, though Wace was not a great poet.
It consists chiefly of octosyllabics, with a curious insertion of Alexandrines
in rhymed not assonanced laisses. Wace was followed by Benoist de Sainte-
More, who extended his Chronicle of the Dukes of Normandy to more than
forty thousand verses. The 'Life of St. Thomas' (Becket), by Garnier de Pont
St. Maxence, also deserves notice, as does an anonymous poem on the
English wars in Ireland. But the most interesting of this group is probably
the history[81] of William Marshal, Earl of Pembroke, who died in 1219 and
who during his life played a great part in England. It abounds in passages of
historical interest and literary value. During the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, the practice of writing history in verse gradually died out, yet
some of the most important examples date from this time. Such are the
Chronicles of Philippe Mouskès[82], a Fleming, in more than thirty thousand
verses, extending from the Siege of Troy to the year 1243. Mouskès is of
some importance in literary history, because of the great extent to which he
has drawn on the Chansons de Gestes for his information. In 1304
Guillaume Guiart, a native of Orleans, wrote in twelve thousand verses a
Chronicle of the thirteenth century, including a few years earlier and later.
There are a large number of other Verse Chronicles, but few of them are of
much importance historically, and fewer still of any literary interest.
History, however, was by no means the only serious subject which took this
incongruous form in the middle ages. The amount of miscellaneous verse
written during the period between the end of the eleventh and the beginning
of the fifteenth century is indeed enormous. Only a very small portion of it
has ever been printed, and the mere summary description of the manuscripts
which contain it is as yet far from complete. If it be said generally that,
during the greater part of these three hundred years, the first impulse of any
one who wished to write, no matter on what subject, was to write in verse,
and that the popular notion of the want of literary tastes in the middle ages
is utterly mistaken, some idea may be formed of the vast extent of literature,
poetical in form, which was then produced. Much no doubt of this literature
is not in the least worthy of detailed notice; much, whether worthy or not,
must from mere considerations of space and proportion remain unnoticed
here. What is possible, is to indicate briefly the chief forms, authors, and

subjects, which fall under the heading of this chapter, and to give a
somewhat detailed account of the great serious poem of mediæval France,
the Roman de la Rose. Peculiarities of metre and so forth will be indicated
where it is necessary, but it may be said generally that the great mass of this
literature is in octosyllabic couplets.
It has already been observed in discussing the Fabliaux
that the first enquirers into old French literature were led Miscellaneous
Satirical Verse.
to include a very miscellaneous assortment of poems
under that head; and it may now be added that this miscellaneous
assortment with much else constitutes the farrago of the present chapter.
The two great poems of the Roman du Renart and the Roman de la Rose
stand as representatives of the more or less serious poetry of the time, and
everything else may be said to be included between them. Beginning
nearest to the Roman du Renart and its kindred Fabliaux, we find a vast
number of half-satirical styles of poetry, many, if not most of them, known
(according to what has been noted in the preface as characteristic of
mediaeval literature) by distinctive form-names. Of these dits and débats
have already been noticed, but it is not easy to give a notion of the number
of the existing examples, or of the extraordinary diversity of subjects to
which both, and especially the dits, extend. Perhaps some estimate may be
formed from the fact that the dits of three Flemish poets alone, Baudouin de
Condé, Jean de Condé, and Watriquet de Couvin, fill four stout octavo
volumes[83]. The subjects of these and of the large number of dits composed
by other writers and anonymous are almost innumerable. The earliest are
for the most part simple enumerations of the names of streets, of street
cries, of guilds, of coins, and such-like things. By degrees they become
more definitely didactic, and at last allegorical moralising masters them as
it does almost every other kind of poetry in the fourteenth century. The
débat, sometimes called dispute, or bataille, is an easily understood variety
of the dit. Rutebœuf's principal débat has been named; another in a less
serious spirit is that between Charlot et le Barbier. There is a Bataille des
Vins, a Bataille de Caréme et de Charnage, a Débat de l'Hiver et l'Été, etc.,
etc. Another name much used for half-satirical, half-didactic verse was that
of Bible, of which the most famous (probably because it was the first
known) is that of Guyot de Provins,—a violent onslaught on the powers that

were in Church and State by a discontented monk. An extract from it will
illustrate this division of the subject as well as anything else:—

Des fisicïens me merveil:
de lor huevre et de lor conseil
rai ge certes mont grant merveille,
nule vie ne s'apareille
a la lor, trop par est diverse
et sor totes autres perverse.
bien les nomme li communs nons;
mais je ne cuit qu'i ne soit hons
qui ne les doie mont douter.
il ne voudroient ja trover
nul home sanz aucun mehaing.
maint oingnement font e maint baing
ou il n'a ne senz ne raison,
cil eschape d'orde prison
qui de lor mains puet eschaper.
qui bien set mentir et guiler
et faire noble contenance,
tout ont trové fors la crëance
que les genz ont lor fait a bien.
tiex mil se font fisicïen
qui n'en sevent voir nes que gié.
li plus maistre sont mont changié
de grant ennui, n'il n'est mestiers
dont il soit tant de mençongiers.
il ocïent mont de la gent:
ja n'ont ne ami ne parent
que il volsissent trover sain;
de ce resont il trop vilain.
mont a d'ordure en ces lïens.
qui en main a fisicïens,
se met par els. il m'ont ëu
entre lor mains: onques ne fu,
ce cuit, nule plus orde vie.
je n'aim mie lor compaignie,

si m'aït dex, qant je sui sains:
honiz est qui chiet en lor mains.
par foi, qant je malades fui,
moi covint soffrir lor ennui.
Testaments of the satirical kind, chiefly noteworthy for the brilliant use
which Villon made of the tradition of composing them, resveries and
fatrasies (nonsense poems with a more or less satirical drift), parodies of
the offices of the Church, of its sermons, of the miracle plays, are the chief
remaining divisions of the poetry which, under a light and scoffing
envelope, conceals a serious purpose.
Such things have at all times been composed in verse,
and the reason is sufficiently obvious. In the first place, Didactic verse.
the intention of the writers is to a certain extent masked, Philippe de Thaun.
and in the second, the reader's attention is attracted. But the middle ages by
no means confined the use of verse to such cases. Downright instruction
was, as often as not, the object of the verse writer in those days. The
earliest, and as such the most curious of didactic poems, are those of
Philippe de Thaun, an Englishman of Norman extraction, who wrote in the
first quarter of the twelfth century. His two works are a Comput, or
Chronological Treatise, dedicated to an uncle of his, who was chaplain to
Hugh Bigod, Earl of Norfolk, and a Bestiary, or Zoological Catalogue,
dedicated to Adela of Louvain, the wife of Henry the First. Written before
the vogue of the versified Arthurian Romances had consecrated the
octosyllable, these poems are in couplets of six syllables. Their great age,
and to a certain extent their literary merit, deserve an extract:—

Monosceros est beste,
un corn ad en la teste,
pur çeo ad si a nun.
de buc ele ad façun.
par pucele eat prise,
or oëz en quel guise,
quant hom le volt cacer
et prendre et enginner,
si vent horn al orest
u sis repaires est;

la met une pucele
hors de sein sa mamele,
e par odurement
monosceros la sent;
dune vent a la pucele,
si baiset sa mamele,
en sun devant se dort,
issi vent a sa mort;
li hom survent atant,
ki l'ocit en dormant,
u trestut vif le prent,
si fait puis sun talent.
grant chose signefie,
ne larei nel vus die.
Monosceros griu est,
en franceis un-corn est:
beste de tel baillie
Jhesu Crist signefie;
un deu est e serat
e fud e parmaindrat;
en la virgine se mist,
e pur hom charn i prist,
e pur virginited,
pur mustrer casteed,
a virgine se parut
e virgine le conceut.
virgine est e serat
e tuz jurz parmaindrat.
ores oëz brefment
le signefïement.
Ceste beste en verté
nus signefie dé;
la virgine signefie,
sacez, sancte Marie;
par sa mamele entent
sancte eglise ensement;
e puis par le baiser

çeo deit signefïer,
que hom quant il se dort
en semblance est de mort:
dés cum home dormi,
ki en cruiz mort sufri,
ert sa destructïun
nostre redemptïun,
e sun traveillement
nostre reposement.
si deceut dés dïable
par semblant cuvenable;
anme e cors sunt un,
issi fud dés et hum,
e içeo signefie
beste de tel baillie.
Bestiaries and Computs (the French title of the Chronologies) were for
some time the favourites with didactic verse writers, but before long the
whole encyclopædia, as it was then understood, was turned into verse.
Astrology, hunting, geography, law, medicine, history, the art of war, all had
their treatises; and latterly Trésors, or complete popular educators, as they
would be called nowadays, were composed, the best-known of which is that
of Walter of Metz in 1245.
All, or almost all, these works, written as they were in an
age sincerely pious, if somewhat grotesque in its piety, Moral and
Theological verse.
and theoretically moral, if somewhat loose in its
practice, contained not only abundant moralising, but also more or less
theology of the mystical kind. It would therefore have been strange if ethics
and theology themselves had wanted special exponents in verse. Before the
middle of the twelfth century Samson of Nanteuil (again an Englishman by
residence) had versified the Proverbs of Solomon, and in the latter half of
the same century vernacular lives of the saints begin to be numerous.
Perhaps the most popular of these was the legend of Barlaam and Josaphat,
of which the fullest poetical form has been left us by an English trouvère of
the thirteenth century named Chardry, by whom we have also a verse
rendering of the 'Seven Sleepers,' and some other poems[84]. Somewhat
earlier, Hermann of Valenciennes was a fertile author of this sort of work,

composing a great Bible de Sapience or versification of the Old Testament,
and a large number of lives of saints. Of books of Eastern origin, one of the
most important was the Castoiement d'un Père à son Fils, which comes
from the Panchatantra, though not directly. The translated work had great
vogue, and set the example of other Castoiements or warnings. The monk
Helinand at the end of the twelfth century composed a poem on 'Death,' and
a vast number of similar poems might be mentioned. The commonest
perhaps of all is a dialogue Des trois Morts et des trois Vifs, which exists in
an astonishing number of variants. Gradually the tone of all this work
becomes more and more allegorical. Dreams, Mirrors, Castles, such as the
'Castle of Seven Flowers,' a poem on the virtues, make their appearance.
The question of the origin of this habit of allegorising
and personification is one which has been often Allegorical verse.
incidentally discussed by literary historians, but which
has never been exhaustively treated. It is certain that, at The Roman de la
a very early period in the middle ages, it makes its Rose.
appearance, though it is not in full flourishing until the thirteenth century. It
seems to have been a reflection in light literature of the same attitude of
mind which led to the development of the scholastic philosophy, and, as in
the case of that philosophy, Byzantine and Eastern influences may have
been at work. Certain it is that in some of the later Greek romances[85],
something very like the imagery of the Roman de la Rose is discoverable.
Perhaps, however, we need not look further than to the natural result of
leisure, mental activity, and literary skill, working upon a very small stock
of positive knowledge, and restrained by circumstances within a very
narrow range of employment. However this may be, the allegorising habit
manifests itself recognisably enough in French literature towards the close
of the twelfth century. In the Méraugis de Portlesguez of Raoul de
Houdenc, the passion for arguing out abstract questions of lovelore is
exemplified, and in the Roman des Eles of the same author the knightly
virtues are definitely personified, or at least allegorised. At the same time
some at all events of the Troubadours, especially Peire Wilhem, carried the
practice yet further. Merci, Pudeur, Loyauté, are introduced by that poet as
persons whom he met as he rode on his travels. In Thibaut de Champagne a
still further advance was made. The representative poem of this allegorical
literature, and moreover one of the most remarkable compositions furnished

by the mediaeval period in France, is the Roman de la Rose[86]. It is
doubtful whether any other poem of such a length has ever attained a
popularity so wide and so enduring. The Roman de la Rose extends to more
than twenty thousand lines, and is written in a very peculiar style; yet it
maintained its vogue, not merely in France but throughout Europe, for
nearly three hundred years from the date of its commencement, and for
more than two hundred from that of its conclusion. The history of the
composition of the poem is singular. It was begun by William of Lorris, of
whom little or nothing is known, but whose work must, so far as it is easy
to make out, have been done before 1240, and is sometimes fixed at 1237.
This portion extends to 4670 lines, and ends quite abruptly. About forty
years later, Jean de Meung, or Clopinel, afterwards one of Philippe le Bel's
paid men of letters, continued it without preface, taking up William of
Lorris' cue, and extended it to 22,817 verses, preserving the metre and some
of the personages, but entirely altering the spirit of the treatment. The
importance of the poem requires that such brief analysis as space will allow
shall be given here. Its general import is sufficiently indicated by the
heading,—

Ci est le Rommant de la Rose
Où l'art d'amors est tote enclose;

though the rage for allegory induced its readers to moralise even its
allegorical character, and to indulge in various far-fetched explanations of
it. In the twentieth year of his age, the author says, he fell asleep and
dreamed a dream. He had left the city on a fair May morning, and walked
abroad till he came to a garden fenced in with a high wall. On the wall were
portrayed figures, Hatred, Félonnie, Villonie, Covetousness, Avarice, Envy,
Sadness, Old Age, Papelardie (Hypocrisy), Poverty—all of which are
described at length. He strives to enter in, and at last finds a barred wicket
at which he is admitted by Dame Oiseuse (Leisure), who tells him that
Déduit (Delight) and his company are within. He finds the company
dancing and singing, Dame Liesse (Enjoyment) being the chief songstress,
while Courtesy greets him and invites him to take part in the festival. The
god of love himself is then described, with many of his suite—Beauty,
Riches, etc. A further description of the garden leads to the fountain of
Narcissus, whose story is told at length. By this the author, who is

thenceforth called the lover, sees and covets a rosebud. But thorns and
thistles bar his way to it, and the god of love pierces him with his arrows.
He does homage to the god, who accepts his service, and addresses a long
discourse to him on his future duties and conduct. The prospect somewhat
alarms him, when a new personage, Bel Acueil (Gracious Reception),
comes up and tenders his services to the lover, the god having disappeared.
Almost immediately, however, Dangier[87] makes his appearance, and
drives both the lover and Bel Acueil out of the garden. As the former is
bewailing his fate, Reason appears and remonstrates with him. He persists
in his desire, and parleys with Dangier, both directly and by ambassadors,
so that in the end he is brought back by Bel Acueil into the garden and
allowed to see but not to touch the rose. Venus comes to his aid, and he is
further allowed to kiss it. At this, however, Shame, Jealousy, and other evil
agents reproach Dangier. Bel Acueil is immured in a tower, and the lover is
once more driven forth.
Here the portion due to William of Lorris ends. Its main characteristics have
been indicated by this sketch, except that the extreme beauty and grace of
the lavish descriptions which enclose and adorn the somewhat
commonplace allegory perforce escape analysis. It is in these descriptions,
and in a certain tenderness and elegance of general thought and expression,
that the charm of the poem lies, and this is very considerable. The
deficiency of action, however, and the continual allegorising threaten to
make it monotonous had it been much longer continued in the same strain.
It is unlikely that it was this consideration which determined Jean de Meung
to adopt a different style. In his time literature was already agitated by
violent social, political, and religious debates, and the treasures of classical
learning were becoming more and more commonly known. But prose had
not yet become a common literary vehicle, save for history, oratory, and
romance, nor had the duty of treating one thing at a time yet impressed
itself strongly upon authors. Jean de Meung was satirically disposed, was
accomplished in all the learning of his day, and had strong political
opinions. He determined accordingly to make the poem of Lorris, which
was in all probability already popular, the vehicle of his thoughts.
In doing this he takes up the story as his predecessor had left it, at the point
where the lover, deprived of the support of Bel Acueil, and with the

suspicions of Dangier thoroughly aroused against him, lies despairing
without the walls of the delightful garden. Reason is once more introduced,
and protests as before, but in a different tone and much more lengthily. She
preaches the disadvantages of love in a speech nearly four hundred lines
long, followed by another double the length, and then by a dialogue in
which the lover takes his share. The difference of manner is felt at once.
The allegory is kept up after a fashion, but instead of the graceful fantasies
of William of Lorris, the staple matter is either sharp and satirical views of
actual life, or else examples drawn indifferently from sacred and profane
history. One speech of Reason's, a thousand lines in length, consists of a
collection of instances of this kind showing the mobility of fortune. At
length she leaves the lover as she found him, 'melancolieux et dolant,' but
unconvinced. Amis (the friend), who has appeared for a moment previously,
now reappears, and comforts him, also at great length, dwelling chiefly on
the ways of women, concerning which much scandal is talked. The scene
with Reason had occupied nearly two thousand lines; that with Amis
extends to double that length, so that Jean de Meung had already excelled
his predecessor in this respect. Profiting by the counsel he has received, the
lover addresses himself to Riches, who guards the way, but fruitlessly. The
god of love, however, takes pity on him (slightly ridiculing him for having
listened to Reason), and summons all his folk to attack the tower and free
Bel Acueil. Among these Faux Semblant presents himself, and, after some
parley, is received. This new personification of hypocrisy gives occasion to
some of the author's most satirical touches as he describes his principles and
practice. After this, Faux Semblant and his companion, Contrainte
Astenance (forced or feigned abstinence), set to work in favour of the lover,
and soon win their way into the tower. There they find an old woman who
acts as Bel Acueil's keeper. She takes a message from them to Bel Acueil,
and then engages in a singular conversation with her prisoner, wherein the
somewhat loose morality of the discourses of Amis is still further enforced
by historical examples, and by paraphrases of not a few passages from
Ovid. She afterward admits the lover, who thus, at nearly the sixteen-
thousandth line from the beginning, recovers through the help of False
Seeming the 'gracious reception' which is to lead him to the rose. The castle,
however, is not taken, and Dangier, with the rest of his allegorical company,
makes a stout resistance to 'Les Barons de L'Ost'—the lords of Love's army.
The god sends to invoke the aid of his mother, and this introduces a new

personage. Nature herself, and her confidant, Genius, are brought on the
scene, and nearly five thousand verses serve to convey all manner of
thoughts and scraps of learning, mostly devoted to the support, as before, of
questionably moral doctrines. In these five thousand lines almost all the
current ideas of the middle ages on philosophy and natural science are more
or less explicitly contained. Finally, Venus arrives and, with her burning
brand, drives out Dangier and his crew, though even at this crisis of the
action the writer cannot refrain from telling the story of Pygmalion and the
Image at length. The way being clear, the lover proceeds unmolested to
gather the longed-for rose.
It is impossible to exaggerate, and not easy to describe,
the popularity which this poem enjoyed. Its attacks on Popularity of the
womanhood and on morality generally provoked indeed Roman de la Rose.
not a few replies, of which the most important came long afterwards from
Christine de Pisan and from Gerson. But the general taste was entirely in
favour of it. Allegorical already, it was allegorised in fresh senses, even a
religious meaning being given to it. The numerous manuscripts which
remain of it attest its popularity before the days of printing. It was
frequently printed by the earliest typographers of France, and even in the
sixteenth century it received a fresh lease of life at the hands of Marot, who
re-edited it. Abroad it was praised by Petrarch and translated by
Chaucer[88]; and it is on the whole not too much to say that for fully two
centuries it was the favourite book in the vernacular literature of Europe.
Nor was it unworthy of this popularity. As has been pointed out, the grace
of the part due to William of Lorris is remarkable, and the satirical vigour of
the part due to Jean de Meung perhaps more remarkable still. The
allegorising and the length which repel readers of to-day did not disgust
generations whose favourite literary style was the allegorical, and who had
abundance of leisure; but the real secret of its vogue, as of all such vogues,
is that it faithfully held up the mirror to the later middle ages. In no single
book can that period of history be so conveniently studied. Its inherited
religion and its nascent free-thought; its thirst for knowledge and its lack of
criticism; its sharp social divisions and its indistinct aspirations after liberty
and equality; its traditional morality and asceticism, and its half-pagan,
half-childish relish for the pleasures of sense; its romance and its
coarseness, all its weakness and all its strength, here appear.

The imitations of the Roman de la Rose were in
proportion to its popularity. Much of this imitation took Imitations.
place in other kinds of poetry, which will be noticed
hereafter. Two poems, however, which are almost contemporary with its
earliest form, and which have only recently been published, deserve
mention. One, which is an obvious imitation of Guillaume de Lorris, but an
imitation of considerable merit, is the Roman de la Poire[89], where the
lover is besieged by Love in a tower. The other, of a different class, and free
from trace of direct imitation, is the short poem called De Venus la Déesse
d'Amors[90], written in some three hundred four-lined stanzas, each with one
rhyme only. Some passages of this latter are very beautiful.
Three extracts, two from the first part of the Roman de la Rose, and one
from the second, will show its style:—

En iceli tens déliteus,
Que tote riens d'amer s'esfroie,
Sonjai une nuit que j'estoie,
Ce m'iert avis en mon dormant,
Qu'il estoit matin durement;
De mon lit tantost me levai,
Chauçai-moi et mes mains lavai.
Lors trais une aguille d'argent
D'un aguiller mignot et gent,
Si pris l'aguille à enfiler.
Hors de vile oi talent d'aler,
Por oïr des oisiaus les sons
Qui chantoient par ces boissons
En icele saison novele;
Cousant mes manches à videle,
M'en alai tot seus esbatant,
Et les oiselés escoutant,
Qui de chanter moult s'engoissoient
Par ces vergiers qui florissoient,
Jolis, gais et pleins de léesce.
Vers une rivière m'adresce
Que j'oï près d'ilecques bruire.

Car ne me soi aillors déduire
Plus bel que sus cele rivière.
D'un tertre qui près d'iluec ière
Descendoit l'iaue grant et roide,
Clere, bruiant et aussi froide
Comme puiz, ou comme fontaine,
Et estoit poi mendre de Saine,
Mès qu'ele iere plus espandue.
Onques mès n'avoie véue
Tele iaue qui si bien coroit:
Moult m'abelissoit et séoit
A regarder le leu plaisant.
De l'iaue clere et reluisant
Mon vis rafreschi et lavé.
Si vi tot covert et pavé
Le fons de l'iaue de gravele;
La praérie grant et bele
Très au pié de l'iaue batoit.
Clere et serie et bele estoit
La matinée et atemprée:
Lors m'en alai parmi la prée
Contreval l'iaue esbanoiant,
Tot le rivage costoiant.

* * * * * *

Une ymage ot emprès escrite,
Qui sembloit bien estre ypocrite,
Papelardie ert apelée.
C'est cele qui en recelée,
Quant nus ne s'en puet prendre garde,
De nul mal faire ne se tarde.
El fait dehors le marmiteus,
Si a le vis simple et piteus,
Et semble sainte créature;
Mais sous ciel n'a male aventure
Qu'ele ne pense en son corage.

Moult la ressembloit bien l'ymage
Qui faite fu à sa semblance,
Qu'el fu de simple contenance;
Et si fu chaucie et vestue
Tout ainsinc cum fame rendue.
En sa main un sautier tenoit,
Et sachiés que moult se penoit
De faire à Dieu prières faintes,
Et d'appeler et sains et saintes.
El ne fu gaie ne jolive,
Ains fu par semblant ententive
Du tout à bonnes ovres faire;
Et si avoit vestu la haire.
Et sachiés que n'iere pas grasse.
De jeuner sembloit estre lasse,
S'avoit la color pale et morte.
A li et as siens ert la porte
Dévéée de Paradis;
Car icel gent si font lor vis
Amegrir, ce dit l'Évangile,
Por avoir loz parmi la vile,
Et por un poi de gloire vaine,
Qui lor toldra Dieu et son raine.

* * * * * *

Comment le traistre Faulx-Semblant
Si va les cueurs des gens emblant,
Pour ses vestemens noirs et gris,
Et pour son viz pasle amaisgris.
'Trop sai bien mes habiz changier,
Prendre l'un, et l'autre estrangier.
Or sui chevaliers, or sui moines,
Or sui prélas, or sui chanoines,
Or sui clers, autre ore sui prestres,
Or sui desciples, or sui mestres,
Or chastelains, or forestiers:

Briément, ge sui de tous mestiers.
Or resui princes, or sui pages,
Or sai parler trestous langages;
Autre ore sui viex et chenus,
Or resui jones devenus.
Or sui Robers, or sui Robins,
Or cordeliers, or jacobins.
Si pren por sivre ma compaigne
Qui me solace et acompaigne,
(C'est dame Astenance-Contrainte),
Autre desguiséure mainte,
Si cum il li vient à plesir
Por acomplir le sien désir.
Autre ore vest robe de fame;
Or sui damoisele, or sui dame,
Autre ore sui religieuse,
Or sui rendue, or sui prieuse,
Or sui nonain, or sui abesse,
Or sui novice, or sui professe;
Et vois par toutes régions
Cerchant toutes religions. Mès de religion, sans faille,
G'en pren le grain et laiz la paille;
Por gens avulger i abit,
Ge n'en quier, sans plus, que l'abit.
Que vous diroie? en itel guise
Cum il me plaist ge me desguise;
Moult sunt en moi mué li vers,
Moult sunt li faiz aux diz divers.
Si fais chéoir dedans mes piéges
Le monde par mes priviléges;
Ge puis confesser et assoldre,
(Ce ne me puet nus prélas toldre,)
Toutes gens où que ge les truisse;
Ne sai prélat nul qui ce puisse,
Fors l'apostole solement
Qui fist cest establissement
Tout en la faveur de nostre ordre.'

FOOTNOTES:
[77] This is an account of the battle of thirty Englishmen and thirty Bretons in
the Edwardian wars.
[78] There is, it appears, no authority for the Christian name of Robert which
used to be given to Wace.
[79] Wace's Brut is not the only one. The title seems to have become a common
name.
[80] The old edition of the Roman de Rou, by Pluquet, has been entirely
superseded by that of Dr. Hugo Andresen. 2 vols. Heilbronn, 1877-1879.
[81] Discovered recently in the Middlehill collection, and known chiefly by an
article in Romania (Jan. 1882), giving an abstract and specimens.
[82] Ed. Reiffenberg. Brussels, 1835-1845.
[83] Ed. Schéler. Brussels, 1866-1868.
[84] Well edited by Koch. Heilbronn, 1879.
[85] See especially Hysminias and Hysmine.
[86] Ed. F. Michel. 2 vols. Paris, 1864.
[87] Dangier is not exactly 'danger.' To be 'en dangier de quelqu'un' is to be 'in
somebody's power.' Dangier is supposed to stand for the guardian of the
beloved, father, brother, husband, etc. This at least has been the usual
interpretation, and seems to me to be much the more probable. M. Gaston Paris,
however, and others, see in Dangier the natural coyness and resistance of the
beloved object, not any external influence.
[88] Chaucer's authorship of the existing translation has been denied. It is,
however, certain that he did translate the poem.
[89] Ed. Stehlich. Halle, 1881.
[90] Ed. Förster. Berne, 1880.

CHAPTER VIII.
ROMANS D'AVENTURES.

The remarkable fecundity of early French literature in
narrative poetry on the great scale was not limited to the Distinguishing
features of Romans
Chanson de Geste, the Arthurian Romance, and the d'Aventures.
classical story wrought into the likeness of one or the
other of these. Towards the end of the twelfth or the beginning of the
thirteenth century a new class of narrative poems arose, derived from each
and all of these kinds, but marked by important differences. The new form
immediately reacted on the forms which had given it birth, and produced
new Chansons de Gestes, new Arthurian Romances, and new classical
stories fashioned after its own image. This is what is called the Roman
d'Aventures, of which the first and main feature is open and almost avowed
fictitiousness, and the second the more or less complete abandonment of
any attempt at cyclic arrangement or subordination to a central theme.
Until quite recently it was not unusual to apply the term
Roman d'Aventures with less strictness, and to make it Looser application
of the term.
include the Romances of the Round Table. There can,
however, be no doubt that it is far better to adopt Jean
Bodel's three classes as distinguishing into separate Classes of Romans
d'Aventures.
groups the epic poetry of the eleventh and twelfth
centuries, and to restrict the title Romans d'Aventures to the later narrative
developments of the thirteenth and fourteenth. For the second
distinguishing mark which we have just indicated is striking and of more or
less universal application. In these later poems the ambition of the writer to
class his work under and with some precedent work is almost entirely
absent. He allows himself complete freedom, though he may sometimes, in
order to give his characters greater interest, connect them nominally with
some famous personage or event of the earlier cycles. This tendency to
shake off the shackles of cyclicism is early apparent. There are episodes
even in the Chansons de Gestes which have little or no reference to
Charlemagne or his peers: the Arthurian Romances in prose and verse

contain long digressions, holding but very loosely to the Table Round, such
as the adventures of Tristram and Percivale, and still more the singular
episode of Grimaud in the Saint Graal. As for the third class, the Trouvères
almost from the beginning assumed the greatest licence in their handling of
the classical legends. These accordingly were less affected than any others
by the change. It is possible to divide the Romans d'Aventures themselves
under the three headings. It is further possible to indicate a large class of
Chansons de Gestes over which the influence of the Roman d'Aventures has
passed. But the Chanson having a special formal peculiarity—the
assonanced or rhymed tirade—survived the new influence better than the
other two, and keeps its name, and to some extent its character, while the
Romances of Arthur and antiquity are simply lost in the general body of
tales of adventure. These tales are for the most part written in octosyllabic
couplets on the model of Chrestien, but a very few, such as Brun de la
Montaigne, imitate the exterior characteristics of the Chanson.
It is further to be noticed that while the earlier poems are mostly
anonymous, the Romans d'Aventures are generally, though not always,
signed, and bear characteristics of particular authorship. In some cases,
notably in those of Adenès le Roi and Raoul de Houdenc, we have a body
of work signed or otherwise identified, which enables us to attribute a
definite literary character and position to its authors. This, as we have
noted, is impossible in the case of the national epics, and not too easy in
that of the Arthurian Romances. Until quite recently however the Roman
d'Aventures has had less of the attention of editors than its forerunners, and
the works which compose the class are still to some extent unpublished.
Adenès or Adans le Roi perhaps derived his surname
from the function of king of the minstrels, if he Adenès le Roi.
performed it, at the court of Henry III, duke of Brabant.
He was, most likely, born in the second quarter of the thirteenth century,
and the last probable allusion to him which we have occurs in the year
1297. The events of his life are only known from his own poems, and
consist chiefly of travels in company with different princesses and princes
of Flanders and Brabant. His literary work is however of great importance.
It consists partly of refashionings of three Chansons de Gestes, Les
enfances Ogier, Berte aus grans Piés, and Bueves de Commarchis[91]. In
these three poems Adenès works up the old epics into the form fashionable

in his time, and as we possess the older versions of the first and last, the
comparison of the two forms affords a literary study of the highest interest.
His last, longest, and most important work is the Roman d'Aventures of
Cléomadès[92], a poem extending to 20,000 verses, and not less valuable for
its intrinsic merit than as a type of its class. Its popularity in the middle ages
was immense. Froissart gives it the place occupied in the Inferno by
Lancelot in his description of his declaration of love to his mistress, and
allusions to it under its second title of Le Cheval de Fust[93] are frequent.
The most prominent feature in the story is the introduction of a wooden
horse, like that known to everybody in the Arabian Nights, which, started
and guided by means of pegs, transports its rider whithersoever he will. Its
great length allows of a very long series of adventures, all of which are told
in spirited and flowing verse, though with considerable prolixity and a
certain abuse of stock descriptions. These two faults characterise all the
Romans d'Aventures and the Chansons which were remodelled in their
style. The merits of Cléomadès are not so universally found, but its extreme
length is not common. Few other Romans d'Aventures exceed 10,000 lines.
An extract from this poem will well illustrate the manner of this important
class of composition:—

Cleomadés vit un chastel
encoste un plain, tres fort et bel,
ou il ot mainte bele tour.
bos et rivieres vit entour,
vignes et praieries grans.
mult fu li chastiaus bien sëans.
la façon dou castel deïsse,
mais je dout mult que ne meïsse
trop longement au deviser:
pour ce m'en voel briément passer.
Du chastel vous dirai le non:
miols sëant ne vit aine nus hom,
lors l'apieloit on Chastel-noble.
n'ot tel dusque en Constantinoble,
ne de la dusque en Osterice
n'ot plus bel, plus fort ne plus rice.
carmans a cel point i estoit

que Cleomadés vint la droit.
forment li sambloit li chastiaus
de toutes pars riches et biaus.
Cleomadés lors s'avisa
que viers le chastel se trera.
bien pensoit qu'en tel liu manoient
gent qui de grant afaire estoient.
che fu si qu'apriés l'ajournee
mult faisoit bele matinee,
car mais estoit nouviaus entrés:
c'est uns tans ki mult est amés
et de toutes gens conjoïs;
pour çou a non mais li jolis.
une tres grant tour haute et forte
avoit asés priés de la porte,
ki estoit couverte de plon,
plate deseure, car adon
les faisoit on ensi couvrir
pour engins et pour assallir.
Cleomadés a avisee
la tour ki estoit haute et lee;
lors pense qu'il s'arestera
sor cele tour tant qu'il savra,
se il puet, la certainité
quel païs c'est la verité.
lors a son cheval adrechié
viers la tour de marbre entaillié.
les chevilletes si tourna
que droit sour la tour aresta.
si coiement s'est avalés
que sour aighe coie vait nés.
Raoul de Houdenc is an earlier poet than Adenès, and Raoul de Houdenc.
represents the Roman d'Aventures in its infancy, when it
still found it necessary to attach itself to the great cycle of the Round Table.
His works, besides some shorter poems[94], consist of the Roman des Eles
(Ailes), a semi-allegorical composition, describing the wings and feathers

of chivalry, that is to say, the great chivalrous virtues, among which Raoul,
like a herald as he was, gives Largesse the first place; of Méraugis de
Portlesguez, an important composition, possessing some marked
peculiarities of style; and possibly also of the Vengeance de Raguidel, in
which the author works out one of the innumerable unfinished episodes of
the great epic of Percevale. Thus Raoul de Houdenc occupies no mean
place in French literature, inasmuch as he indicates the starting-point of two
great branches, the Roman d'Aventures and the allegorical poem, and this at
a very early date. This date is not known exactly; but it was certainly before
1228, when the Trouvère Huon de Méry alludes to him, and classes him
with Chrestien as a master of French verse. He has in truth some very
noteworthy peculiarities. The chief of these, which must soon strike any
reader of Méraugis, is his tendency to enjambement or overlapping of
couplets. It is a curious feature in the history of French verse that the
isolation of the couplet has constantly recurred in its history, and that as
constantly reformers have striven to break up the monotony so produced by
this process of enjambement. Perhaps Raoul is the earliest who thus, as an
indignant critic put it at the first representation of Hernani, 'broke up verses,
and threw them out of window.' Besides this metrical characteristic, the
thing most noteworthy in his poems (as might indeed have been expected
from his composition of the Roman des Eles) is a tendency to allegorising,
and to scholastic disquisitions on points of amatory casuistry. The whole
plot of Méraugis indeed turns on the enquiry whether physical or
metaphysical love is the sincerest, and on the quarrel which a difference on
this point brings on between the hero and Gorvein Cadrus his friend and his
rival in the love of the fair Lidoine.
Many other Romans d'Aventures deserve mention, both
for their intrinsic merits and for the immense popularity Chief Romans
they once enjoyed. Foremost among these must be d'Aventures.
mentioned Partenopex de Blois[95] and Flore et Blanchefleur[96]. The
former (formerly ascribed to Denis Pyramus and now denied to him, but
said to date from the twelfth century) is a kind of modernised Cupid and
Psyche, except that Cupid's place is taken by the fairy Melior, and Psyche's
by the knight Parthenopeus or Parthenopex. This poem has great elegance
and freshness of style, and though the author is inclined to moralise (as a
near forerunner of the Roman de la Rose was bound to do), his moralisings

are gracefully and naively put. Flore et Blanchefleur is perhaps even
superior. Its theme is the love of a young Christian prince for a Saracen girl-
slave, who has been brought up with him. She is sold into a fresh captivity
to remove her from him, but he follows her and rescues her unharmed from
the harem of the Emir of Babylon. The delicacy of the handling is very
remarkable in this poem, and it has some links of connection with Aucassin
et Nicolette. Le Roman de Dolopathos[97] has a literary history of great
interest which we need not touch upon here. Its versification has more
vigour than that of almost any other Roman d'Aventures. Blancandin et
l'Orguilleuse d'Amour[98] is more promising at the beginning than in the
sequel. A young knight, hearing of the pride and coyness of a lady, accosts
and kisses her as she rides past with a great following of knights. Her
coldness is of course changed to love at first sight, and the audacious suitor
afterwards delivers her from her enemies; but the working out of the story is
rather dully managed. Brun de la Montaigne[99], as has been already
mentioned, is written in Chanson form, and deals with the famous Forest of
Broceliande in Britanny. Guillaume de Palerne[100] is a still more
interesting work. It introduces the favourite mediaeval idea of lycanthropy,
the hero being throughout helped and protected by a friendly were-wolf,
who is before the end of the poem freed from the enchantment to which he
is subjected. This Romance was early translated into English. Of the same
class is the Roman de l'Escouffle, where a hawk carries away the heroine's
ring, as in a well-known story of the Arabian Nights. Amadas et Idoine[101]
is one of the numerous histories of the success of a squire of low degree,
but is distinguished from most of them by the originality of its conception
and the vigour of its style. The scenes where the hero is recovered of his
madness by his beloved, and where, keeping guard over her tomb, he fights
with ghostly enemies, after a time of trial of his fidelity, and rescues her
from death, are unusually brilliant. Le Bel Inconnu[102], which (from a
curious misunderstanding of its older form Li Biaus Desconnus) occurs in
English form as Lybius Diasconus, tells the story of a son of Gawain and
the fairy with the white hands, and thus is one of the numerous secondary
Romances of the Round Table. So also is the long and interesting Roman du
Chevalier as Deux Espées[103]; this extends to more than 12,000 lines, and,
though the adventures recorded are of the ordinary Round Table pattern,
there is noticeable in it a better faculty of maintaining the interest and a

completer mastery over episodes than usual. A still longer poem (also
belonging to what may be called the outer Arthurian cycle) is Durmart le
Gallois[104], which contains almost 16,000 verses. The loves of the hero and
Fenise, the Queen of Ireland, are somewhat lengthily handled; but there are
passages of merit, especially one most striking episode in which the hero,
riding through a forest by night, comes to a tree covered from top to bottom
with burning torches, while a shining naked child is enthroned on the
summit. These touches of mystical religion are rarer in the later Romans
d'Aventures than in the Arthurian Romances proper, but with them one of
the most remarkable elements of romance disappears. Philippe de Rémy,
Seigneur de Beaumanoir (who has other claims to literary distinction) is
held to be author of two Romans d'Aventures[105], La Manekine (the story
of the King of Hungary's daughter, who cut off her hand to save herself
from her father's incestuous passion) and Blonde d'Oxford, where a young
French squire carries off an English heiress. Joufrois de Poitiers[106], which
has not come down to us complete, is chiefly remarkable for the liveliness
of style with which adventures, in themselves tolerably hackneyed, are
handled. Other Romans d'Aventures, which are either as yet in manuscript
or of less importance, are Ille et Galeron and Eracle, both by Gautier
d'Arras, Cristal et Larie, La Dame à la Licorne, Guy de Warwike, Gérard
de Nevers or La Violette[107], Guillaume de Dole, Elédus et Séréna,
Florimont.
Like most kinds of mediaeval poetry, these Romans
d'Aventures have a very considerable likeness the one to General Character.
the other. It may indeed be said that they possess a
'common form' of certain incidents and situations, which reappear with
slight changes and omissions in all or most of them. Their besetting sins are
diffuseness and the recurrence of stock descriptions and images. On the
other hand, they have their peculiar merits. The harmony of their
versification is often very considerable; their language is supple,
picturesque, and varied, and the moral atmosphere which they breathe is
one of agreeable refinement and civilisation. In them perhaps is seen most
clearly the fanciful and graceful side of the state of things which we call
chivalry. Its mystical and transcendental sides are less vividly and
touchingly exhibited than in the older Arthurian Romances; and its higher
passions are also less dealt with. The Romans d'Aventures supply once

more, according to the Aristotelian definition, an Odyssey to the Arthurian
Iliad; they are complex and deal with manners. Nor ought it to be omitted
that, though they constantly handle questions of gallantry, and though their
uniform theme is love, the language employed on these subjects is almost
invariably delicate, and such as would not fail to satisfy even modern
standards of propriety. The courtesy which was held to be so great a
knightly virtue, if it was not sufficient to ensure a high standard of morality
in conduct, at any rate secured such a standard in matter of expression. In
this respect the Court literature of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries
stands in very remarkable contrast to that which was tolerated, if not
preferred, from the time of Louis the Eleventh until the reign of his
successor fourteenth of the name.
Reference has already been made to the influence which
these poems had on the Chansons de Gestes. Few of the Last Chansons.
Baudouin de
later developments of these are worth much attention, Sebourc.
but what may be called the last original Chanson
deserves some notice. Baudouin de Sebourc[108] and its sequel the Bastard
of Bouillon[109] worthily close this great division of literature, and, setting
as they do a finish to the sub-cycle of the Chevalier au Cygne, hardly lose
except in simplicity by comparison with its magnificent opening in the
Chanson d'Antioche. They contain together some 33,000 verses, and the
scene changes freely. It is sometimes in Syria, where the Crusaders fight
against the infidel, sometimes in France and Flanders, where Baudouin has
adventures of all kinds, comic and chivalrous, sometimes on the sea, where
among other things the favourite mediaeval legend of St. Brandan's Isle is
brought in. Not a little of its earlier part shows the sarcastic spirit common
at the date of its composition, the beginning of the fourteenth century. The
length of the two poems is enormous, as has been said; but, putting two or
three masterpieces aside, no poem of mediaeval times has a more varied
and livelier interest than Baudouin de Sebourc, and few breathe the genuine
Chanson spirit of pugnacious piety better than Le Bastart de Bouillon.

FOOTNOTES:
[91] Ed. Schéler. Brussels, v. d.

[92] Ed. van Hasselt. Brussels, 1866.
[93] The wooden horse.
[94] The Songe d'Enfer and the Voie de Paradis, published by Jubinal, as the
Roman des Eles has been by Schéler, Méraugis by Michelant, and the Vengeance
de Raguidel by Hippeau.
[95] Ed. Crapelet. Paris, 1834.
[96] Ed. Du Méril. Paris, 1856.
[97] Ed. Brunet et Montaiglon. Paris, 1856.
[98] Ed. Michelant. Paris, 1867.
[99] Ed. Meyer. Paris, 1875.
[100] Ed. Michelant. Paris, 1876.
[101] Ed. Hippeau. Paris, 1863.
[102] Ed. Hippeau. Paris, 1860.
[103] Ed. Förster. Halle, 1877.
[104] Ed. Stengel. Tübingen, 1873.
[105] Both edited in extract by Bordier. Paris, 1869. Complete edition begun by
Suchier. Paris, 1884.
[106] Ed. Hofmann and Muncker. Halle, 1880.
[107] Ed. Michel.
[108] Ed. Boca. 2 vols. Valenciennes, 1841.
[109] Ed. Schéler. Brussels, 1877.

CHAPTER IX.
LATER SONGS AND POEMS.

Not the least important division of early French
literature, in point of bulk and peculiarity, though not The Artificial
Forms of Northern
always the most important in point of literary France.
excellence, consists of the later lyrical and
miscellaneous poems of the fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries. By the
end of the thirteenth century the chief original developments had lost their
first vigour, while, on the other hand, the influence of the regular forms of
Provençal poetry had had time to make itself fully felt. There arose in
consequence, in northern France, a number of artificial forms, the origin
and date of which is somewhat obscure, but which rapidly attained great
popularity, and which continued for fully two centuries almost to
monopolise the attention of poets who did not devote themselves to
narrative. These forms, the Ballade, the Rondeau, the Virelai, etc., have
already been alluded to as making their appearance among the later growths
of early lyrical poetry. They must now be treated in the abundant
development which they received at the hands of a series of poets from
Lescurel to Charles d'Orléans.
The principle underlying all these forms is the same, that
is to say, the substitution for the half-articulate refrain of General Character.
Varieties.
the early Romances, of a refrain forming part of the
sense, and repeated with strict regularity at the end or in the middle of
stanzas rigidly corresponding in length and constitution. In at least two
cases, the lai and the pastourelle, the names of earlier and less rigidly exact
forms were borrowed for the newer schemes; but the more famous and
prevailing models[110], the Ballade, with its modification the Chant Royal,
and the Rondel, with its modifications the Rondeau and the Triolet, are new.
It has been customary to see in the adoption of these forms a sign of
decadence; but this can hardly be sustained in face of the fact that, in
Charles d'Orléans and Villon respectively, the Rondel and the Ballade were

the occasion of poetry far surpassing in vigour and in grace all preceding
work of the kind, and also in presence of the service which the sonnet—a
form almost if not quite as artificial—has notoriously done to poetry. It may
be admitted, however, that the practitioners of the Ballade and the Rondeau
soon fell into puerile and inartistic over-refinements. The forms of Ballade
known as Équivoquée, Fratrisée, Couronnée, etc., culminating in the
preposterous Emperière, are monuments of tasteless ingenuity which cannot
be surpassed in their kind, and they have accordingly perished. But both in
France and in England the Ballade itself and a few other forms have
retained popularity at intervals, and have at the present day broken out into
fresh and vigorous life.
The chief authors of these pieces during the period we
are discussing were Jehannot de Lescurel, Guillaume de Jehannot de
Machault, Eustache Deschamps, Jean Froissart, Lescurel.
Christine de Pisan, Alain Chartier, and Charles
d'Orléans. Besides these there were many others, though Guillaume
Machault.
de

the epoch of the Hundred Years' War was not altogether
fertile in lighter poetry or poetry of any kind. Jehannot
Eustache
de Lescurel[111] is one of those poets of whom absolutely Deschamps
nothing is known. His very name has only survived in
the general syllabus of contents of the manuscript which contains his works,
and which is in this part incomplete. The thirty-three poems—sixteen
Ballades, fifteen Rondeaus[112], and two nondescript pieces—which exist
are of singular grace, lightness, and elegance. They cannot be later and are
probably earlier than the middle of the fourteenth century, and thus they are
anterior to most of the work of the school. Guillaume de Machault was a
person sufficiently before the world, and his work is very voluminous. As
usual with all these poets, it contains many details of its author's life, and
enables us to a certain extent to construct that life out of these indications.
Machault was probably born about 1284, and may not have died till 1377. A
native of Champagne and of noble birth, he early entered, like most of the
lesser nobility of the period, the service of great feudal lords. He was
chamberlain to Philip the Fair, and at his death became the secretary of John
of Luxembourg, the well-known king of Bohemia. After the death of this
prince at Cressy, he returned to the service of the court of France and served
John and Charles V., finally, as it appears, becoming in some way connected

with Pierre de Lusignan, king of Cyprus. His works were very numerous,
amounting in all to some 80,000 lines, of which until recently nothing but a
few extracts was in print. In the last few years, however, La Prise
d'Alexandrie[113], a rhymed chronicle of the exploits of Lusignan, and the
Voir Dit[114], a curious love poem in the style of the age, have been printed.
Besides these his works include numerous ballades, etc., and several long
poems in the style of those of Froissart, shortly to be described. On the
other hand, the works of Eustache Deschamps, which are even more
voluminous than those of Machault, his friend and master, are almost
wholly composed of short pieces, with one notable exception, the Miroir de
Mariage, a poem of 13,000 lines[115]. Deschamps has left no less than 1175
ballades, and as the ballade usually contains twenty-four lines at least, and
frequently thirty-four, this of itself gives a formidable total. Rondeaus,
virelais, etc., also proceeded in great numbers from his pen; and he wrote an
important 'Art of Poetry,' a treatise rendered at once necessary and popular
by the fashion of artificial rhyming. The life of Deschamps was less varied
than that of Machault, whose inferior he was in point of birth, but he held
some important offices in his native province, Champagne. Both
Deschamps and Machault exhibit strongly the characteristics of the time.
Their ballades are for the most part either moral or occasional in subject,
and rarely display signs of much attention to elegance of phraseology or to
weight and value of thought. In the enormous volume of their works,
amounting in all to nearly 200,000 lines, and as yet mostly unpublished,
there is to be found much that is of interest indirectly, but less of intrinsic
poetical worth. The artificial forms in which they for the most part write
specially invite elegance of expression, point, and definiteness of thought,
qualities in which both, but especially Deschamps, are too often deficient.
When, for instance, we find the poet in his anxiety to discourage swearing,
filling, in imitation of two bad poets of his time, one, if not two ballades[116]
with a list of the chief oaths in use, it is difficult not to lament the lack of
critical spirit displayed.
Froissart, though inferior to Lescurel, and though far less
remarkable as a poet than as a prose writer, can fairly Froissart.
hold his own with Deschamps and Machault, while he
has the advantage of being easily accessible[117]. The later part of his life
having been given up to history, he is not quite so voluminous in verse as

his two predecessors. Yet, if the attribution to him of the Cour d' Amour and
the Trésor Amoureux be correct, he has left some 40,000 or 50,000 lines.
The bulk of his work consists of long poems in the allegorical courtship of
the time, interspersed with shorter lyrical pieces in the prevailing forms.
One of these poems, the Buisson de Jonece, is interesting because of its
autobiographical details; and some shorter pieces approaching more nearly
to the Fabliau style, Le Dit du Florin, Le Débat du Cheval et du Lévrier,
etc., are sprightly and agreeable enough. For the most part, however,
Froissart's poems, like almost all the poems of the period, suffer from the
disproportion of their length to their matter. If the romances of the time,
which are certainly not destitute of incident, be tedious from the
superabundance of prolix description, much more tedious are these recitals
of hyperbolical passion tricked out with all the already stale allegorical
imagery of the Roman de la Rose and with inappropriate erudition of the
fashion which Jean de Meung had confirmed, if he did not set it.
Christine de Pisan, who was born in 1363, was a pupil of
Deschamps, as Deschamps had been a pupil of Christine de Pisan.
Machault. She was an industrious writer, a learned
person, and a good patriot, but not by any means a great poetess. So at least
it would appear, though here again judgment has to be formed on
fragments, a complete edition of Christine never having been published,
and even her separate poems being unprinted for the most part, or printed
only in extract. Besides a collection of Ballades, Rondeaux, and so forth,
she wrote several Dits (the Dit de la Pastoure, the Dit de Poissy, the Dittié
de Jeanne d'Arc, and some Dits Moraux), besides a Mutation de Fortune, a
Livre des Cent Histoires de Troie, etc., etc.
Alain Chartier, who was born in or about 1390, and who
died in 1458, is best known by the famous story of Alain Chartier.
Margaret of Scotland, queen of France, herself an
industrious poetess, stooping to kiss his poetical lips as he lay asleep. He
also awaits a modern editor. Like Froissart, he devoted himself to
allegorical and controversial love poems, and like Christine to moral verse.
In the former he attained to considerable skill, and a ballade, which will
presently be given, will show his command of dignified expression. On the
whole he may be said to be the most complete example of the scholarliness
which tended more and more to characterise French poetry at this time, and

which too often degenerated into pedantry. Chartier is the first considerable
writer of original work who Latinises much; and his practice in this respect
was eagerly followed by the rhétoriqueur school both in prose and verse.
He himself observed due measure in it; but in the hands of his successors it
degraded French to an almost Macaronic jargon.
In all the earlier work of this school not a little grace and elegance is
discoverable, and this quality manifests itself most strongly in the poet who
may be regarded as closing the strictly mediaeval series, Charles
d'Orléans[118]. The life of this poet has been frequently told. As far as we are
concerned it falls into three divisions. In the first, when after his father's
death he held the position of a great feudal prince almost independent of
royal control, it is not recorded that he produced any literary work. His long
captivity in England was more fruitful, and during it he wrote both in
French and in English. But the last five-and-twenty years of his life, when
he lived quietly and kept court at Blois (bringing about him the literary men
of the time from Bouciqualt to Villon, and engaging with them in poetical
tournaments), were the most productive. His undoubted work is not large,
but the pieces which compose it are among the best of their kind. He is
fond, in the allegorical language of the time, of alluding to his having 'put
his house in the government of Nonchaloir,' and chosen that personage for
his master and protector. There is thus little fervency of passion about him,
but rather a graceful and somewhat indolent dallying with the subjects he
treats. Few early French poets are better known than Charles d'Orléans, and
few deserve their popularity better. His Rondeaux on the approach of
spring, on the coming of summer and such-like subjects, deserve the very
highest praise for delicate fancy and formal skill.
Of poets of less importance, or whose names have not been preserved, the
amount of this formal poetry which remains to us is considerable. The best-
known collection of such work is the Livre des Cent Ballades[119], believed,
on tolerably satisfactory evidence, to have been composed by the famous
knight-errant Bouciqualt and his companions on their way to the fatal battle
of Nicopolis. Before, however, the fifteenth century was far advanced,
poetry of this formal kind fell into the hands of professional authors in the
strictest sense, Grands Rhétoriqueurs as they were called, who, as a later
critic said of almost the last of them, 'lost all the grace and elegance of the
composition' in their elaborate rules and the pedantic language which they

employed. The complete decadence of poetry in which this resulted will be
treated partly in the summary following the present book, partly in the first
chapter of the book which succeeds it.
Meanwhile this frail but graceful poetry may be illustrated by an irregular
Ballade from Lescurel, a Chanson Balladée from Machault, a Virelai from
Deschamps, a Ballade from Chartier, and a Rondel from Charles d'Orléans.

Jehannot de Lescurel.

Amour, voules-vous acorder
Que je muire pour bien amer?
Vo vouloir m'esteut agreer;
Mourir ne puis plus doucement;
Vraiement,
Amours, faciez voustre talent.

Trop de mauvais portent endurer
Pour celi que j'aim sanz fausser
N'est pas par li, au voir parler,
Ains est par mauparliere gent.
Loiaument,
Amours, faciez voustre talent.

Dous amis, plus ne puis durer
Quant ne puis ne n'os regarder
Vostre doue vis, riant et cler.
Mort, alegez mon grief torment;
Ou, briefment,
Amours, faciez voustre talent.

Guillaume de Machault.

Onques si bonne journee
Ne fu adjournee,
Com quant je me departi
De ma dame desiree

A qui j'ay donnee
M'amour, & le cuer de mi.

Car la manne descendi
Et douceur aussi,
Par quoi m'ame saoulee
Fu dou fruit de Dous ottri,
Que Pite cueilli
En sa face coulouree.
La fu bien l'onnour gardee
De la renommee
De son cointe corps joli;
Qu'onques villeine pensee
Ne fu engendree
Ne nee entre moy & li.
Onques si bonne journee, &c.

Souffisance m'enrichi
Et Plaisance si,
Qu'onques creature nee
N'ot le cuer si assevi,
N'a mains de sousci,
Ne joie si affinee.
Car la deesse honnouree
Qui fait l'assemblee
D'amours, d'amie & d'ami,
Coppa le chief de s'espee
Qui est bien tempree,
A Dangier, mon anemi.
Onques si bonne journee, &c.

Ma dame l'enseveli
Et Amours, par fi
Que sa mort fust tost plouree.
N'onques Honneur ne souffri
(Dont je l'en merci)
Que messe li fu chantee.

Sa charongne trainee
Fu sans demouree
En un lieu dont on dit: fi!
S'en fu ma joie doublee,
Quant Honneur l'entree
Ot dou tresor de merci.
Onques si bonne journee, &c.

Eustache Deschamps.

Sui-je, sui-je, sui-je belle?
Il me semble, a mon avis,
Que j'ay beau front et doulz viz,
Et la bouche vermeilette;
Dictes moy se je sui belle.

J'ay vers yeulx, petit sourcis,
Le chief blont, le nez traitis,
Ront menton, blanche gorgette;
Sui-je, sui-je, sui-je belle, etc.

J'ay dur sain et hault assis,
Lons bras, gresles doys aussis,
Et, par le faulx, sui greslette;
Dictes moy se je sui belle.

J'ay piez rondes et petiz,
Bien chaussans, et biaux habis,
Je sui gaye et foliette;
Dictes moy se je sui belle.

J'ay mantiaux fourrez de gris,
J'ay chapiaux, j'ay biaux proffis,
Et d'argent mainte espinglette;
Sui-je, sui-je, sui-je belle?

J'ay draps de soye, et tabis,
J'ay draps d'or, et blanc et bis,

J'ay mainte bonne chosette;
Dictes moy se je sui belle.

Que quinze ans n'ay, je vous dis;
Moult est mes tresors jolys,
S'en garderay la clavette;
Sui-je, sui-je, sui-je belle?

Bien devra estre hardis
Cilz, qui sera mes amis,
Qui ora tel damoiselle;
Dictes moy se je sui belle?

Et par dieu, je li plevis,
Que tres loyal, se je vis,
Li seray, si ne chancelle;
Sui-je, sui-je, sui-je belle?

Se courtois est et gentilz,
Vaillains, apers, bien apris,
Il gaignera sa querelle;
Dictes moy se je sui belle.

C'est uns mondains paradiz
Que d'avoir dame toudiz,
Ainsi fresche, ainsi nouvelle;
Sui-je, sui-je, sui-je belle?

Entre vous, acouardiz,
Pensez a ce que je diz;
Cy fine ma chansonnelle;
Sui-je, sui-je, sui-je belle?

Alain Chartier.

O folz des folz, et les folz mortelz hommes,
Qui vous fiez tant es biens de fortune
En celle terre, es pays ou nous sommes,

Y avez-vous de chose propre aucune?
Vous n'y avez chose vostre nes-une,
Fors les beaulx dons de grace et de nature.
Se Fortune donc, par cas d'adventur
Vous toult les biens que vostres vous tenez,
Tort ne vous fait, aincois vous fait droicture,
Car vous n'aviez riens quant vous fustes nez.

Ne laissez plus le dormir a grans sommes
En vostre lict, par nuict obscure et brune,
Pour acquester richesses a grans sommes.
Ne convoitez chose dessoubz la lune,
Ne de Paris jusques a Pampelune,
Fors ce qui fault, sans plus, a creature
Pour recouvrer sa simple nourriture.
Souffise vous d'estre bien renommez,
Et d'emporter bon loz en sepulture:
Car vous n'aviez riens quant vous fustes nez.

Les joyeulx fruictz des arbres, et les pommes,
Au temps que fut toute chose commune,
Le beau miel, les glandes et les gommes
Souffisoient bien a chascun et chascune:
Et pour ce fut sans noise et sans rancune.
Soyez contens des chaulx et des froidures,
Et me prenez Fortune doulce et seure.
Pour vos pertes, griefve dueil n'en menez,
Fors a raison, a point, et a mesure,
Car vous n'aviez riens quant vous fustes nez.

Se Fortune vous fait aucune injure,
C'est de son droit, ja ne l'en reprenez,
Et perdissiez jusques a la vesture:
Car vous n'aviez riens quant vous fustes nez.

Charles D'orléans.

Le temps a laissie son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
Et s'est vestu de brouderie,
De soleil luyant, cler et beau.
Il n'y a beste, ne oyseau,
Qu'en son jargon ne chante ou crie:
Le temps a laissie son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye.
Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau
Portent, en livree jolie,
Gouttes d'argent d'orfavrerie,
Chascun s'abille de nouveau:
Le temps a laissie son manteau.

FOOTNOTES:
[110] The following is an account of these forms, in their more important
developments. The ballade consists of three stanzas, and an envoy, or final half-
stanza, which is sometimes omitted. The number of the lines in each stanza is
optional, but it should not usually be more than eleven or less than eight. The
peculiarity of the poem is that the last line of every stanza is identical, and that
the rhymes are the same throughout and repeated in the same order. The
examples printed at the end of this chapter from Lescurel and Chartier will
illustrate this sufficiently. There is no need to enter into the absurdity of ballades
équivoquées, emperières, etc., further than to say that their main principle is the
repetition of the same rhyming word, in a different sense, it may be twice or
thrice at the end of the line, it may be at the end and in the middle, it may be at
the end of one line and the beginning of the next. The chant royal is a kind of
major ballade having five of the longest (eleven-lined) stanzas and an envoy of
five lines. The rondel is a poem of thirteen lines (sometimes made into fourteen
by an extra repetition), consisting of two quatrains and a five-lined stanza, the
first two lines of the first quatrain being repeated as the last two of the second,
and the first line of all being added once more at the end. The rondeau, a poem
of thirteen, fourteen, or fifteen lines, is arranged in stanzas of five, four, and four,
five, or six lines, the last line of the second and third stanzas consisting of the
first words of the first line of the poem. The triolet is a sort of rondel of eight
lines only, repeating the first line at the fourth, and the first and second at the
seventh and eighth. Lastly, the villanelle alternates one of two refrain lines at the
end of each three-lined stanza. These are the principal forms, though there are
many others.
[111] Ed. Montaiglon. Paris, 1855.
[112] The Rondeau is not in Lescurel systematised into any regular form.

[113] Ed. L. de Mas Latrie. Société de l'Orient Latin, Geneva, 1877. This is a
poem not much shorter than the Voir Dit, but continuously octosyllabic and very
spirited. The final account of the murder of Pierre (which he provoked by the
most brutal oppression of his vassals) is full of power.
[114] Ed. P. Paris. Société des Bibliophiles, Paris, 1875. This is a very
interesting poem consisting of more than 9000 lines, mostly octosyllabic
couplets, with ballades, etc. interspersed, one of which is given at the end of this
chapter. It is addressed either to Agnes of Navarre, or, as M. P. Paris thought, to
Péronelle d'Armentières, and was written in 1362, when the author was probably
very old.
[115] Deschamps is said to have been also named Morel. A complete edition of
his works has been undertaken for the Old French Text Society by the Marquis
de Queux de Saint Hilaire.
[116] Ballades, 147, 149. Ed. Queux de St. Hilaire.
[117] Ed. Schéler. 3 vols. Brussels, 1870-1872.
[118] Ed. Héricault. 2 vols. Paris, 1874. Charles d'Orléans was the son of the
Duke of Orleans, who was murdered by the Burgundians, and of Valentina of
Milan. He was born in 1391, taken prisoner at Agincourt, ransomed in 1449, and
he died in 1465. His son was Louis XII.
[119] Ed. Queux de St. Hilaire. Paris, 1868.

CHAPTER X.
THE DRAMA.

The origins of the drama in France, like most other
points affecting mediaeval literature, have been made Origins of Drama.
the subject of a good deal of dispute. It has been
attempted, on the one hand, to father the mysteries and miracle-plays of the
twelfth and later centuries on the classical drama, traditions of which are
supposed to have been preserved in the monasteries and other homes of
learning. On the other hand, a more probable and historical source has been
found in the ceremonies and liturgies of the Church, which in themselves
possess a considerable dramatic element, and which, as we shall see, were
early adapted to still more definitely dramatic purposes. Disputes of this
kind, if not exactly otiose, are not suited to these pages; and it is sufficient
to say that while Plautus and Terence at least retained a considerable hold
on mediaeval students, the natural tendencies to dramatic representation
which exist in almost every people, assisted by the stimulus of ecclesiastical
traditions, ceremonies, and festivals, are probably sufficient to account for
the beginnings of dramatic literature in France.
It so happens too that such historical evidence as we
have entirely bears out this supposition. The earliest Earliest Vernacular
Dramatic Forms.
compositions of a dramatic kind that we possess in
French, are arguments and scraps interpolated in Latin
liturgies of a dramatic character. Earlier still these works Mysteries
Miracles.
and

had been wholly in Latin. The production called 'The
Prophets of Christ' is held to date from the eleventh
Miracles de la
century, and consists of a series of utterances of the Vierge.
prophets and patriarchs, who are called upon in turn to
bear testimony in reference to the Messiah, according to a common patristic
habit. By degrees other portions of Old Testament history were thrown into
the dramatic or at least dialogic form. In the drama or dramatic liturgy of
Daniel, fragments of French make their appearance, and the Mystery of
Adam is entirely in the vulgar tongue. Both these belong to the twelfth

century, and the latter appears to have been not merely a part of the church
services, but to have been independently performed outside the church
walls. It is accompanied by full directions in Latin for the decoration and
arrangement of stage and scenes. Another important instance, already
mentioned, of somewhat dubious age, but certainly very early, is the
Mystery of The Ten Virgins. This is not wholly in French, but contains some
speeches in a Romance dialect. These three dramas, Daniel, Adam, and The
Ten Virgins, are the most ancient specimens of their kind, which, from the
thirteenth century onward, becomes very numerous and important. By
degrees a distinction was established between mystery and miracle-plays,
the former being for the most part taken from the sacred Scriptures, the
latter from legends and lives of the Saints and of the Virgin. Early and
interesting specimens of the miracle are to be found in the Théophile of
Rutebœuf and in the Saint Nicholas of Jean Bodel d'Arras, both belonging
to the same (thirteenth) century[120]. But the most remarkable examples of
the miracle-play are to be found in a manuscript which contains forty
miracles of the Virgin, dating from the fourteenth century. Selections from
these have been published at different times, and the whole is now in course
of publication by the Old French Text Society[121]. As the miracles were
mostly concerned with isolated legends, they did not lend themselves to
great prolixity, and it is rare to find them exceed 2000 lines. Their
versification is at first somewhat licentious, but by degrees they settled
down into more or less regular employment of the octosyllabic couplet.
Both in them and in the mysteries the curious mixture of pathos and
solemnity on the one side, with farcical ribaldry on the other, which is
characteristic of mediaeval times, early becomes apparent. The mysteries,
however, as they became more and more a favourite employment of the
time, increased and grew in length. The narrative of the Scriptures being
more or less continuous, it was natural that the small dramas on separate
subjects should by degrees be attracted to one another and be merged in
larger wholes. It was another marked characteristic of mediaeval times that
all literary work should be constantly subject to remaniement, the facile
scribes of each day writing up the work of their predecessors to the taste
and demands of their own audience. In the case of the mysteries, as in that
of the Chansons de Gestes, each remaniement resulted in a lengthening of
the original. It became an understood thing that a mystery lasted several
days in the representation; and in many provincial towns regular theatres

were constructed for the performances, which remained ready for use
between the various festival times. In the form which these representations
finally assumed in the fifteenth century, they not only required elaborate
scenery and properties, but also in many cases a very large troop of
performers. It is from this century that most of the mysteries we possess
date, and they are all characterised by enormous length. The two most
famous of these are the Passion[122] of Arnould Gréban, and the Viel
Testament[123], due to no certain author. The Passion, as originally written
in the middle of the fifteenth century, consisted of some 25,000 lines, and
thirty or forty years later it was nearly doubled in length by the alterations
of Jean Michel. The Mystère du Viel Testament, of which no manuscript is
now known, but which was printed in the last year of the fifteenth century,
is now being reprinted, and extends to nearly 50,000 verses. Additions even
to this are spoken of; and Michel's Passion, supplemented by a
Résurrection, extended to nearly 70,000 lines, which vast total is believed
to have been frequently acted as a whole. In such a case the space of weeks
rather than days, which is said to have been sometimes occupied in the
performance of a mystery, cannot be thought excessive.
The enormous length of the larger mysteries makes
analysis of any one of them impossible; but as an Heterogeneous
instance of the curious comedy which is intermixed with Character
Mysteries.
of

their most serious portions, and which shocked critics
even up to our own time, we may take the scene of the Tower of Babel in
the Mystère du Viel Testament[124]. Here the author is not content with
describing Nimrod's act in general terms, or by the aid of the convenient
messenger; he brings the actual masons and carpenters on the stage. Gaste-
Bois (Spoilwood), Casse-Tuileau (Breaktile), and their mates talk before us
for nearly 200 lines, while Nimrod and others come in from time to time
and hasten on the work. The workmen are quite outspoken on the matter.
They do not altogether like the job; and one of them says,

On ne peut en fin que faillir.
Besongnons; mais qu'on nous paie bien.

A little further on and they are actually at work. One calls for a hod of
mortar, another for his hammer. The labourers supply their wants, or make

jokes to the effect that they would rather bring them something to drink. So
it goes on, till suddenly the confusion of tongues falls upon them, and they
issue their orders in what is probably pure jargon, though fragments of
something like Italian can be made out. In the very middle of this scene
occurs a really fine and reverently written dialogue between Justice and
Mercy pleading respectively to the Divinity for vengeance and pardon.
Instances such as this abound in the mysteries, which are sometimes
avowedly interrupted in order that the audience may be diverted by a
farcical interlude.
Of the miracles, that of St. Guillaume du Désert will
serve as a fair example. It is but 1500 lines in length, yet Argument of a
Miracle Play.
the list of dramatis personae extends to nearly thirty,
and there are at least as many distinct scenes. William, count of Poitiers and
duke of Aquitaine, has rendered himself in many ways obnoxious to the
Holy See. He has recognised an anti-pope, has driven a bishop from his
diocese for refusing to do likewise, and has offended against morality. An
embassy, including St. Bernard, is therefore sent from Rome to warn and
correct him. William is not proof against their eloquence, and soon becomes
deeply penitent. He quits his palaces, and retires to the society of hermits in
the wilderness. These enjoin penances upon him. He is to have a heavy
hauberk immovably riveted on his bare flesh, and with sackcloth for an
overcoat to visit Rome and beg the Pope's forgiveness. He does this, and the
Pope sends him to the patriarch of Jerusalem, William taking the additional
penance as a proof of the heinousness of his sin. After this he retires by
himself into a solitary place. Here, however, a knight of his country seeks
him out, represents the anarchy into which it has fallen in his absence, and
implores him to return. But this is not William's notion of duty. He refuses,
and to be free from such importunities in future, retires to the island of
Rhodes, and there lives in solitude. Irritated at the idea of his escaping
them, Satan and Beelzebub attack him and beat him severely; but he
recovers by the Virgin's intervention, and serves as a model to young
devotees who seek his cell, and like him become hermits. At last a chorus of
saints descends to see his godly end, which takes place in the presence of
the neophytes. The events, of which this is a very brief abstract, are all
clearly indicated in the short space of 1500 verses, many of which are only
of four syllables[125]. There is of course no attempt at drawing any figure,

except that of the saint, at full length, and this is characteristic of the class.
But as dramatised legends, for they are little more, these miracles possess
no slight merit.
The general literary peculiarities of the miracle and mystery plays do not
differ greatly from those of other compositions in verse of the same time
which have been already described. Their great fault is prolixity. In the
collection of the Miracles de la Vierge, the comparative brevity of the
pieces renders them easier to read than the long compositions of the
fifteenth century, and the poetical beauty of some of the legends which they
tell is sufficient to furnish them with interest. Even in these, however, the
absence of point and of dignity in the expression frequently mars the effect;
and this is still more the case with the longer mysteries. Of these latter,
however, the work of the brothers Gréban—for there were two, Arnould and
Simon, concerned—contains passages superior to the general run, and in
others lines and even scenes of merit occur.
Although the existence of the drama as an actual fact
was for a long time due to the performance and Profane Drama.
popularity of the mysteries and miracles, specimens of
dramatic work with purely profane subjects are to be Adam de la Halle.
found at a comparatively early date. Adam de la Halle,
so far as our present information goes, has the credit of inventing two
separate styles of such composition[126]. In Li Jus de la Feuillie he has left
us the earliest comedy in the vulgar tongue known; in the pastoral drama of
Robin et Marion the earliest specimen of comic opera. Independently of the
improbability that the drama, once in full practice, should be arbitrarily
confined to a single class of subject, there were many germs of dramatic
composition in mediaeval literature which wanted but a little
encouragement to develop themselves. The verse dialogues and débats,
which both troubadours and trouvères had favoured, were in themselves
incompletely dramatic. The pastourelles, an extremely favourite and
fashionable class of composition, must have suggested to others besides the
Hunchback of Arras the idea of dramatising them; and the early and
strongly-marked partiality of the middle ages for pageants and shows of all
kinds could hardly fail to induce those who planned them to intersperse
dialogue.

The plot of Robin et Marion is simple and in a way regular. The ordinary
incidents of a pastourelle, the meeting of a fair shepherdess and a passing
knight, the wooing (in this case an unsuccessful one) and the riding away,
are all there. The piece is completed by a kind of rustic picnic, in which the
neighbouring shepherds and shepherdesses join and disport themselves.
Marion is a very graceful and amiable figure; Robin a sheepish coward,
who is not in the least worthy of her. In Adam's other and earlier drama he
is by no means so partial to the feminine sex, and his work, though equally
fresh and vigorous, is more complex and less artistically finished. It is in
part autobiographic, and introduces Adam confessing to friends with
sufficient effrontery his intention of going to Paris and deserting his wife.
This part contains a very pretty though curiously unsuitable description of
the wooing, which has such an unlucky termination. Suddenly, however, the
author introduces his father, an old citizen, who is quite ready to encourage
his son in his evil ways provided it costs him nothing, and the piece loses
all regularity of plot. Divers citizens of Arras, male and female, are
introduced with a more or less satiric intention, and the last episode brings
in the personages of Morgue la Fée and of the mesnie (attendants) of a
certain shadowy King Hellequin. There is a doctor, too, whose revelations
of his patients' affairs are sufficiently comic, not to say farcical. Destitute as
it is of method, and approaching more nearly to the Fabliau than to any
other division of mediaeval literature in the coarseness of its language, the
piece has great interest, not merely because of its date and its apparent
originality, but because of numerous passages of distinct literary merit. The
picture of the neglected wife in her girlhood is inferior to nothing of the
kind even in the thirteenth century, that fertile epoch of early French poetry.
The father, too, Maître Henri, the earliest of his kind on the modern stage,
has traits which the great comic masters would not disown.
The classes of later secular drama may be thus divided,—the monologue,
the farce, the morality, the sotie, the profane mystery. The first four of these
constitute one of the most interesting divisions of early French literature;
and it is to be hoped that before long easy access will be afforded to the
whole of it. The last is only interesting from the point of view of literary
history.
The monologue is the simplest form of dramatic
composition and needs but little notice, though it seems Monologues.

to have met with some favour from playgoers of the time. By dint also of
adroit changes of costume and assistance from scenery, etc., the monologue
was sometimes made more complicated than appears at first sight possible,
as for instance, in the Monologue du Bien et du Mal des Dames, where the
speaker plays successively the parts of two advocates and of a judge. The
monologue, however, more often consisted in a dramatisation of the earlier
dit, in which some person or thing is made to declare its own attributes. Of
very similar character is the so-called sermon joyeux, which, however,
preserves more or less the form of an address from the pulpit, of course
travestied and applied to ludicrous subjects.
The farce, on the other hand, is one of the most
important of all dramatic kinds in reference to French Farces.
literature. It is a genuine product of the soil, and proved
the ancestor of all the best comedy of France, on which foreign models had
very little influence. Until the discovery and acquisition by the British
Museum of a unique collection of farces the number of these compositions
known to exist was not large, and such as had been printed were difficult of
access. It is still not easy to get together a complete collection, but the
reimpression of the British Museum pieces in the Bibliothèque
Elzévirienne[127] with M. Ed. Fournier's Théâtre avant la Renaissance[128]
contains ample materials for judgment. In all, we possess about a hundred
farces, most of which are probably the composition of the fifteenth century,
though it is possible that some of them may date from the end of the
fourteenth. The most famous of all early French farces, that of Pathelin,
belongs, it is believed, to the middle or earlier part of the fifteenth, and
speaking generally, this century is the most productive of theatrical work, at
least of such as remains to us. The subjects of these farces are of the widest
possible diversity. In their general character they at once recall the Fabliaux,
and no one who reads many of them can doubt that the one genre is the
immediate successor of the other. The farce, like the Fabliau, deals with an
actual or possible incident of ordinary life to which a comic complexion is
given by the treatment. The length of these compositions is very variable,
but the average is perhaps about five hundred lines. Their versification is
always octosyllabic and regular. But a curious peculiarity is found in most
of them as well as in a few contemporary dramas of the serious kind. From
time to time the speeches of the characters are dovetailed into one another

so as to make up the Triolet (or rondeau of eight lines with triple repetition
of the first and double repetition of the second), a form which in the
fifteenth, seventeenth, and nineteenth centuries has been a favourite with
French poets of the lighter kind. The number of personages is never large; it
sometimes falls as low as two (in which case the farce might in strictness be
called, as it sometimes is, a débat or dialogue), and rarely, if ever, rises
above four or five. From what has already been said it will be seen that it is
not easy to give any general summary of the subjects of this curious
composition. Conjugal differences of one kind and another make up a very
large part of them, but by no means the whole, and there are few aspects of
contemporary bourgeois life which do not come in for treatment. As an
example we may take the Farce du Pasté de la Tarte[129]. The characters are
two thieves, a pastry-cook, and his wife. The farce opens with a lamentable
Triolet, in which the two thieves bewail their unhappy state. Immediately
afterwards, the pastry-cook, in front of whose shop the scene is laid, calls to
his wife and tells her that an eel-pie is to be kept for him, and that he will
send for it later, as he intends to dine abroad. The two thieves overhear the
conversation, and the token which is to be given by the messenger, and after
trying in vain to beg a dinner, determine to filch one. Thief the second goes
to the pastry-cook's wife, gives the appointed token, and easily obtains the
pie, upon which both feast. Unluckily, however, this does not satisfy them,
and the successful thief, remembering a fine tart which he has seen in the
shop, decides that the possession of it would much improve their dinner. He
persuades his companion to try and secure it. Meanwhile, however, the
enraged pastry-cook has come home hungry and demands his eel-pie. His
wife in vain assures him that she has sent it by the messenger who brought
his token. Her husband disbelieves her; words run high, and are followed by
blows. At this juncture the first thief appears and demands the tart,
whereupon the irate pastry-cook turns his rage upon him. The stick makes
him confess the device, and smarting under the blows, he is easily induced
to make his companion a sharer in his own sorrows. This is effected by an
obvious stratagem. The pastry-cook thus avenges himself of both his
enemies, who however, with some philosophy, console themselves with the
fact that, after all, they have had an excellent dinner without paying for it.
This piece serves as a fair example of the more miscellaneous farces, in
almost all of which the stick plays a prominent part, a part which it may be

observed retained its prominence at least till the time of Molière. Of the
farces dealing with conjugal matters, one of the most decent, and perhaps
the most amusing of all, is the Farce du Cuvier, which has nothing to do
with the story under the same title which may be found (possibly taken
from Apuleius) in Boccaccio, and in the Fabliaux. In the farce a hen-pecked
husband is obliged by his wife to accept a long list of duties which he is to
perform. Soon afterwards she by accident falls into the washing-tub, and to
all her cries for help he replies 'cela n'est point à mon rollet' (schedule). Not
a few also are directed against the clergy, and these as a rule are the most
licentious of all. It is, however, rare to find any one which is not more or
less amusing; and students of Molière in particular will find analogies and
resemblances of the most striking kind to many of his motives. It is, indeed,
pretty certain that these pieces did not go out of fashion until Molière's own
time. The titles of some of the early and now lost pieces which his company
for so many years played in the provinces are immediately suggestive of the
old farces to any one who knows the latter. The farce was moreover a very
far-reaching kind of composition. As a rule the satire which it contains is
directed against classes, such as women, the clergy, pedants, and so forth,
who had nothing directly to do with politics, and it is thus, more or less
directly, the ancestor of the comedy of manners. It is never, properly
speaking, political, even indirect allusions to politics being excluded from
it. It relies wholly upon domestic and personal interests. Not a few farces,
such as that of which we have given a sketch, turn upon the same subject as
the Repues Franches attributed to Villon, and deal with the ingenious
methods adopted by persons who hang loose upon society for securing their
daily bread. Others attack the fertile subject of domestic service, and furnish
not a few parallels to Swift's Directions. Every now and then however we
come across a farce, or at least a piece bearing the title, in which a more
allegorical style of treatment is attempted. Such is the farce of Folle
Bobance, in which the tendency of various classes to loose and light living
is satirised amusingly enough. A gentleman, a merchant, a farmer, are all
caught by the seductive offers of Folle Bobance, and are not long before
they repent it. Such again is the Farce des Théologastres, in which the
students of the Paris theological colleges are ridiculed, the Farce de la
Pippée, and many others.

In strictness, however, those pieces where allegorical
personages make their appearance are not farces but Moralities.
moralities. These compositions were exceedingly
popular in the later middle ages, and their popularity was a natural sequence
of the rage for allegorising which had made itself evident in very early
times, and had in the Roman de la Rose dominated almost all other literary
tastes. The taste for personification and abstraction has always lent itself
easily enough to satire, and in the fifteenth century pieces under the
designation of moralities became very common. We do not possess nearly
as many specimens of the morality as of the farce, but, on the other hand,
the morality is often, though not always, a much longer composition than
the farce. The subjects of moralities include not merely private vices and
follies, but almost all actual and possible defects of Church and State, and
occasionally the term is applied to pieces, the characters of which are not
abstractions, but which tell a story with a more or less moral turn.
Sometimes these pieces ran to a very great length, and one is quoted,
L'Homme Juste et l'Homme Mondain, which contains 36,000 lines, and
must, like the longer mysteries, have occupied days or even weeks in
acting. A morality however, on the average, consisted of about 2000 lines,
and its personages were proportionally more numerous than those of the
farce. Thus the Moralité des Enfans de Maintenant contains thirteen
characters who are indifferently abstract and concrete; Maintenant,
Mignotte, Bon Advis, Instruction, Finet, Malduit, Discipline, Jabien,
Luxure, Bonté, Désespoir, Perdition, and the Fool. This list almost
sufficiently explains the plot, which simply recounts the persistence of one
child in evil and his bad end, with the repentance of the other. The
moralities have the widest diversity of subject, but most of them are
tolerably clearly explained by their titles. La Condamnation de Banquet is a
rather spirited satire on gluttony and open housekeeping. Marchebeau
attacks the disbanded soldiery of the middle of the fifteenth century.
Charité points out the evils which have come into the world for lack of
charity. La Moralité d'une Femme qui avait voulu trahir la Cité de Romme
is built on the lines of a miracle-play. Science et Asnerye is a very lively
satire representing the superior chances which the followers of Asnerye—
ignorance—have of obtaining benefices and posts of honour and profit as
compared with those of learning. Mundus, caro, daemonia, again tells its
own tale. Les Blasphémateurs, which is very well spoken of, but has not

been reprinted, rests on the popular legend upon which Don Juan is also
based. In short, unless a complete catalogue were given, there is no means
of fully describing the numerous works of this class.
The Sotie is a class of much more idiosyncrasy.
Although we have very few Soties (not at present more Soties.
than a dozen accessible to the student), although the
contents of this class are as a rule duller even than those of the moralities,
and infinitely inferior in attraction to those of the farces, yet the Sotie has
the merit of possessing a much more distinct and peculiar form. It is
essentially political comedy, and it has the peculiarity of being played by
stock personages, like an Italian comedy of the early kind. The Sotie, at
least in its purely political form, was, as might be expected, not very long
lived. Its most celebrated author was Gringore, and his Sotie, which forms
part of Le Jeu du Prince des Sots et Mère Sotte, is still the typical example
of the kind. Besides these two characters (who represent, roughly speaking,
the temporal and spiritual powers), we have in this piece, Sotte Commune,
the common people; Sotte Fiance, false confidence; Sotte Occasion, who
explains herself; and a good many other allegorical personages, such as the
Seigneur de Gayeté, etc. These pieces, however, are for the most part so
entirely occasional that their chief literary interest lies in their curious stock
personages. It should, however, be observed that of the few Soties which we
possess by no means all correspond to this description, some of them being
indistinguishable from moralities. A curious detail is that the various pieces
we have been mentioning were sometimes, in representation, combined
after the fashion of a regular tetralogy. First came a monologue or cry
containing a kind of proclamation. This was followed by the Sotie itself;
then followed the morality, and lastly a farce. The work of Gringore, just
noticed, forms part of such a tetralogy.
The profane mysteries may be briefly despatched. They
were the natural result of the vogue of the mysteries Profane Mysteries.
proper, with which they vie in prolixity. Some of them
were based on history or romance, such as, for instance, the Mystery of
Troy. Others corresponded pretty nearly to the history plays of our own
dramatists at a later period. Such is the Mystery of the Siege of Orleans
which versifies and dramatises, at a date very shortly subsequent to the

actual events, the account of them already made public in different
chronicles.
Of considerable interest and importance in connection
with these early forms of drama is the subject of the Societies of Actors.
persons and societies by whom they were represented, a
subject upon which it is necessary to say a few words. At first, as we have
seen, the actors were members or dependents of the clergy. As the mysteries
increased in bulk and demanded larger companies, their representation fell
more and more into the hands of the laity, even women in not a few cases
acting parts, though this was rather the exception than the rule. It became
not unusual for the guilds, which play such an important part in the social
history of the middle ages, to undertake the task, and at last regular societies
of actors were formed. The most famous of these, the Confrérie de la
Passion (whose first object was to play the mystery, or rather cycle of
mysteries, known by that name), was licensed in 1402, and in the course of
the fifteenth century a very large number of rival bodies were more or less
formally constituted. The clerks of the Bazoche, or Palace of Justice, had
long been dramatically inclined, but it was not till this time that they were
recognised as, so to speak, the patentees of a peculiar form of drama which
in their case was the morality. The Enfants sans Souci, young men of good
families in the city, devoted themselves rather to the Sotie, and the stock
personages of that curious form correspond to the official titles of the
officers of their guild. Besides these, many other similar but less durable
and regularly constituted societies arose, whose heads took fantastic titles,
such as Empereur de Galilée, Roi de l'Epinette, Prince de l'Etrille, and so
forth. No one of these, however, attained the importance of the
Confraternity of the Passion. This was chiefly composed of tradesmen and
citizens of Paris, and for a hundred and fifty years it continued to play for
the most part mysteries, sacred and profane alike, but the latter, according to
its name and profession, less commonly. In 1548 a curious example of the
change of times and manners took place, owing in all probability to the
influence, direct or indirect, of the Reformation. The Confraternity had its
charter renewed, but it was expressly forbidden to play the sacred dramas
which it had been originally constituted to perform. Thenceforward secular
plays only were lawful in Paris, but the older dramas continued for a long
time to be performed in the provinces, and in Britanny have been acted

within the last half century. The Confraternity became regular actors of
ordinary farces, and as time went on were known under the title of the
Comedians of the Hôtel de Bourgogne, a name which brings us at once into
the presence of Molière. In these last sentences we have a little outstripped
the mediaeval period proper, but in dramatic matters there is no gap
between the ancient and modern theatre until we arrive at the Pléiade.
It is not very easy to illustrate the manner of the ancient French drama by
citations within ordinary compass; but the following passages, the first from
the Mystery of the Passion, the second from the original form of Pathelin,
may serve the purpose:—

Ici deschargent Jesus de la croix.

Simon. or avant donc, puis que ainsi va.
je ferai vostre voulenté;
mais il me poise en verité
de la honte que vous me faictes.
o Jesus, de tous les prophettes
le plus sainct et le plus begnin,
vous venés a piteuse fin,
veue vostre vie vertüeuse
quant vostre croix dure et honteuse
pour vostre mort fault que je porte.
se c'est a tort, je m'en rapporte
a ceulx qui vous ont forjugé.
Ici charge la croix a Simon.

Nembroth. Messeigneurs, il est bien chargé;
cheminons, depeschons la voie.

Salmanazar. j'ai grant désir que je le voie
fiché en ce hault tabernacle,
a sçavoir s'il fera miracle,
quant il sera cloué dessus.

Jéroboam. seigneurs, hastés moi ce Jesus
et ces deux larrons aux coustés.

s'ilz ne vuellent, si les battez
si bien qu'il n'y ait que redire.

Claquedent. a cela ne tiendra pas, sire.
nos en ferons nostre povoir.

Ici porte Simon une partie de la croix et
Jesus l'autre et le battent les sergens.

Dieu le pere. Pitié doit tout cueur esmouvoir
en lamenter piteusement
le martyre et le gref tourment
que Jesus, mon chier filz, endure.
il porte détresse tant dure,
que, puis que le monde dura,
homme si dure n'endura,
laquelle ne peult plus durer
sans la mort honteuse endurer,
et n'aura son sainct corps duree
tant qu'il ait la mort enduree,
il appert, car plus va durant,
et plus est tourment endurant,
sans quelque confort qui l'alege.
si convient que la mort abrege
et de l'exécuter s'apreste,
pour satiffaire a la requeste
de dame Justice severe,
qui pour requeste ne prïere
ne veult rien de ses drois quitter.
Michel, allés donc conforter
en ceste amere passïon
mon filz, plain de dilectïon,
qui veult dure mort en gré predre
et va sa doulce chair estrandre
ou puissant arbre de la croix.

Sainct Michel. pere du ciel et roi des rois,
humblement a chere assimplie

sera parfaicte et acomplie
vostre voulenté juste et bonne.
Ici descendent les anges de paradis.

* * * * * *

Path. ce bergier ne peut nullement
respondre aux fais que l'on propose,
s'il n'a du conseil; et il n'ose
ou il ne scet en demander.
s'il vous plaisoit moy commander
que je fusse a luy, je y seroye.

Juge. avecques luy? je cuideroye
que ce fust trestoute froidure:
c'est peu d'acquest. Path. mais je vous jure
qu'aussi n'en veuil rien avoir:
pour dieu soit. or je voys sçavoir
au pauvret qu'il voudra me dire,
et s'il me sçaura point instruire
pour respondre aux fais de partie.
il auroit dure departie
de ce, qui ne le secourroit.
vien ça, mon amy. qui pourroit
trouver? entens. Berg. bee. Path. quel bee, dea!
par le sainct sang que dieu crëa,
es tu fol? dy moy ton affaire.

Berg. bee. Path. quel bee! oys tu tes brebis braire?
c'est pour ton prouffit; entens y.

Berg. bee. Path. et dy ouÿ ou nenny,
c'est bien faict. dy tousjours, feras?

Berg. bee. Path. plus haut, ou tu t'en trouveras
en grans depens, ou je m'en doubte.

Berg. bee. Path. or est plus fol cil qui boute

tel fol naturel en procés.
ha, sire, renvoyez l'en a ses
brebis; il est fol de nature.

Drapp. est il fol? sainct sauveur d'Esture!
il est plus saige que vous n'estes.

Path. envoyez le garder ses bestes,
sans jour que jamais ne retourne.
que maudit soit il qui adjourne
tels folz que ne fault adjourner.

Drapp. et l'en fera l'en retourner
avant que je puisse estre ouÿ?

Path. m'aist dieu, puis qu'il est foul, ouÿ.
pour quoy ne fera? Drapp. he dea, sire,
au moins laissez moy avant dire
et faire mes conclusïons.
ce ne sont pas abusïons
que je vous dy ne mocqueries.

Juge. ce sont toutes tribouilleries
que de plaider a folz ne a folles.
escoutez, a moins de parolles
la court n'en sera plus tenue.

Drapp. s'en iront ilz sans retenue
de plus revenir? Juge. et quoy doncques?

Path. revenir? vous ne veistes oncques
plus fol ne en faict ne en response:
et cil ne vault pas mieulx une once.
tous deux sont folz et sans cervelle:
par saincte Marie la belle,
eux deux n'en ont pas un quarat[130].

FOOTNOTES:

[120] These, as well as The Ten Virgins and many other pieces soon to be
mentioned, are to be found in Monmerqué and Michel, Théâtre François au
Moyen Age, Paris, 1874, last ed.; Adam, ed. Luzarches, 1854.
[121] Vols. 1-6. Paris, 1876-1881.
[122] Ed. G. Paris and G. Raynaud. Paris, 1878.
[123] Ed. J. de Rothschild. Vols. i-iii. Paris, 1878-1881.
[124] Mystère du Viel Testament, i. 259-272.
[125] Miracles de la Vierge, ii. 1-54.
[126] See Monmerqué and Michel, op. cit.
[127] Ancien Théâtre Français, vols. 1-3. Paris, 1854.
[128] Paris, n. d.
[129] Ancien Théâtre Français, ii. 64-79.
[130] A history of the mediaeval theatre has been undertaken by M. Petit de
Julleville, of which two volumes, containing an excellent account of the
Mysteries, have appeared (Paris, 1880). Information on other points is rather
scattered, but it will be found well summarised in Aubertin, Histoire de la
Langue et de la Littérature Française au Moyen Age (Paris, 1876-8), i. 372-570.
A complete collection of farces, soties, etc. is hoped for from the Old French
Text Society.

CHAPTER XI.
PROSE CHRONICLES.

In all countries the use of prose for literature is
chronologically later than the use of poetry, and France Beginning of Prose
Chronicles.
is no exception to the rule. The Chansons de Gestes
were in their way historical poems, and they were, as we
have seen, soon followed by directly historical poems in Grandes
Chroniques de
considerable numbers. It was not, however, till the prose France.
Arthurian romances of Map and his followers had made
prose popular as a vehicle for long narratives, that regular history began to
be written in the vulgar tongue. The vogue of these prose romances dates
from the latter portion of the twelfth century; the prose chronicle follows it
closely, and dates from the beginning of the thirteenth. It was not at first
original. The practice of chronicle writing in Latin had been frequent during
the earlier centuries, and at last the monks of three monasteries, St. Benoit
sur Loire, St. Germain des Prés, and St. Denis, began to keep a regular
register of the events of their own time, connecting this with earlier
chronicles of the past. The most famous and dignified of the three, St.
Denis, became specially the home of history. The earliest French prose
chronicles do not, however, come from this place. They are two in number;
both date from the earliest years of the thirteenth century, and both are
translations. One is a version of a Latin compilation of Merovingian
history; the other of the famous chronicle of Turpin[131]. These two are
composed in a southern dialect bordering on the Provençal, and the first
was either written by or ascribed to a certain Nicholas of Senlis. The
example was followed, but it was not till 1274 that a complete vernacular
version of the history of France was executed by a monk of St. Denis—
Primat—in French prose. This version, slightly modified, became the
original of a compilation very famous in French literature and history, the
Grandes Chroniques de France, which was regularly continued by
members of the same community until the reign of Charles V, from official
sources and under royal authority. The work, under the same title but

written by laics, extends further to the reign of Louis XI. The necessity of
translation ceased as soon as the example of writing in the vernacular had
been set, though Latin chronicles continued to be produced as well as
French.
Long, however, before history on the great scale had
been thus attempted, and very soon after the first attempt Villehardouin.
of Nicholas of Senlis had shown that the vulgar tongue
was capable of such use, original prose memoirs and chronicles of
contemporary events had been produced, and, as happens more than once in
French literature, the first, or one of the first, was also the best. The
Conquête de Constantinoble[132] of Geoffroy de Villehardouin was written
in all probability during the first decade of the thirteenth century. Its author
was born at Villehardouin, near Troyes, about 1160, and died, it would
seem, in his Greek fief of Messinople in 1213. His book contains a history
of the Fourth Crusade, which resulted in no action against the infidels, but
in the establishment for the time of a Latin empire and in the partition of
Greece among French barons. Villehardouin's memoirs are by universal
consent among the most attractive works of the middle ages. Although no
actually original manuscript exists, we possess a copy which to all
appearance faithfully represents the original. To readers, who before
approaching Villehardouin have well acquainted themselves with the
characteristics of the Chansons de Gestes, the resemblance of the Conquête
de Constantinoble to these latter is exceedingly striking. The form, putting
the difference between prose and verse aside, is very similar, and the merits
of vigorous and brightly coloured language, of simplicity and vividness of
presentation, are identical. At the same time either his own genius or the
form which he has adopted has saved Villehardouin from the crying defect
of most mediaeval work, prolixity and monotony. He has much to say as
well as a striking manner of saying it, and the interest of his work as a story
yields in nothing to its picturesqueness as a piece of literary composition.
His indirect as well as direct literary value is moreover very great, because
he enables us to see that the picture of manners and thought given by the
Chansons de Gestes is in the main strictly true to the actual habits of the
time—the time, that is to say, of their composition, not of their nominal
subjects. Villehardouin is the chief literary exponent of the first stage of
chivalry, the stage in which adventure was an actual fact open to every one,

and when Eastern Europe and Western Asia offered to the wandering knight
opportunities quite as tempting as those which the romances asserted to
have been open to the champions of Charlemagne and Arthur. But, as a
faithful historian, he, while putting the poetical and attractive side of
feudalism in the best light, does not in the least conceal its defects,
especially the perpetual jarring and rivalry inevitable in armies where
hundreds of petty kings sought each his own advantage.
The Fourth Crusade was fertile in chroniclers.
Villehardouin's work was supplemented by the chronicle Minor Chroniclers
between
of Henri de Valenciennes, which is written in a Villehardouin and
somewhat similar style, but with still more resemblance Joinville.
to the manner and diction of the Chansons, so much so
that it has been even supposed, though probably without foundation, to be a
rhymed Chanson thrown into a prose form. This process is known to have
been actually applied in some cases. Another historian of the expedition
whose work has been preserved was Robert de Clari. Baldwin Count of
Flanders, who also accompanied it, was not indeed the author but the
instigator of a translation of Latin chronicles which, like the Grandes
Chroniques de France, was continued by original work and attained, under
the title of Chronique de Baudouin d'Avesnes, very considerable
dimensions.
The thirteenth century also supplies a not inconsiderable number of works
dealing with the general history of France. Guillaume de Nangis wrote in
the latter part of the century several historical treatises, first in Latin and
then in French. An important work, entitled La Chronique de Rains
(Rheims), dates from the middle of the period, and, though less picturesque
in subject and manner than Villehardouin, has considerable merits of style.
Normandy, Flanders, and, the Crusades generally, each have groups of
prose chronicles dealing with them, the most remarkable of the latter being
a very early French translation of the work of William of Tyre, with
additions[133]. Of the Flanders group, the already mentioned chronicle
called of Baudouin d'Avesnes is the chief. It is worth mentioning again
because in its case we see the way in which French was gaining ground. It
exists both in Latin and in the vernacular. In other cases the Latin would be
the original; but in this case it appears, though it is not positively certain,

that the book was written in French, and translated for the benefit of those
who might happen not to understand that language.
As Villehardouin is the representative writer of the
twelfth century, so is Joinville[134] of the thirteenth, as Joinville.
far as history is concerned. Jean de Joinville, Sénéchal
of Champagne, was born in 1224 at the castle of Joinville on the Marne,
which afterwards became the property of the Orleans family, and was
destroyed during the Revolution. He died in 1319. He accompanied Saint
Louis on his unfortunate crusade in 1248, but not in his final and fatal
expedition to Tunis. Most of the few later events of his life known to us
were connected with the canonisation of the king; but he is known to have
taken part in active service when past his ninetieth year. His historical work,
a biography of St. Louis, deals chiefly with the crusade, and is one of the
most circumstantial records we have of mediaeval life and thought. It is of
much greater bulk than Villehardouin's Conquête, and is composed upon a
different principle, the author being somewhat addicted to gossip and apt to
digress from the main course of his narrative. It has, however, to be
remembered that Joinville's first object was not, like Villehardouin's, to give
an account of a single and definite enterprise, but to display the character of
his hero, to which end a certain amount of desultoriness was necessary and
desirable. His style has less vigour than that of his countryman and
predecessor, but it has more grace. It is evident that Joinville occasionally
set himself with deliberate purpose to describe things in a literary fashion,
and his interspersed reflections on manners and political subjects
considerably increase the material value of his work. It is unfortunate that
nothing like a contemporary manuscript has come down to us, the earliest in
existence being one of the late fourteenth century, when considerable
changes had passed over the language. With the aid of some contemporary
documents on matters of business which Joinville seems to have dictated,
M. de Wailly has effected an exceedingly ingenious conjectural restoration
of the text of the book, but the interest of this is in strictness diminished by
the fact that it is undoubtedly conjectural. The period of composition of
Joinville's book was somewhat late in his life, apparently in the first years
of the fourteenth century, and about 1310 he presented it to Louis le Hutin,
though it does not appear what became of the manuscript.

The period between Joinville and Froissart is peculiarly barren in
chronicles. Besides the serial publications already noticed, the Chroniques
de France and the Chroniques de Flandre, there are perhaps only two
which are worth mentioning. The first is a Chronique des Quatre Premiers
Valois, written with exactness and careful attention to authentic sources of
information. The other is the Chronique of Jean Lebel, canon of Liège. This
is not only a work of considerable merit in itself, but still more remarkable
because it was the model, and something more, of Froissart. That historian
began by almost paraphrasing the work of Lebel; and though by degrees he
worked the early parts of his book into more and more original forms
according to the information which he picked up, these parts remained to
the last indebted to the author from whom they had been originally
compiled.
Froissart was born in 1337 and did not die till after
1409, the precise date of his death being unknown. Froissart.
There are few problems of literary criticism which are
more difficult than that of arranging a definitive edition of his famous
Chroniques[135]. In most cases the task of the critic is to decide which of
several manuscripts, all long posterior to the author's death, deserves most
confidence, or how to supply and correct the faults of a single document. In
Froissart's case there is, on the contrary, an embarrassing number of
seemingly authentic texts. During the whole of his long life, Froissart seems
to have been constantly occupied in altering, improving, and rectifying his
work, and copies of it in all its states are plentiful. The early printed editions
represent merely a single one of these; Buchon's is somewhat more
complete. But it is only within the last few years that the labours of M.
Kervyn de Lettenhove and M. Siméon Luce have made it possible (and not
yet entirely possible) to see the work in all its conditions. M. Kervyn de
Lettenhove's edition is complete and excellent as far as it goes. That of M.
Luce is still far from finished. The editor, however, has succeeded in
presenting three distinct versions of the first book. This is the most
interesting in substance, the least in manner and style. It deals with a period
most of which lay outside of Froissart's own knowledge, and in treating
which he was at first content to paraphrase Jean Lebel, though afterwards
he made this part of the book much more his own. It never, however,
attained to the gossiping picturesqueness of the later books (there are four

in all), in which the historian relies entirely on his own collections.
Although Cressy, Poitiers, and Najara may be of more importance than the
fruitless chevauchée of Buckingham through France, the gossip of the
Count de Foix' court, and the kite-and-crow battles of the Duke de Berri and
his officers with Aymerigot Marcel and Geoffrey Tête-Noire, they are much
less characteristic of Froissart. The literary instinct of Scott enabled him (in
a speech of Claverhouse[136]) exactly to appreciate our author. Some of his
admirers have striven to make out that traces of political wisdom are to be
found in the later books. If it be so, they are very deeply hidden. A sentence
which must have been written when Froissart was more than fifty years old
puts his point of view very clearly. Geoffrey Tête-Noire, the Breton
brigand, 'held a knight's life, or a squire's, of no more account than a
villain's,' and this is said as if it summed up the demerits of the free
companion. Beyond knights and ladies, tourneys and festivals, Froissart
sees nothing at all. But his admirable power of description enables him to
put what he did see as well as any writer has ever put it. Vast as his work is,
the narrative and picturesque charm never fails; and in a thousand different
lights the same subject, the singular afterglow of chivalry, which the
influence of certain English and French princes kept up in the fourteenth
century, is presented with a mastery rare in any but the best literature. He is
so completely indifferent to anything but this, that he does not take the
slightest trouble to hide the misery and the misgovernment which the
practical carrying out of his idea caused. Never, perhaps, was there a better
instance of a man of one idea, and certainly there never was any man by
whom his one idea was more attractively represented. To this day it is
difficult even with the clearest knowledge of the facts to rise from a perusal
of Froissart without an impression that the earlier period of the Hundred
Years' War was a sort of golden age in which all the virtues flourished,
except for occasional ugly outbreaks of the evil principle in the Jacquerie,
the Wat Tyler insurrection, and so forth. As a historian Froissart is, as we
should expect, not critical, and he carries the French habit of disfiguring
proper names and ignoring geographical and other trifles to a most
bewildering extent. But there is little doubt that he was diligent in collecting
and careful in recording his facts, and his extreme minuteness often
supplies gaps in less prolix chroniclers.

The last century of the period which is included in this
chapter is extremely fertile in historians. These range Fifteenth-Century
themselves naturally in two classes; those who Chroniclers.
undertake more or less of a general history of the country during their time,
and those who devote themselves to special persons as biographers, or to
the recital of the events which more particularly concern a single city or
district. The first class, moreover, is more conveniently subdivided
according to the side which the chroniclers took on the great political duel
of their period, the struggle between Burgundy and France.
The Burgundian side was particularly rich in annalists. The study and
practice of historical writing had, as a consequence of the Chronicle of
Baudouin, and the success of Lebel and Froissart, taken deep root in the
cities of Flanders which were subject to the Duke of Burgundy, while the
magnificence and opulence of the ducal court and establishments naturally
attracted men of letters. Froissart's immediate successor, Enguerrand de
Monstrelet, belongs to this party. Monstrelet[137], who wrote a chronicle
covering the years 1400-1444, is not remarkable for elegance or
picturesqueness of style, but takes particular pains to copy exactly official
reports of speeches, treaties, letters, etc. Another important chronicle of the
same side is that of George Chastellain[138], a busy man of letters, who was
historiographer to the Duke of Burgundy, and wrote a history of the years
1419-1470. Chastellain was a man of learning and talent, but was somewhat
imbued with the heavy and pedantic style which both in poetry and prose
was becoming fashionable. The memoirs of Olivier de la Marche extend
from 1435 to 1489, and are also somewhat heavy, but less pedantic than
those of Chastellain. Dealing with the same period, and also written in the
Burgundian interest, are the memoirs of Jacques du Clerq, 1448-1467, and
of Lefèvre de Saint Rémy, 1407-1436; as also the Chronicle of Jehan de
Wavrin, beginning at the earliest times and coming down to 1472. Wavrin's
subject is nominally England, but the later part of his work of necessity
concerns France also.
The writers on the royalist side are of less importance and less numerous,
though individually perhaps of equal value. The chief of them are Mathieu
de Coucy, who continued the work of Monstrelet in a different political
spirit from 1444 to 1461; Pierre de Fenin, who wrote a history of part of the

reign of Charles VI; and Jean Juvenal des Ursins[139], a statesman and
ecclesiastic, who has dealt more at length with the whole of the same reign.
Of these Juvenal des Ursins takes the first rank, and is one of the best
authorities for his period; but from a literary point of view he cannot be
very highly spoken of, though there is a certain simplicity about his manner
which is superior to the elaborate pedantry of not a few of his
contemporaries and immediate successors.
The second class has the longest list of names, and perhaps the most
interesting constituents. First may be mentioned Le Livre des Faits et
bonnes Mœurs du sage roi Charles V. This is an elaborate panegyric by the
poetess Christine de Pisan, full of learning, good sense, and sound morality,
but somewhat injured by the classical phrases, the foreign idioms, and the
miscellaneous erudition, which characterise the school to which Christine
belonged. Far more interesting is the Livre des Faits du Maréchal de
Bouciqualt[140], a book which is a not unworthy companion and
commentary to Froissart, exhibiting the kind of errant chivalry which
characterised the fourteenth century, and in part the fifteenth, and which so
greatly assisted the English in their conflicts with the French. Joan of Arc
was made, as might have been expected, the subject of numerous chronicles
and memoirs which have come down to us under the names of Cousinot,
Cochon, and Berry. The Constable of Richemont, who had the credit of
overthrowing the last remnant of English domination at the battle of
Formigny, found a biographer in Guillaume Gruel.
Lastly have to be mentioned three curious works of great value and interest
bearing on this time. These are the journals of a citizen of Paris[141] (or two
such), which extend from 1409 to 1422, and from 1424 to 1440, and the so-
called Chronique scandaleuse of Jean de Troyes covering the reign of Louis
XI. These, with the already-mentioned chronicle of Juvenal des Ursins, are
filled with the minutest information on all kinds of points. The prices of
articles of merchandise, the ravages of wolves, etc., are recorded, so that in
them almost as much light is thrown on the social life of the period as by a
file of modern newspapers. The chronicle of Jean Chartier, brother of Alain,
that of Molinet in continuance of Chastellain, and the short memoirs of
Villeneuve, complete the list of works of this class that deserve mention.
Examples of the three great French historians of the middle ages follow:—

Villehardouin.

La velle de la saint Martin vindrent devant Gadres en
Esclavonie, si virent la cité fermee de halz murs et de haltes
torz, et pour noiant demandissiés plus bele ne plus fort ne plus
riche. et quant li pelerin la virent, il se merveillerent mult et
distrent li uns a l'autre 'coment porroit estre prise tel vile par
force, se diex meïsmes nel fait?' Les premieres nés vindrent
devant la vile et aëncrerent et atendirent les autres et al matin
fist mult bel jor et mult cler, et vinrent les galies totes et li
huissier et les autres nés qui estoient arrieres, et pristrent le port
par force et rompirent la chaaine qui mult ere forz et bien
atornee, et descendirent a terre, si que li porz fu entr'aus et la
vile. lor veïssiez maint chevalier et maint serjant issir des nés et
maint bon destrier traire des huissiers et maint riche tref et maint
pavellon.
Einsine se loja l'oz et fu Gadres assegie le jor de la saint Martin.
a cele foiz ne furent mie venu tuit li baron, ear encor n'ere mie
venuz li marchis de Montferrat qui ere remés arriere por afaire
que il avoit. Estiennes del Perche fu remés malades en Venise et
Mahis de Monmorenci, et quant il furent gari, si s'en vint Mahis
de Monmorenci aprés l'ost a Gadrez; mes Estienes del Perche ne
le fist mie si bien, quar il guerpi l'ost et s'en ala en Puille
sejorner. avec lui s'en ala Rotrox de Monfort et Ives de la Ille et
maint autre, qui mult en furent blasmé, et passerent au passage
de marz en Surie.
L'endemain de la saint Martin issirent de cels de Gadres et
vindrent parler le duc de Venise qui ere en son paveillon, et li
distrent que il li rendroient la cité et totes les lor choses sals lor
cors en sa merci. et li dus dist qu'il n'en prendroit mie cestui plet
ne autre, se par le conseil non as contes et as barons, et qu'il en
iroit a els parler.
Endementiers que il ala parler as contes et as barons, icele partie
dont vos avez oï arrieres, qui voloient l'ost depecier, parlerent as
messages et lor distrent 'por quoi volez vos rendre vostre cité? li

pelerin ne vos assaldront mie ne d'aus n'avez vos garde, se vos
vos poëz defendre des Venisïens, dont estes vos quites.' et ensi
pristrent un d'aus meïsmes qui avoit non Robert de Bove, qui ala
as murs de la vile et lor dist ce meïsmes. Ensi entrerent li
message en la vile et fu li plais remés. Li dus de Venise com il
vint as contes et as barons, si lor dist 'seignor, ensi voelent cil de
la dedanz rendre la cité sals lor cors a ma merci, ne je ne
prendroie cestui plait ne autre se per voz conseill non' et li baron
li respondirent 'sire, nos vos loons que vos le preigniez et si le
vos prïon.' et il dist que il le feroit. Et il s'en tornerent tuit
ensemble al paveillon le duc por le plait prendre, et troverent
que li message s'en furent alé par le conseil a cels qui voloient
l'ost depecier. E dont se dreça uns abes de Vals de l'ordre de
Cistials, et lor dist 'seignor, je vos deffent de par l'apostoile de
Rome que vos ne assailliez ceste cité, quar ele est de crestïens et
vos iestes pelerin.' Et quant ce oï li dus, si en fu mult iriez et
destroiz et dist as contes et as barons 'seignor, je avoie de ceste
vile plait a ma volonté, et vostre gent le m'ont tolu et vos
m'aviez convent que vos le m'aideriez a conquerre, et je vos
semoing que vos le façoiz.'
Maintenant li conte et li baron parlerent ensemble et cil qui a la
lor partie se tenoient, et distrent 'mult ont fait grant oltrage cil
qui ont cest plait desfet, et il ne fu onques jorz que il ne meïssent
paine a cest ost depecier. or somes nos honi, se nos ne l'aidons a
prendre.' Et il vienent al duc et li dïent 'sire, nos le vos aiderons
a prendre por mal de cels qui destorné l'ont.' Ensi fu li consels
pris; et al matin alerent logier devant les portes de la vile, et si
drecierent lor perrieres et lor mangonials et lor autres engins
dont il avoient assez; et devers la mer drecierent les eschieles
sor les nés. lor commencierent a la vile a geter les pieres as murz
et as lors. Ensi dura cil asals bien por v jors et lor si mistrent lors
trenchëors a une tour, et cil commencierent a trenchier le mur. et
quant cil dedenz virent ce, si quistrent plait tot atretel com il
l'avoient refusé par le conseil a cels qui l'ost voloient depecier.

Joinville.

Au mois d'aoust entrames en nos neis a la Roche de Marseille: a
celle journée que nous entrames en nos neis, fist l'on ouvrir la
porte de la nef, et mist l'on touz nos chevaus ens, que nous
deviens mener outre mer; et puis reclost l'on la porte et
l'enboucha l'on bien, aussi comme l'on naye un tonnel. pour ce
que, quant le neis est en la grant mer, toute la porte est en l'yaue.
Quant li cheval furent ens, nostre maistres notonniers escrïa a
ses notonniers qui estoient ou bec de la nef et lour dist 'est aree
vostre besoingne?' et il respondirent 'oïl, sire, vieingnent avant
clerc et li provere.' Maintenant que il furent venu, il lour escrïa
'chantez de par dieu'; et il s'escrïerent tuit a une voiz 'veni
creator spiritus.' et il escrïa a ses notonniers 'faites voile de par
dieu'; et il si firent. et en brief tens li venz se feri ou voile et
nous ot tolu la vëue de la terre, que nous ne veïsmes que ciel et
yaue: et chascun jour nous esloigna li venz des païs ou nous
avions estei neiz. et ces choses vous moustre je que cil est bien
fol hardis, qui se ose mettre en tel peril atout autrui chatel ou en
pechié mortel; ear l'on se dort le soir la ou on ne set se l'on se
trouvera ou font de la mer au matin.
En la mer nous avint une fiere merveille, que nous trouvames
une montaigne toute ronde qui estoit devant Barbarie. nous la
trouvames entour l'eure de vespres et najames tout le soir, et
cuidames bien avoir fait plus de cinquante lieues, et lendemain
nous nous trouvames devant icelle meïsmes montaigne; et ainsi
nous avint par dous foiz ou par trois. Quant li marinnier virent
ce, il furent tuit esbahi et nous distrent que nos neis estoient en
grant peril; ear nous estiens devant la terre aus Sarrazins de
Barbarie. Lors nous dist uns preudom prestres que on appeloit
doyen de Malrut, ear il n'ot onques persecucïon en paroisse. ne
par defaut d'yaue ne de trop pluie ne d'autre persecucïon, que
aussi tost comme il avoit fait trois processïons par trois samedis,
que diex et sa mere ne le delivrassent. Samedis estoit: nous
feïsmes la premiere processïon entour les dous maz de la nef; je
meïsmes m'i fiz porter par les braz, pour ce que je estoie grief
malades. Onques puis nous ne veïsmes la montaigne, et venimes
en Cypre le tiers samedi.

Froissart.

Je fuis adont infourmé par le seigneur d'Estonnevort, et me dist
que il vey, et aussi firent plusieurs, quant l'oriflambe fut
desploiee et la bruïne se chey, ung blanc coulon voller et faire
plusieurs volz par dessus la baniere du roy; et quant il eut assez
volé, et que on se deubt combatre et assambler aux ennemis, il
se print a sëoir sur l'une des bannieres du roy; dont on tint ce a
grant signiffïance de bien. Or approchierent les Flamens et
commenchierent a jetter et a traire de bombardes et de canons et
de gros quarreaulx empenez d'arain; ainsi se commença la
bataille. Et en ot le roy de France et ses gens le premier
encontre, qui leur fut moult dur; ear ces Flamens, qui
descendoient orgueilleusement et de grant voulenté, venoient
roit et dur, et boutoient en venant de l'espaule et de la poitrine
ainsi comme senglers tous foursenez, et estoient si fort
entrelachiés tous ensemble qu'on ne les povoit ouvrir ne
desrompre. La fuirent du costé des François par le trait des
canons, des bombardes et des arbalestres premierement mort: le
seigneur de Waurin, baneret, Morelet de Halwin et Jacques
d'Ere. Et adont fut la bataille du roy reculee; mais l'avantgarde et
l'arrieregarde a deux lez passerent oultre et enclouïrent ces
Flamens, et les misrent a l'estroit. Je vous diray comment sur ces
deux eles gens d'armes les commencierent a pousser de leurs
roides lances a longs fers et durs de Bourdeaulx, qui leur
passoient ces cottes de maille tout oultre et les perchoient en
char; dont ceulx qui estoient attains et navrez de ces fers se
restraindoient pour eschiever les horïons; ear jamais ou amender
le peuïssent ne se boutoient avant pour eulx faire destruire. La
les misrent ces gens d'armes a tel destroit qu'ilz ne se sçavoient
ne povoient aidier ne ravoir leurs bras ne leurs planchons pour
ferir ne eulz deffendre. La perdoient les plusieurs force et alaine,
et la tresbuchoient l'un sur l'autre, et se estindoient et moroient
sans coup ferir. La fut Phelippe d'Artevelle encloz et pousé de
glaive et abatu, et gens de Gand qui l'amoient et gardoient grant
plenté atterrez entour luy. Quant le page dudit Phelippe vey la
mesadventure venir sur les leurs, il estoit bien monté sur bon

coursier, si se party et laissa son maistre, ear il ne le povoit
aidier; et retourna vers Courtray pour revenir a Gand.
(A)insi fut faitte et assamblee celle bataille; et lors que des deux
costez les Flamens furent astrains et encloz, ilz ne passerent plus
avant, ear ilz ne se povoient aidier. Adont se remist la bataille du
roy en vigeur, qui avoit de commencement ung petit branslé. La
entendoient gens d'armes a abatre Flamens en grant nombre, et
avoient les plusieurs haches acerees, dont ilz rompoient ces
bachinets et eschervelloient testes; et les aucuns plommees, dont
ilz donnoient si grans horrïons, qu'ilz les abatoient a terre. A
paines estoient Flamens chëuz, quant pillars venoient qui entre
les gens d'armes se boutoient et portoient grandes coutilles, dont
ilz les partüoient; ne nulle pitié n'en avoient non plus que se ce
fuissent chiens. La estoit le clicquetis sur ces bacinets si grant et
si hault, d'espees, de haches, et de plommees, que l'en n'y ouoit
goutte pour la noise. Et ouÿ dire que, se tous les heaumiers de
Paris et de Brouxelles estoient ensemble, leur mestier faisant, ilz
n'euïssent pas fait si grant noise comme faisoient les combatans
et les ferans sur ces testes et sur ces bachinets. La ne
s'espargnoient point chevalliers ne escuïers ainchois mettoient la
main a l'euvre par grant voulenté, et plus les ungs que les autres;
si en y ot aucuns qui s'avancerent et bouterent en la presse trop
avant; ear ilz y furent encloz et estains, et par especïal messire
Loÿs de Cousant, ung chevallier de Berry, et messire Fleton de
Revel, filz au seigneur de Revel; mais encoires en y eut des
autres, dont ce fut dommage: mais si grosse bataille, dont celle
la fut, ou tant avoit de pueple, ne se povoit parfurnir et au
mieulx venir pour les victorïens, que elle ne couste grandement.
Car jeunes chevalliers et escuïers qui desirent les armes se
avancent voulentiers pour leur honneur et pour acquerre loënge;
et la presse estoit la si grande et le dangier si perilleux pour
ceulx qui estoient enclos ou abatus, que se on n'avoit trop bonne
ayde, on ne se povoit relever. Par ce party y eut des Françoiz
mors et estains aucuns; mais plenté ne fut ce mie; ear quant il
venoit a point, ilz aidoient l'un l'autre. La eut ung molt grant
nombre de Flamens occis, dont les tas des mors estoient haulx et

longs ou la bataille avoit esté; on ne vey jamais si peu de sang
yssir a tant de mors.
Quant les Flamens qui estoient derriere veirent que ceulx devant
fondoient et chëoient l'un sus l'autre et que ilz estoient tous
desconfis, ilz s'esbahirent et jetterent leurs plançons par terre et
leurs armures et se misrent a la fuitte vers Courtray et ailleurs.
Ilz n'avoient cure que pour eulx mettre a sauveté. Et Franchois et
Bretons aprés, quy les chassoient en fossez et en buissons, en
aunois et an marés et bruieres, cy dix, cy vingt, cy trente, et la
les recombatoient de rechief, et la les occïoient, se ilz n'estoient
les plus fors. Si en y eut ung moult grant nombre de mors en la
chace entre le lieu de la bataille et Courtray, ou ilz se retraioient
a saulf garant. Ceste bataille advint sur le Mont d'Or entre
Courtray et Rosebeque en l'an de grace nostre seigneur, mil iijc.
iiijxx. et II., le jeudi devant le samedi de l'advent, le xxvije. jour
de novembre, et estoit pour lors le roy Charles de France ou
xiiije. an de son ëage.

FOOTNOTES:
[131] The chronicle of the pseudo-Turpin is of little real importance in the
history of French literature, because it is admitted to have been written in Latin.
The busy idleness of critics has however prompted them to discuss at great
length the question whether the Chanson de Roland may not possibly have been
composed from this chronicle. The facts are these. Tilpin or Turpin was actually
archbishop of Rheims from 753-794, but nobody pretends that the chronicle
going under his name is authentic. All that is certain is that it is not later than
1165, and that it is probably not earlier than the middle, or at most the beginning,
of the eleventh century, while the part of it which is more particularly in question
is of the end of that century. Roland is almost certainly of the middle at latest.
Curiosity on this point may be gratified by consulting M. Gaston Paris, De
pseudo-Turpino, Paris, 1865, or M. Léon Gautier, Epopées Françaises, Paris,
1878. But, from the literary point of view, it is sufficient to say that, while
Turpin is of the very smallest literary merit, Roland is among the capital works
of the middle ages.
[132] Ed. N. de Wailly. Paris, 1874.
[133] Ed. P. Paris. 2 vols., 1879-80. It is characteristic of the middle ages that
this work usually bore the title of Roman d'Eracle, for no other reason than that
the name of Héraclius occurs in the first sentence.
[134] Ed. N. de Wailly. Paris, 1874. Besides the Histoire de St. Louis, Joinville
has left an interesting Credo, a brief religious manual written much earlier in his
life.
[135] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove. 20 vols., Brussels. Ed. S. Luce, Paris, in course
of publication. The edition of Buchon, 3 vols., Paris, 1855, is still the best for
general use. Froissart's poems give many biographical details which are
interesting, but unimportant. He wandered all his life from court to court,
patronised and pensioned by kings, queens, and princes. He was successively
curé of Lestines and canon of Chimay. In early life he was much in England,
being specially patronised by Edward III. and Philippa.
[136] Old Mortality, chap. 35.
[137] Ed. Buchon. Paris, 1858.
[138] Chastellain has been fortunate, like most Flemish writers, in being
excellently and completely edited (by M. Kervyn de Lettenhove. 8 vols.,
Brussels).
[139] Ed. Michaud et Poujoulat.
[140] Ed. Michaud et Poujoulat.
[141] Ed. Michaud et Poujoulat, in whose collection most of the many authors
here mentioned will be also found.

CHAPTER XII.
MISCELLANEOUS PROSE.

It was natural, and indeed necessary, that, when the use
of prose as an allowable vehicle for literary composition General use of
Prose.
was once understood and established, it should gradually
but rapidly supersede the more troublesome and far less appropriate form of
verse. Accordingly we find that, from the beginning of the thirteenth
century, the amount of prose literature is constantly on the increase. It
happens, however, or, to speak more precisely, it follows that this
miscellaneous prose literature is of much less importance and of much less
interest than the contemporary and kindred literature in verse. For in the
nature of things much of it was occupied with what may be called the
journey-work of literature,—the stuff which, unless there be some special
attraction in its form, grows obsolete, or retains a merely antiquarian
interest in the course of time. There was, moreover, still among the chief
patrons of literature a preference for verse which diverted the brightest
spirits to the practice of that form. Yet again, the best prose composition of
the middle ages, with the exception of a few works of fiction, is to be found
in its chronicles, and these have already been noticed. A review, therefore,
much less minute in scale than that which in the first ten chapters of this
book has been given to the mediaeval poetry of France, will suffice for its
mediaeval prose, and such a review will appropriately close the survey of
the literature of the middle ages.
It has already been pointed out in the first chapter that
documentary evidence exists to prove the custom of Prose Sermons. St.
Bernard.
preaching in French (or at least in lingua romana) at a
very early date. It is not, however, till many centuries
after the date of Mummolinus, that there is any trace of Maurice de Sully.
regularly written vernacular discourses. When these
appear in the twelfth century the Provençal dialects Later Preachers.
Gerson.
appear to have the start of French proper. Whether the
forty-four prose sermons of St. Bernard which exist were written by him in

French, or were written in Latin and translated, is a disputed point. The
most reasonable opinion seems to be that they were translated, but it is
uncertain whether at the beginning of the thirteenth or the middle of the
twelfth century. However this may be, the question of written French
sermons in the twelfth century does not depend on that of St. Bernard's
authorship. Maurice de Sully, who presided over the See of Paris from 1160
to 1195, has left a considerable number of sermons which exist in
manuscripts of very different dialects. Perhaps it may not be illegitimate to
conclude from this, that at the time such written sermons were not very
common, and that preachers of different districts were glad to borrow them
for their own use. These also are thought to have been first written in Latin
and then translated. But whether Maurice de Sully was a pioneer or not, he
was very quickly followed by others. In the following century the number
of preachers whose vernacular work has been preserved is very large; the
increase being, beyond all doubt, partially due to the foundation of the two
great preaching orders of St. Francis and St. Dominic. The existing
literature of this class, dating from the thirteenth, the fourteenth, and the
early fifteenth centuries, is enormous, but the remarks made at the
beginning of this chapter apply to it fully. Its interest is almost wholly
antiquarian, and not in any sense literary. Distinguished names indeed occur
in the catalogue of preachers, but, until we come to the extreme verge of the
mediaeval period proper, hardly one of what may be called the first
importance. The struggle between the Burgundian and Orleanist, or
Armagnac parties, and the ecclesiastical squabbles of the Great Schism,
produced some figures of greater interest. Such are Jean Petit, a furious
partisan, who went so far as to excuse the murder of the Duke of Orleans,
and Jean Charlier, or Gerson, one of the most respectable and considerable
names of the later mediaeval literature. Gerson was born in 1363, at a
village of the same name in Lorraine. He early entered the Collège de
Navarre, and distinguished himself under Peter d'Ailly, the most famous of
the later nominalists. He became Chancellor of the University, received a
living in Flanders, and for many years preached in the most constantly
attended churches of Paris. He represented the University at the Council of
Constance, and, becoming obnoxious to the Burgundian party, sought
refuge with one of his brothers at Lyons, where he is said to have taught
little children. He died in 1429. Gerson, it should perhaps be added, is one
of the numerous candidates (but one of the least likely) for the honour of

having written the Imitation. He concerns us here only as the author of
numerous French sermons. His work in this kind is very characteristic of
the time. Less mixed with burlesque than that of his immediate successors,
it is equally full of miscellaneous, and, as it now seems, somewhat
inappropriate erudition, and far fuller of the fatal allegorising and
personification of abstract qualities which were in every branch of literature
the curse of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Yet there are passages of
real eloquence in Gerson, though perhaps the chief literary point about him
is the evidence he gives of the insufficiency of the language in its then
condition for serious prose work.
This is indeed the lesson of most of the writing which
we have to notice in this chapter. Next to sermons may Moral and
Devotional
most naturally be placed devotional and moral works, Treatises.
for, as may easily be imagined, theology and philosophy,
properly so called, did not condescend to the vulgar Translators.
tongue until after the close of the period. Only treatises
for the practical use of the unlearned and ignorant
adopted the vernacular. Of such there are manuals of Political and
Polemical Works.
devotion and sketches of sacred history which date from
the thirteenth century, besides numerous later treatises, among the authors
of which Gerson is again conspicuous. The most popular, perhaps, and in a
way the most interesting of all such moral and devotional treatises, is the
book of the Chevalier de la Tour Landry[142], written in the third quarter of
the fourteenth century. This book, destined for the instruction of the author's
three daughters, is composed of Bible stories, moral tales from ordinary
literature and from the writer's experience, precepts and rules of conduct,
and so forth; in short, a Whole Duty of Girls. Most however of the works of
this sort which were current were, as may be supposed, not original, but
translated, and these translations played a very important part in the history
of the language. The earliest of all are translations of the Bible, especially
of the Psalms and the book of Kings, the former of which may perhaps date
from the end of the eleventh century. Translations of the fathers, and of the
Lives of the Saints, followed in such numbers that, in 1199, Pope Innocent
III. blamed their indiscriminate use. The translation of profane literature
hardly begins much before the thirteenth century. In this it becomes
frequent; and in the following many classical writers and more mediaeval

authors in Latin underwent the process. But it was not till the close of the
fourteenth century that the most important translations were made, and that
translation began to exercise its natural influence on a comparatively
unsophisticated language, by providing terms of art, by generally enriching
the vocabulary, and by the elaboration of the peculiarities of syntax and
style necessary for rendering the sentences of languages so highly organised
as Latin and Greek. Under John of Valois and his three successors
considerable encouragement was given by the kings of France to this sort of
work, and three translators, Pierre Bersuire, Nicholas Oresme, and Raoul de
Presles, have left special reputations. The eldest of these, Pierre Bersuire or
Bercheure, a friend of Petrarch, was born in 1290, and towards the end of
his life, about 1352, translated part of Livy. Nicholas Oresme, the date of
whose birth is unknown, but who entered the Collège de Navarre in 1348,
and is likely to have been at that time thirteen or fourteen years old, and
who became Dean of Rouen and Bishop of Lisieux, translated, in 1370 and
the following years, the Ethics, Politics, and Economics of Aristotle (from
the Latin, not the Greek). He died in 1382. Oresme was a good writer, and
particularly dexterous in adopting neologisms necessary for his purpose.
Raoul de Presles executed translations of the Bible and of St. Augustine's
De Civitate Dei. All these writers furnished an enlarged vocabulary to their
successors, the most remarkable of whom were the already mentioned
Christine de Pisan and Alain Chartier. The latter is especially noteworthy as
a prose writer, and the comments already made on his style and influence as
a poet apply here also. His Quadriloge Invectif and Curial, both satirical or,
at least, polemical works, are his chief productions in this kind. Raoul de
Presles also composed a polemical work, dealing chiefly with the burning
question of the papal and royal powers, under the title of Songe du Verger.
It might seem unlikely at first sight that so highly
technical a subject as law should furnish a considerable Codes and Legal
contingent to early vernacular literature; but there are Treatises.
some works of this kind both of ancient date and of no small importance.
England and Normandy furnish an important contingent, the 'Laws of
William the Conqueror' and the Coutumiere Normandie being the most
remarkable: but the most interesting document of this kind is perhaps the
famous Assises de Jérusalem, arranged by Godfrey of Bouillon and his
crusaders as the code of the kingdom of Jerusalem in 1099, and known also

as the Lettres du Sépulcre, from the place of their custody. The original text
was lost or destroyed at the capture of Jerusalem by Saladin in 1187; but a
new Assise, compiled from the oral tradition of the jurists who had seen and
used the old, was written by Philippe de Navarre in 1240, or thereabouts,
for the use of the surviving Latin principalities of the East. This was shortly
afterwards enlarged and developed by Jean d'Ibelin, a Syrian baron, who
took part in the crusade of St. Louis. These codes concerned themselves
only with one part of the original Lettres du Sépulcre, the laws affecting the
privileged classes; but the other part, the Assises des Bourgeois, survives in
Le Livre de la Cour des Bourgeois, which has been thought to be older than
the loss of the original. These various works contain the most complete
account of feudal jurisprudence in its palmy days that is known, for the still
earlier Anglo-Norman laws represent a more mixed state of things. It was
especially in Cyprus that the Jerusalem codes were observed. The chief
remaining works of the same kind which deserve mention are the
Établissements de St. Louis and the Livre de Justice et de Plet, which both
date from the time of Louis himself; the Conseil, a treatise on law by Pierre
de Fontaines, who died in 1289, and the Coutumes du Beauvoisis of
Philippe de Beaumanoir, who wrote in 1283. The legal literature of the
fourteenth century is abundant, but possesses considerably less interest.
Last of all, before coming to prose fiction, a vast if not
very interesting class of miscellaneous prose work must Miscellanies and
Didactic Works.
be mentioned. The word class has been used, but
perhaps improperly, for classification is almost impossible. Books of
accounts and domestic economy of all sorts (generally called livres de
raison) were very common; treatises of all kinds of more general character
on household management abounded. We have a Ménagier de Paris, a
Viandier de Paris, both of the fourteenth century. But much earlier the
orderly and symmetrical spirit which has always distinguished the French
makes itself apparent in literature. The Livre des Métiers de Paris of
Étienne Boileau, dating from the thirteenth century, gives a complete idea
of the organisation of guilds and trades at that time. An innumerable
multitude of treatises on the minor morals, on love, on manners, exists in
manuscript, and in rare instances in print. The Trésors, or compendious
encyclopædias, which have already been noticed in verse, began in the
thirteenth century to be composed in prose, the most remarkable being that

of Brunetto Latini, the master of Dante, who avowedly used French as his
vehicle of composition, because it was the most commonly read of
European languages. This book was written apparently about or before
1270. Nor did the separate arts lack illustration in prose. Medicine and
alchemy, astronomy and poetry, war and chess, had their treatises, while
Bestiaries and Lapidaries are almost as numerous in prose as in verse.
Finally, there is the important category of books of travel. There are a
certain number of voyages to the Holy Land[143]; some miscellaneous
travels mostly, though not universally, translated from the Latin; and last,
but not least, the great book of Marco Polo, which seems to have been
written originally in French, the author, when in captivity at Genoa, having
dictated it to Rusticien of Pisa, who also figures as a compiler of late
versions of the Arthurian legend, and who thus had some skill in French
composition.
The prose fiction of the period has been kept to the last,
because it expresses a different order of literary Fiction
endeavour from those divisions which have hitherto
been treated. The language of the middle ages was ill-suited for work other
than narrative; for narrative work it was supremely well adapted. Yet the
prose fiction which we have is not on the whole equal in merit to the poetry,
though in one or two instances it is of great value. The medium of
communication was not generally known or used until the period of
decadence had been reached, and the peculiar defects of mediaeval
literature, prolixity and verbiage, show themselves more conspicuously and
more annoyingly in prose than in verse. We have, however, some
remarkable work of the later periods, and in the latest of all we have one
writer, Antoine de la Salle, who deserves to rank with the great chroniclers
as a fashioner of French prose.
The French prose fiction of the middle ages resolves itself into several
classes: the early Arthurian Romances already noticed; the scattered tales of
the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, which are chiefly to be studied in
two excellent volumes of the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne[144]; the versions of
such collections of legends, chiefly oriental in origin, as the History of the
Seven Wise Men and the Gesta Romanorum; the longer classical romances
in prose; the late prose remaniements of the great verse epics and romances
of the twelfth century; and the more or less original work of the fifteenth

century, when prose was becoming an independent and coequal literary
exponent. The first class requires no further mention; of the third, the
editions of the Roman des Sept Sages, by M. Gaston Paris[145], and of the
Violier des Histoires Romaines, by M. Gustave Brunet[146], may be referred
to as sufficient instances; of the fourth a very interesting specimen has been
made accessible by the publication of the prose Roman de Jules César of
Jean de Tuim[147], a free version from Lucan made apparently in the course
of the thirteenth century, and afterwards imitated by the author of the verse
romance; the fifth, though very numerous, are not of much value, though
the great romance of Perceforest and a few others may be excepted from
this general condemnation. The second and the last deserve a longer
mention.
The tales of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, as published by MM.
Moland and Héricault, are eight in number. Those of the second volume are
on the whole inferior in interest to those of the first. They consist of
Asseneth, a graceful legend of the marriage of Joseph with the daughter of
the Egyptian high-priest; Troilus, interesting chiefly as a prose version of
Benoist de Ste. More's legend of Troilus and Cressida, through the channel
of Guido Colonna and Boccaccio; and a very curious English story, that of
the rebel Fulk Fitzwarine. The thirteenth-century tales consist of
L'Empereur Constant, the story with which Mr. Morris has made English
readers familiar under the title of the 'Man born to be King;' of a prose
version of the ubiquitous legend of Amis et Amiles; of Le roi Flore et la
belle Jehanne, a kind of version of Griselda, though the particular trial and
exhibition of fidelity is quite different; of the Comtesse de Ponthieu, the
least interesting of all; and lastly, of the finest prose tale of the French
middle ages, Aucassin et Nicolette. In this exquisite story Aucassin, the son
of the count of Beaucaire, falls in love with Nicolette, a captive damsel. It is
very short, and is written in mingled verse and prose. The theme is for the
most part nothing but the desperate love of Aucassin, which is careless of
religion, which makes him indifferent to the joy of battle and to everything,
except 'Nicolette ma très-douce mie,' and which is, of course, at last
rewarded. But the extreme beauty of the separate scenes makes it a
masterpiece.

Antoine de la Salle is one of the most fortunate of
authors. The tendency of modern criticism is generally Antoine de la Salle.
to endeavour to prove that some famous author has been
wrongly credited with some of the work which has made his fame. Homer,
Shakespeare, Chaucer, Rabelais, have all had to pay this penalty. In the case
of Antoine de la Salle, on the contrary, critics have vied with each other in
heaping unacknowledged masterpieces on his head. His only acknowledged
work is the charming romance of Petit Jean de Saintré[148]. The first thing
added to this has been the admirable satire of the Quinze Joyes du
Mariage[149], the next the famous collection of the Cent Nouvelles[150], and
the last the still more famous farce of Pathelin[151]. There are for once few
or no external reasons why these various attributions should not be
admitted, while there are many internal ones why they should. Antoine de la
Salle was born in 1398, and spent his life in the employment of different
kings and princes;—Louis III of Anjou, King of Naples, his son the good
King René, the count of Saint Pol, and Philip the Good of Burgundy, who
was his natural sovereign. Nothing is known of him after 1461. Of the three
prose works which have been attributed to him—there are others of a
didactic character in manuscript—the Quinze Joyes du Mariage is
extremely brief, but it contains the quintessence of all the satire on that
honourable estate which the middle ages had elaborated. Every chapter—
there is one for each 'joy' with a prologue and conclusion—ends with a
variation on this phrase descriptive of the unhappy Benedict, 'est sy est
enclose dans la nasse, et à l'aventure ne s'en repent point et s'il n'y estait il
se y mettroit bientot; la usera sa vue en languissant, et finira misérablement
ses jours.' The satire is much quieter and of a more humorous and less
boisterous character than was usual at the time. The Cent Nouvelles
Nouvelles are to all intents and purposes prose fabliaux. They have the full
licence of that class of composition, its sparkling fun, its truth to the
conditions of ordinary human life. Many of them are taken from the work
of the Italian novelists, but all are handled in a thoroughly original manner.
In style they are perhaps the best of all the late mediaeval prose works,
being clear, precise, and definite without the least appearance of baldness or
dryness. Petit Jehan de Saintré is, together with the Chronique de Messire
Jacques de Lalaing[152] of Georges Chastellain (a delightful biography,
which is not a work of fiction), the hand-book of the last age of chivalry.
Jehan de Saintré, who was a real person of the preceding century, but from

whom the novelist borrows little or nothing but his name, falls in love with
a lady who is known by the fantastic title of 'la dame des belles cousines.'
He wins general favour by his courtesy, true love, and prowess; but during
his absence in quest of adventures, his faithless mistress betrays him for a
rich abbot. The latter part of this book exhibits something of the satiric
intention, which was never long absent from the author's mind; the former
contains a picture, artificial perhaps, but singularly graceful, of the
elaborate religion, as it may almost be called, of chivalry. Strikingly evident
in the book is the surest of all signs of a dying stage of society, the most
delicate observation and sympathetic description joined to sarcastic and
ironical criticism.
As examples of this prose literature we may take a fragment of one of the
sermons attributed to St. Bernard (twelfth century), an extract from
Aucassin et Nicolette (thirteenth century), and one from the Curial of Alain
Chartier (early fifteenth century):—

St. Bernard.

Granz est ceste mers, chier frere, et molt large, c'est ceste
presente vie ke molt est amere et molt plaine de granz ondes, ou
trois manieres de gent puyent solement trespesseir, ensi k'il
delivreit en soient, et chascuns en sa maniere. Troi homme sunt:
Noë, Danïel et Job. Li primiers de cez trois trespesset a neif, li
seconz par pont et li tierz par weit. Cist troi homme signifïent
trois ordenes ki sunt en sainte eglise. Noë conduist l'arche par
mei lo peril del duluve, en cui je reconois aparmenmes la forme
de ceos qui sainte eglise ont a governeir. Danïel, qui apeleiz est
bers de desiers, ki abstinens fut et chastes, il est li ordenes des
penanz et des continanz ki entendent solement a deu. Et Job, ki
droituriers despensiers fut de la sustance de cest munde, signifïet
lo fëaule peule qui est en marïaige, a cuy il loist bien avoir en
possessïon les choses terrienes. Del primier et del secont nos
covient or parler, ear ci sunt or de present nostre frere, et ki
abbeit sunt si cum nos, ki sunt del nombre des prelaiz; et si sunt
assi ci li moine ki sunt de l'ordene des penanz dont nos mismes,
qui abbeit sommes, ne nos doyens mies osteir, si nos par

aventure, qui jai nen avignet, nen avons dons oblïeit nostre
professïon por la grace de nostre office. Lo tierz ordene, c'est de
ceos ki en marïaige sunt, trescorrai ju or briément, si cum ceos
qui tant nen apartienent mies a nos cum li altre. c'est cil ordenes
ki a vveit trespesset ceste grant meir; et cist ordenes est molt
peneuous et perillous, et ki vait par molt longe voie, si cum cil
ki nule sente ne quierent ne nule adrece. En ceu appert bien ke
molt est perillouse lor voie, ke nos tant de gent i vëons perir,
dont nos dolor avons, et ke nos si poc i vëons de ceos ki ensi
trespessent cum mestiers seroit; ear molt est griés chose
d'eschuïr l'abysme des vices et les fossés des criminals pechiez
entre les ondes de cest seule, nomeyement or en cest tens ke li
malices est si enforciez.

AUCASSIN ET NICOLETTE.

Aucasins fu mis en prison si com vos avés, oï et entendu, et
Nicolete fu d'autre part en le canbre. Ce fu el tans d'esté, el mois
de mai, que li jor sont caut, lonc et cler, et les nuis coies et
series. Nicolete jut une nuit en son lit, si vit la lune luire cler par
une fenestre, et si oï le lorseilnol canter en garding, se li sovint
d'Aucasin son ami qu'ele tant amoit. ele se comença a porpenser
del conte Garin de Biaucaire qui de mort le haoit; si se pensa
qu'ele ne remanroit plus ilec, que s'ele estoit acusee et li quens
Garins le savoit, il le feroit de male mort morir. ele senti que li
vielle dormoit qui aveuc li estoit. ele se leva, si vesti un blïaut de
drap de soie que ele avoit molt bon; si prist dras de lit et
touailes, si noua l'un a l'autre, si fist une corde si longe conme
ele pot, si le noua au piler de le fenestre, si s'avala contreval le
gardin, et prist se vesture a l'une main devant et a l'autre deriere;
si s'escorça por le rousee qu'ele vit grande sor l'erbe, si s'en ala
aval le gardin. Ele avoit les caviaus blons et menus recercelés, et
les ex vairs et rïans, et le face traitice et le nés haut et bien assis,
et les levretes vermelletes plus que n'est cerisse ne rose el tans
d'esté, et les dens blans et menus, et avoit les mameletes dures
qui li souslevoient sa vestëure ausi com ce fuissent II nois
gauges, et estoit graille parmi les flans, qu'en vos dex mains le

pëusciés enclorre; et les flors des margerites qu'ele ronpoit as
ortex de ses piés, qui li gissoient sor le menuisse du pié par
deseure, estoient droites noires avers ses piés et ses ganbes, tant
par estoit blance la mescinete. Ele vint au postic; si le deffrema,
si s'en isci par mi les rues de Biaucaire par devers l'onbre, ear la
lune luisoit molt clere, et erra tant qu'ele vint a le tor u ses amis
estoit. Li tors estoit faëlé de lius en lius, et ele se quatist delés
l'un des pilers. si s'estraint en son mantel, si mist sen cief par mi
une crevëure de la tor qui vielle estoit et anciienne, si oï Aucasin
qui la dedens pleuroit et faisoit mot grant dol et regretoit se
douce amie que tant amoit. et quant ele l'ot assés escouté, si
comença a dire.

Alain Chartier.

La court, affin que tu l'entendes, est ung couvent de gens qui
soubz faintise du bien commun sont assemblez pour eulx
interrompre; ear il n'y a gueres de gens qui ne vendent,
achaptent ou eschangent aucunes foiz leurs rentes ou leurs
propres vestemens; ear entre nous de la court nous sommes
marchans affectez qui achaptons les autres gens et autresfoiz
pour leur argent nous leur vendons nostre humanité precïeuse.
Nous leur vendons et achaptons autruy par flaterie ou par
corrupcïons; mais nous sçavons tres bien vendre nous mesmes a
ceulx qui ont de nous a faire. Combien donc y peus tu acquerir
qui es certain sans doubte et sans peril? veulx tu aller a la court
vendre ou perdre ce bien de vertu, que tu as acquis hors d'icelle
court? Certes, frere, tu demandes ce que tu deusses reffuser, tu te
fies en ce dont tu te deusses deffier et fiches ton esperance en ce
que te tire a peril. Et se tu y viens, la court te servira de tant de
mensonges controverses d'une part, et de l'autre de bailler tant
de tours et de charges que tu auras dedans toy mesmes bataille
continuëlle et soussiz angoisseux et pour certain homme qui
pourra bonnement dire que ceste vie fust bieneuree qui par tant
de tempestes est achatee et en tant de contrarïetez esprouvee.

FOOTNOTES:
[142] Ed. Montaiglon. Paris, 1854.
[143] A good example of these is the Saint Voyage de Jérusalem of the Seigneur
d'Anglure (1385), edited by MM. Bonnardot and Longnon. Paris, 1878.

[144] Nouvelles du 13e et du 14e siècle. Ed. Moland et Héricault. 2 vols. Paris,
1856.
[145] Paris, 1876.
[146] Paris, 1858.
[147] Ed. Settegast. Halle, 1881.
[148] Ed. Guichard. Paris, 1843.
[149] Ed. Jannet. Paris, 1853; 2nd ed. 1857.
[150] Ed. Wright. Paris, 1858.
[151] Ed. Fournier, Théâtre Français avant la Renaissance. Paris, n. d.
[152] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, viii. 1-259.

INTERCHAPTER I.
SUMMARY OF MEDIAEVAL LITERATURE.

In the foregoing book a view has been given of the principal developments
of mediaeval literature in France. The survey has extended, taking the
extremest chronological limits, over some eight centuries. But, until the end
of the eleventh, the monuments of ancient French literature are few and
scattered, and the actual manuscripts which we possess date in hardly any
case further back than the twelfth. In reality the history of mediaeval
literature in France is the history of the productions of the twelfth,
thirteenth, fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries with a long but straggling
introduction, ranging from the eighth or even the seventh. Its palmy time is
unquestionably in the twelfth and the thirteenth. During these two hundred
years almost every kind of literature is attempted. Vast numbers of epic
poems are written; one great story, that of Arthur, exercises the imagination
as hardly any other story has exercised it either in ancient or in modern
times; the drama is begun in all its varieties of tragedy, comedy, and opera;
lyric poetry finds abundant and exquisite expression; history begins to be
written, not indeed from the philosophic point of view, but with vivid and
picturesque presentment of fact; elaborate codes are drawn; vernacular
homilies, not mere rude colloquial discourses, are composed; the learning
of the age, such as it is, finds popular treatment; and in particular a satiric
literature, more abundant and more racy if less polished than any that
classical antiquity has left us, is committed to writing. It is often wondered
at and bewailed that this vigorous growth was succeeded by a period of
comparative stagnation in which little advance was made, and in which not
a little decided falling off is noticeable. Except the formal lyric poetry of the
fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries, and the multiplied dramatic energy
of the latter, nothing novel or vigorous appears for some hundred and forty
years, until the extreme verge of the period, when the substitution of the
prose tale, as exemplified in the work attributed to Antoine de la Salle, for
the verse Fabliau, opens a prospect which four centuries of progress have
not closed. The early perfection of Italian, a language later to start than

French, has been regretfully compared with this, and the blame has been
thrown on the imperfection of mediaeval arrangements for educating the
people. The complaint is mistaken, and almost foolish. It is not necessary to
look much further than Italian itself to see the Nemesis of a too early
development. French, like English, which had a yet tardier literary growth,
has pursued its course unhasting, unresting, to the present hour. Italian since
the close of the sixteenth century has contributed not a single masterpiece to
European literature, and not much that can be called good second-rate. It is
not impossible that the political troubles of France—the Hundred Years'
War especially—checked the intellectual development of the country, but if
so, the check was in the long run altogether salutary. The middle ages were
allowed to work themselves out—to produce their own natural fruit before
the full influx of classical literature. What is more, a breathing time was
allowed after the exhaustion of the first set of influences, before the second
was felt. Hence the French renaissance was a far more vigorous growth than
the renaissance of Italy, which displays at once the signs of precocity and of
premature decay. But we are more immediately concerned at the present
moment with the literary results of the middle ages themselves. It is only of
late years that it has been possible fully to estimate these, and it is now
established beyond the possibility of doubt that to France almost every great
literary style as distinguished from great individual works is at this period
due. The testimony of Brunetto Latini as to French being the common
literary tongue of Europe in the thirteenth century has been quoted, and
those who have read the foregoing chapters attentively will be able to recall
innumerable instances of the literary supremacy of France. It must of course
be remembered that she enjoyed for a long time the advantage of enlisting
in her service the best wits of Southern England, of the wide district
dominated by the Provençal dialects, and of no small part of Germany and
of Northern Italy. But these countries took far more than they gave: the
Chansons de Gestes were absorbed by Italy, the Arthurian Romances by
Germany; the Fabliaux crossed the Alps to assume a prose dress in the
Southern tongue; the mysteries and miracles made their way to every corner
of Europe to be copied and developed. To the origination of the most
successful of all artificial forms of poetry—the sonnet—France has indeed
no claim, but this is almost a solitary instance. The three universally popular
books (to use the word loosely) of profane literature in the middle ages, the
epic of Arthur, the satire of Reynard the Fox, the allegorical romance of the

Rose, are of French origin. In importance as in bulk no literature of these
four centuries could dare to vie with French.
This astonishing vigour of imaginative writing was however accompanied
by a corresponding backwardness in the application of the vernacular to the
use of the exacter and more serious departments of letters. Before Comines,
the French chronicle was little more than gossip, though it was often the
gossip of genius. No philosophical, theological, ethical, or political work
deserving account was written in French prose before the beginning of the
sixteenth century. The very language remained utterly unfitted for any such
use. Its vocabulary, though enormously rich in mere volume, was destitute
of terms of the subtlety and precision necessary for serious prose; its syntax
was hardly equal to anything but a certain loose and flowing narration,
which, when turned into the channel of argument, became either bald or
prolix. The universal use of Latin for graver purposes had stunted and
disabled it. At the same time great changes passed over the language itself.
In the fourteenth century it lost with its inflections not a little of its
picturesqueness, and had as yet hit upon no means of supplying the want.
The loose orthography of the middle ages had culminated in a fantastic
redundance of consonants which was reproduced in the earliest printed
books. This, as readers of Rabelais are aware, was an admirable assistance
to grotesque effect, but it was fatal to elegance or dignity except in the
omnipotent hands of a master like Rabelais himself. In the fifteenth century,
moreover, the stereotyped forms of poetry were losing their freshness and
grace while retaining their stately precision. The faculty of sustained verse
narrative had fled the country, only to return at very long intervals and in
very few cases. The natural and almost childish outspokenness of early
times had brought about in all departments of comic literature a revolting
coarseness of speech. The farce and the prose tale almost outdo the more
naïf fabliau in this. Nothing like a critical spirit had yet manifested itself in
matters literary, unless the universal following of a few accepted models
may be called criticism. The very motives of the mediaeval literature, its
unquestioning faith, its sense of a narrow circle of knowledge surrounded
by a vast unknown, its acceptance of classes and orders in church and state
(tempered as this acceptance had been by the sharpest satire on particulars
but by hardly any argument on general points), were losing their force.

Everything was ready for a renaissance, and the next book will show how
the Renaissance came and what it did.

BOOK II.
THE RENAISSANCE.

CHAPTER I.
VILLON, COMINES, AND THE LATER FIFTEENTH
CENTURY.

To determine at what period exactly mediaeval literature
ceases in France and modern literature begins, is not one The Middle Ages
and the
of the easiest problems of literary history. It has Renaissance.
sometimes been solved by the obvious expedient of
making out of the fifteenth century a period of transition, Characteristics of
sometimes by continuing the classification of Fifteenth-century
'mediaeval' until the time when Marot and Rabelais gave Literature.
unmistakeable evidence of the presence and working of
the modern spirit. Perhaps, however, there may, after all, have been
something in the instinct which, in words clumsily enough chosen, made
Boileau date modern French poetry from Villon[153], and there can hardly
be any doubt that, as far as spirit if not form goes, modern French prose
dates from Comines. These two contemporary authors, moreover, have in
them the characteristic which perhaps more than any other distinguishes
modern from mediaeval literature, the predominance of the personal
element. In their works, especially if Villon be taken with the immediately
preceding and partially contemporary Charles d'Orléans, a difference of the
most striking kind is noticeable at once. It is not that the prince who served
the god Nonchaloir so piously is deficient in personal characteristics or
personal attractiveness, but that his personality is still, so to speak, generic
rather than individual. He is still the Trouvère of the nobler class, dallying
with half-imaginary woes in the forms consecrated by tradition to the record
of them. Not so the vagabond whose words after four centuries appeal
directly to the spirit of the modern reader. That reader is cut off from
Charles d'Orléans' world by a gulf across which he can only project himself
by a great effort of study or of sympathetic determination. The barriers
which separate him from Villon are slight enough, consisting mostly of
trifling changes in language and manners which a little exertion easily
overcomes.

The latter portion of the fifteenth century, or, to speak more correctly, its
last two-thirds, have frequently been described as a 'dead season' in French
literature. The description is not wholly just. Even if, according to the plan
just explained, we throw Charles d'Orléans and Antoine de la Salle, two
names of great importance, back into the mediaeval period, and if we allow
most of the chroniclers who preceded Comines to accompany them, there
are still left, before the reign of Francis the First witnessed the definite
blooming of the Renaissance in France, the two names of consummate
importance which stand at the head of this chapter, a few minor writers of
interest such as Coquillart, Baude, Martial d'Auvergne, an interesting group
of literary or at least oratorical ecclesiastics, and a much larger and, from a
literary point of view, more important group of elaborate versifiers, the so-
called grands rhétoriqueurs who preceded the Pléiade in endeavouring to
Latinise the French tongue, and whose stiff verse produced by a natural
rebound the easy grace of Clément Marot. Each of these persons and groups
will demand some notice, and the mention of them will bring us to the
Renaissance of which the subjects of this chapter were the forerunners.

François Villon[154], or Corbueil, or Corbier, or de
Montcorbier, or des Loges, was certainly born at Paris in Villon.
the year 1431. Of the date of his death nothing certain is
known, some authorities extending his life towards the close of the century
in order to adjust Rabelais' anecdotes of him[155], others supposing him to
have died before the publication of the first edition of his works in 1489.
That Villon was not his patronymic, whichsoever of his numerous aliases
may really deserve that distinction, is certain. He was a citizen of Paris and
a member of the university, having the status of clerc. But his youth was
occupied in other matters than study. In 1455 he killed, apparently in self-
defence, a priest named Philip Sermaise, fled from Paris, was condemned to
banishment in default of appearance, and six months afterwards received
letters of pardon. In 1456 a faithless mistress, Catherine de Vausselles, drew
him into a second affray, in which he had the worst, and again he fled from
Paris. During his absence a burglary committed in the capital put the police
on the track of a gang of young good-for-nothings among whom Villon's
name figured, and he was arrested, tried, tortured, and condemned to death.
On appeal, however, the sentence was commuted to banishment. Four years
after he was in prison at Meung, consigned thither by the Bishop of

Orleans, but the king, Louis the Eleventh, set him free. Thenceforward
nothing certain is known of him. He had at one time relations with Charles
d'Orléans. Such are the bare facts of his singular life, to which the peculiar
character of his work has directed perhaps disproportionate attention. This
work consists of a poem in forty stanzas of eight octosyllabic lines (each
rhymed a, b, a, b, b, c, b, c) called the Petit Testament[156]; of a poem in 173
similar stanzas called the Grand Testament, in which about a score of minor
pieces, chiefly ballades or rondeaux, are inserted; of a Codicil composed
mainly of ballades; of a few separate pieces, and of some ballades in argot,
collectively called Le Jargon. Besides these there are doubtful pieces,
including a curious work called Les Repues Franches, which describes in
octaves like those of the Testaments the swindling tricks of Villon and his
companions, an excellent Dialogue between two characters, the Seigneurs
de Mallepaye and Baillevent, and a still better Monologue entitled Le Franc
Archier de Bagnolet. The Little Testament was written after the affair with
Catherine de Vausselles, the Great Testament after his liberation from the
Bishop's Prison at Meung. Many of the minor poems contain allusions
which enable us to fix them to various events in the poet's life. The first
edition of his works was, as has been said, published in 1489. In 1533 he
had the honour of having Marot for editor, and up to the date of the
Bibliophile Jacob's edition of 1854 (since when there have been several
editions), the number had reached thirty-two.
The characteristics of Villon may be looked at either technically or from the
point of view of the matter of his work. He had an extraordinary mastery of
the most artificial forms of poetry which have ever been employed. The
rondel, which Charles d'Orléans wrote with so much grace, he did not use,
but his rondeaux are generally exquisite. The ballade, however, was his
special province. No writer has ever got the full virtue out of the recurrent
rhymes and refrains, which are the special characteristics of the form, as
Villon has. No one has infused into a mere string of names, such as his
famous Ballade des Dames du Temps Jadis and others, such exquisitely
poetical effects by dint of an epithet here and there and of a touching
burden. But the matter of his verse is in many ways perfectly on a level
with its manner. No one excels him in startling directness of phrase, in
simple but infinite pathos of expression. Of the former, the sudden cry of
the Belle Heaulmière after the recital of her former triumphs—

Que m'en reste-t-il? honte et péché;

and the despairing conclusion of the lover of La Grosse Margot—

Je suis paillard, paillardise me suit—

are examples in point; of the latter the line in the rondeau to Death—

Deux étions et n'avions qu'un cœur.

No one has bolder strokes of the picturesque, as for instance—

De Constantinoble
L'empérier aux poings dorés;

and no one can render the sombre horror of a scene better than Villon has
rendered it in the famous epitaph of the gibbeted corpses—

La pluie nous a debués et lavés,
Et le soleil desséchés et noircis,
Pies, corbeaulx nous out les yeux cavés
Et arrachés la barbe et les sourcils.

These are some of Villon's strongest points. Yet in his comparatively limited
work—limited in point of bulk and peculiar in style and subject—he has
contrived to show perhaps more general poetical power than any other
writer who has left so small a total of verse. The note of his song is always
true and always sweet; and despite the intensely allusive character of most
of it, and the necessary loss of the key to many of the allusions, it has in
consequence continued popular through all changes of language and
manners. Of very few French poets can it be said as of Villon that their
charm is immediate and universal, and the reason of this is that his work is
full of touches of nature which are universally perceived, as well as
distinguished by consummate art of expression. In the great literature which
we are discussing, the latter characteristic is almost universally present, the
former not so constantly.

The literary excellence of Comines[157] is of a very
different kind from that of Villon, but he represents the Comines.
changed attitude of the modern spirit towards practical
affairs almost as strongly as Villon does the change in its relations to art and
sentiment. Philippe de Comines was born, not at the château of the same
name which was then in the possession of his uncle, but at Renescure, not
very far from Hazebrouck. His family name was Vandenclyte, and his
ancestors (Flemings, as their name implies) had been citizens of Ghent
before they acquired seignorial position and rank. The education of
Comines was neglected (he never possessed any knowledge of Latin), and
his heritage was heavily encumbered. He was born before 1447, and entered
the service of Philip of Burgundy and of his son Charles of Charolais, the
future Charles le Téméraire. Comines was present at Montlhéry and at the
siege of Liège, while he played a considerable part in the celebrated affair
of Péronne, when Louis XI. was in such danger. Before 1471 he had been
charged with several important negotiations by Charles, now duke, in
France, England, and Spain. But, either personally disobliged by Charles,
or, as seems most likely from the Memoirs, presaging with the keen,
unscrupulous intelligence of the time the downfall of the headlong prince,
he quitted Burgundy and its master in 1472 and entered the service of
Louis, from whom he had already accepted a pension. He was richly
rewarded, married an heiress in Poitou, and at one time enjoyed the
forfeited fief of Talmont, a domain of the first importance, which he
afterwards had to restore to its rightful owners, the La Tremouilles. The
accession of Charles VIII. was not favourable to him, and, having taken part
against the Lady of Beaujeu, he was imprisoned and deprived of Talmont.
But with his usual sagacity, he had in the Duke of Orleans, afterwards Louis
XII., chosen the representative of the side destined to win in the long run.
The Italian wars gave scope to his powers. He was sent to Venice, was
present at the battle of Fornovo, and met Machiavelli at Florence. In the
reign of Louis XII. he received new places and pensions, and he died in
1511 aged at least sixty-four.
Comines is not a master of style, though at times the weight of his thought
and the simplicity of his expression combine to produce an effect not
unhappy. He has odd peculiarities of diction, especially inversions of phrase
and sudden apostrophes which enliven an otherwise rather awkward manner

of writing. Thus, in describing the bad education of the young nobles of his
time, he says, 'de nulles lettres ils n'ont connaissance. Un seul sage homme
on ne leur met à l'entour.' And in his account of the operations before the
battle of Morat he says, 'Il (the Duke of Burgundy) séjourna à Losanne en
Savoie où vous monseigneur de Vienne le servîtes d'un bon conseil en une
grande maladie qu'il eut de douleur et de tristesse.' On the whole, however,
no one would think of reading Comines for the merit, or even the
quaintness of his style, nor can he be commended as a vivid, even if an
inelegant describer. The gallant shows which excited the imaginations of his
predecessors, the mediaeval chroniclers from Villehardouin to Froissart,
find in him a clumsy annalist and a not too careful observer. His interest is
concentrated exclusively on the turns of fortune, the successes of statecraft,
and the lessons of conduct to be noticed in or extracted from the business in
hand. With this purpose he is perpetually digressing. The affairs of one
country remind him of something that has happened in another, and he
stops to give an account of this. To a certain extent the mediaeval influence
is still strong on Comines, though it shows itself in connection with
evidences of the modern spirit. He is religious to a degree which might be
called ostentatious if it were not pretty evidently sincere; and this religiosity
is shown side by side with the exhibition of a typically unscrupulous and
non-moral, if not positively immoral, statecraft. Again, his reflexions,
though usually lacking neither in acuteness nor in depth, are often appended
to a commonplace on the mutability of fortune, the error of anger, the
necessity of adapting means to ends, and so forth. Everywhere in Comines
is evident, however, the anti-feudal and therefore anti-mediaeval conception
of a centralised government instead of a loose assemblage of powerful
vassals. The favourite mediaeval ideal, of which Saint Simon was perhaps
the last sincere champion, finds no defence in Comines; and it seems only
just to allow him, in his desertion of the Duke of Burgundy, some credit for
drawing from the anarchy of the Bien Public, and from his observations of
Germany, England, and Spain, the conclusion that France must be united,
and that union was only possible for her under a king unhampered by
largely appanaged and only nominally dependent princes. It should be said
that the Mémoires of Comines are not a continuous history. The first six
books deal with the reign of Louis XI. from 1465 to 1483. But the seventh
is busied with Charles the Eighth's Italian wars only, the author having

passed over the period of his own disgrace. Besides the Memoirs we
possess a collection of Lettres et Négotiations.[158]
There are three persons who, while of very much less
importance than those just introduced to the reader, Coquillart.
deserve a mention in passing as characteristic and at the
same time meritorious writers, during the second and third quarters of the
fifteenth century, the extreme verge of which the life of all three appears to
have touched. These are Guillaume Coquillart, Henri Baude, and Martial
d'Auvergne. All three were poets, all three have been somewhat over-
praised by the scholars who in days more or less recent have drawn them
from their obscurity, but all three made creditable head against what was
mistaken and absurd in the literary fashions of the time. In the writings of
all of them moreover there is to be found something, if not much, which is
positively good, and which deserves the attention, hardly perhaps of the
general reader, but of students of literature. Coquillart[159] was a native, and
for great part of his life an inhabitant, of Rheims. The extreme dates given
for his birth and death are 1421 and 1510, but there is in reality, as is usual
in the case of all men of letters before the sixteenth century, very little solid
authority for his biography. It may be mentioned that Marot declares him to
have cut short his life by gaming. A life can hardly be said to be cut short at
ninety, nor is that an age at which gaming is a frequent ruling passion. All
that can be said is that he was certainly, as we should now say, in the civil
service of the province of Champagne during the reign of Louis XI., that
like many other men of the time he united ecclesiastical with legal
functions, being not only a town-councillor but a canon, and that he has left
satirical works of some merit and importance. These last alone concern us
much. His chief production is a poem entitled Les Droits Nouveaux, in
octosyllabic verses, not arranged in stanzas of definite length, but, on the
other hand, interlacing the rhymes, and not in couplets after the older
fashion. The plan of this poem is by no means easy to describe. It is partly a
social satire, partly a professional lampoon on the current methods of
learning and teaching law, partly a political diatribe on the alterations
introduced into provincial and national life and polity under Louis XI. Not
very different in character and exactly similar in form, except that it is
arranged as the age would have said par personnages, that is to say semi-
dramatically, is the Plaidoyer de la Simple et de la Rusée. The Blason des

Armes et des Dames takes up a mediaeval theme in a mediaeval style. The
procureurs (advocates) of arms and of ladies endeavour to show each that
his client—war or love—deserves the chief attention of a prince. Here, as
elsewhere with Coquillart, though of course more covertly, satire
dominates. But the best of the pieces attributed to Coquillart are his
monologues. There are three of these, the Monologue Coquillart, the
Monologue du Puys, and the Monologue du Gendarme Cassé. This last is a
ferocious satire on its subject, coarse in language, like most of the author's
poems, but full of rude vigour. The professional soldier as distinguished
from the feudal militia or the train-bands of the towns was odious to the
later middle ages.

Henri Baude[160] is a still less substantial figure. He
seems to have been an élu (member of a provincial Baude.
board) for the province of Limousin, but to have lived
mostly at Paris. He was born at Moulins towards the beginning of the
second quarter of the century, and formed part of the poetical circle of
Charles d'Orléans in his old age. He had troubles with lawless seigneurs and
with the police of Paris; he finally succeeded in obtaining the protection of
the Duke of Bourbon, and he did not die till the end of the century. Only a
selection from his poems has yet been published. The chief thing
remarkable about them (they are mostly occasional and of no great length)
is the plainness, the directness, and, in not a few cases, the elegance of the
diction, which differs remarkably from the cumbrous phrases and obscure
allusive conceits of the time. Many of them are personal appeals for
protection and assistance, others are satirical. Baude had a peculiar mastery
of the rondeau form. His rondeau to the king, expressing a sentiment often
uttered by lackpenny bards in the days of patrons, is a good example of his
style, though it is hardly as simple and devoid of obscurity as usual.

Martial d'Auvergne[161], or Martial de Paris (for by an
odd chance both of these local surnames are given him, Martial d'Auvergne.
probably from the fact that, like Baude, he was a native
of the centre of France and spent his life in the capital), like Coquillart and
Baude, was something of a lawyer by profession, and has left work in prose
as well as in verse. He certainly died in 1508, and, as he is spoken of as
senio confectus, he cannot have been born much later than 1420, especially
as his poem, the Vigilles de Charles VII., was written on the death of that

prince in 1461. This poem is of considerable extent, and is divided into nine
'Psalms' and nine 'Lessons.' The staple metre is the quatrain, but detached
pieces in other measures occur. A complete history of the subject is given,
and in some of the digressions there are charming passages, notably one
(given by M. de Montaiglon) on the country life. Another very beautiful
poem, commonly attributed to Martial, is entitled L'Amant rendu Cordelier
au service de l'Amour, a piece of amorous allegory at once characteristic of
the later middle ages, and free from the faults usually found in such work. A
prose work of a somewhat similar kind, entitled Arrêts d'Amour, is known
to be Martial's. In no writer is there to be found more of the better part of
Marot, as in the light skipping verses:—

Mieux vault la liesse,
L'accueil et l'addresse,
L'amour et simplesse,
De bergers pasteurs,
Qu'avoir à largesse
Or, argent, richesse,
Ne la gentillesse
De ces grants seigneurs.

Car ils ont douleurs
Et des maulx greigneurs,
Mais pour nos labeurs
Nous avons sans cesse
Les beaulx prés et fleurs,
Fruitages, odeurs
Et joye à nos cœurs
Sans mal qui nous blesse.

There is something of the old pastourelles in this, and of a note of
simplicity which French poetry had long lost.
Such verse as this of Martial d'Auvergne was, indeed,
the exception at the time. The staple poetry of the age The Rhétoriqueurs.
was that of the grands rhétoriqueurs, as it has become
usual to call them, apparently from a phrase of Coquillart's. Georges
Chastellain[162] was the great master of this school. But to him personally

some injustice has been done. His pupils and successors, however, for the
most part deserve the ill repute in which they are held. This school of poetry
had three principal characteristics. It affected the most artificial forms of the
artificial poetry which the fourteenth century had seen established, the most
complicated modulations of rhyme, such as the repetition, twice or even
thrice at the end of a line, of the same sound in a different sense, and all the
other puerilities of this particular Ars Poetica. Secondly, it pursued to the
very utmost the tradition of allegorising, of which the Roman de la Rose
had established the popularity. Thirdly, it followed the example set by
Chartier and his contemporaries of loading the language as much as
possible with Latinisms, and in a less degree, because Greek was then but
indirectly known, Graecisms. These three things taken together produced
some of the most intolerable poetry ever written. The school had, indeed,
much vitality in it, and overlapped the beginnings of the Renaissance in
such a manner that it will be necessary to take note of it again in the next
chapter. Some, however, of its greatest lights belonged to the present period.
Such were Robertet, a heavy versifier and the author of letters not easily to
be excelled in pedantic coxcombry, who enjoyed much patronage, royal and
other; Molinet, a direct disciple of Chastellain, and, like him, of the
Burgundian party; and Meschinot (died 1509), a Breton, who has left us an
allegorical work on the 'Spectacles of Princes,' and poems which can be
read in thirty different ways, any word being as good to begin with as any
other. Such also was the father of a better poet than himself, Octavien de
Saint Gelais (1466-1502), who died young and worn out by debauchery.
Jean Marot, the father of Clément, was a not inconsiderable master of the
ballade, and has left poems which do not show to great disadvantage by the
side of those of his accomplished son. But the leader of the whole was
Guillaume Crétin (birth and death dates uncertain), whom his
contemporaries extolled in the most extravagant fashion, and whom a single
satirical stroke of Rabelais has made a laughing-stock for some three
hundred and fifty years. The rondeau ascribed to Raminagrobis, the 'vieux
poète français' of Pantagruel[163], is Crétin's, and the name and character
have stuck. Crétin was not worse than his fellows; but when even such a
man as Marot could call him a poète souverain, Rabelais no doubt felt it
time to protest in his own way. Marot himself, it is to be observed, confines
himself chiefly to citing Crétin's vers équivoqués, which of their kind, and if
we could do otherwise than pronounce that kind hopelessly bad, are without

doubt ingenious. His poems are chiefly occasional verse, letters, débats,
etc., besides ballades and rondeaux of all kinds.
One charming book which has been preserved to us
gives a pleasant contrast to the formal poetry of the time. Chansons du XVème
The Chansons du XVème Siècle, which M. Gaston Paris Siècle.
has published for the Old French Text Society[164], exhibit informal and
popular poetry in its most agreeable aspect. They are one hundred and
forty-three in number, some of them no doubt much older than the fifteenth
century, but certainly none of them younger. There are pastourelles, war-
songs, love-songs in great number, a few patriotic ditties, and a few which
may be called pure folksongs, with the story half lost and only a musical
tangle of words remaining. Nothing can be more natural and simple than
most of these pieces.
Few of the miscellaneous branches of literature at this
time deserve notice. But there was a group of preachers Preachers.
who have received attention, which is said by students of
the whole subject of the mediaeval pulpit in France to be disproportionate,
but which they owe perhaps not least to the citations of them in a celebrated
and amusing book of the next age, the Apologie pour Hérodote of Henri
Estienne. These are Menot (1440-1518) and Maillard the Franciscans, and
Raulin (1443-1514), a doctor of the Sorbonne. These preachers, living at a
time which was not one of popular sovereignty, did not meddle with politics
as preachers had done in France before and were to do again. But they
carried into the pulpit the habit of satirical denunciation in social as well as
in purely religious matters, and gave free vent to their zeal. No illustrations
of the singular licence which the middle ages permitted on such occasions
are more curious than these sermons. Not merely did the preachers attack
their audience for their faults in the most outspoken manner, but they
interspersed their discourses (as indeed was the invariable custom
throughout the whole middle ages) with stories of all kinds. In Raulin, the
gravest of the three, occurs the famous history of the church bells, which
reappears in Rabelais, à propos of the marriage of Panurge.

FOOTNOTES:

[153]

Villon sut le premier, dans ces siècles grossiers,
Débrouiller l'art confus de nos vieux romanciers.

Art Poét. Ch. 1.

[154] Ed. P. L. Jacob. Paris, 1854. Villon's life has been the subject of numerous
elaborate investigations, the latest and best of which is that of A. Longnon. Paris,
1877. Dr. Bijvanck, a Dutch scholar, has dealt since with the MSS.
[155] One of these anecdotes makes him patronised by Edward the Fifth of
England. But the very terms of it are unsuitable to that king.
[156] The reader may be reminded that the Testament was a recognised
mediaeval style. It was satirical and allegorical, the legacies which it gave being
mostly indicative of the legatee's weaknesses or personal peculiarities.
[157] Ed. Chantelauze. Paris, 1881. Also usefully in Michaud et Poujoulat.
[158] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove. 2 vols. Brussels, 1867-8.
[159] Ed. Héricault. 2 vols. Paris, 1857.
[160] Edited in part by J. Quicherat. Paris, 1856.
[161] Martial d'Auvergne had the exceptional good luck to be reprinted in the
18th century (Vigilles 1724, Arrêts 1731), but he has not recently found an
editor, though an edition of the Amant rendu Cordelier has been for some time
due from the Société des Anciens Textes. The notice by M. de Montaiglon (the
promised editor of the edition just mentioned) in Crepet's Poètes Français, i.
427, has been chiefly used here for facts.
[162] Ed. Kervyn de Lettenhove, as previously cited. For the remainder of the
poets reviewed in this paragraph, few of whom have found modern editors, see
Crepet, Poètes Français, vol. i.
[163] iii. 21.
[164] Paris, 1876.

CHAPTER II.
MAROT AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

The beginnings of the Renaissance in France manifest,
as we should expect, a mixture of the characteristics of Hybrid School of
Poetry.
the later middle ages and of the new learning. In those
times the influence of reforms of any kind filtered slowly through the dense
crust of custom which covered the national life of each people, and there is
nothing surprising in the fact that while Italy felt the full influence of the
influx of classical culture in the fifteenth century, that influence should be
only partially manifest in France during the first quarter of the sixteenth,
while it was not until the century was more than half over that it showed
itself in England. The complete manifestation of the combined tendencies
of mediaeval and neo-pagan thought was only displayed in Shakespeare,
but by that time, as is the wont of all such things, it had already manifested
itself partially, though in each part more fully and characteristically,
elsewhere. It is in the literature of France that we find the most complete
exposition of these partial developments. Marot, Ronsard, Rabelais, Calvin,
Garnier, Montaigne, will not altogether make up a Shakespeare, yet of the
various ingredients which go to make up the greatest of literary productions
each of them had shown, before Shakespeare began to write, some complete
and remarkable embodiment. It is this fact which gives the French literature
of the sixteenth century its especial interest. Italy had almost ceased to be
animated by the genius of the middle ages before her literature became in
any way perfect in form, and the survival of the classical spirit was so
strong there that mediaeval influence was never very potent in the moulding
of the national letters. England had lost the mediaeval differentia, owing to
religious and political causes, before the Renaissance made its way to her
shores. But in France the two currents met, though the earlier had lost most
of its force, and, according to the time-honoured parallel, flowed on long
together before they coalesced. In the following chapters we shall trace the
history of this process, and here we shall trace the first stage of it in
reference to French poetry. In the period of which Marot is the

representative name, the earlier force was still dominant in externals; in that
of which Ronsard is the exponent, the Greek and Latin element shows itself
as, for the moment, all-powerful.
Between the rhétoriqueurs proper, the Chastellains and
the Crétins and the Molinets on the one hand, and Marot Jean le Maire.
and his contemporaries and disciples on the other, a
school of poets, considerable at least in numbers, Jehan du Pontalais.
intervened. The chief of these was Jean le Maire des
Belges[165]. He was the nephew of Molinet, and his birth at Belges or Bavia
in Hainault, as well as his literary ancestry and predilections, inclined him
to the Burgundian, or, as it was now, the Austrian side. But the strong
national feeling which was now beginning to distinguish French-speaking
men threw him on the side of the King of Paris, and he was chiefly
occupied in his serious literary work on tasks which were wholly French.
His Illustrations des Gaules is his principal prose work, and in this he
displays a remarkable faculty of writing prose at once picturesque and
correct. The titles of his other works (Temple d'Honneur et de Vertu, etc.)
still recall the fifteenth century, and the Latinising tradition of Chartier
appears strong in him. But at the same time he Latinises with a due regard
to the genius of the language, and his work, pedantic and conceited as it
frequently is, stands in singular contrast to the work of some of his models.
Something not dissimilar, though in this case the rhétoriqueur influence is
less apparent, may be said of Pierre Gringore, whose true title to a place in a
history of French literature is, however, derived from his dramatic work,
and who will accordingly be mentioned later. Nor had the tradition of
Villon, overlaid though it was by the abundance and popularity of formal
and allegorising poetry, died out in France. At least two remarkable figures,
Jehan du Pontalais and Roger de Collérye, represent it in the first quarter of
the century. The former indeed[166] owes his place here rather to a theory
than to certain information; for if M. d'Héricault's notion that Jehan du
Pontalais is the author of a work entitled Contreditz du Songecreux be
without foundation, Jehan falls back into the number of half mythical
Bohemians, bilkers of tavern bills and successful out-witters of the officers
of justice, who possess a shadowy personality in the literary history of
France. Les Contreditz du Songecreux ranks among the most remarkable
examples of the liberty which was accorded to the press under the reign of

Louis XII., a king who inherited some affection for literature from his
father, Charles d'Orléans, and a keen perception of the importance of
literary co-operation in political work from his ancestor, Philippe le Bel,
and his cousin Louis XI. In precision and strikingness of expression Jehan
recalls Villon; in the boldness of his satire on the great and the bitterness of
his attacks on the character of women he recalls Antoine de la Salle and
Coquillart. A trait illustrating the former power may be found in the line
descriptive of the hen-pecked man's condition—

Tous ses cinq sens lui fault retraire.

while his attacks on the nobility are almost up to the level of Burns—

Noblesse enrichie Richesse ennoblie Tiennent leurs estatz,
Qui n'a noble vie Je vous certifie Noble n'est pas.

Roger de Collérye[167] was a Burgundian, living at the
famous and vinous town of Auxerre, and he has Roger de Collérye.
celebrated his loves, his distress, his amiable tendency to
conviviality, in many rondeaux and other poems, Minor Predecessors
of Marot.
sometimes attaining a very high level of excellence. 'Je
suis Bon-temps, vous le voyez' is the second line of one of his irregular
ballades, and the nickname expresses his general attitude well enough.
Mediaeval legacies of allegory, however, supply him with more unpleasant
personages, Faute d'Argent and Plate-Bourse, for his song, and his mistress,
Gilleberte de Beaurepaire, appears to have been anything but continuously
kind. Collérye has less perhaps of the rhétoriqueur flavour than any poet of
this time before Marot, and his verse is very frequently remarkable for
directness and grace of diction. But like most verse of the kind it frequently
drops into a conventionality less wearisome but not much less definite than
that of the mere allegorisers. Jehan Bouchet[168], a lawyer of Poitiers (not to
be confounded with Guillaume Bouchet, author of the Sérées), imitated the
rhétoriqueurs for the most part in form, and surpassed them in length,
excelling indeed in this respect even the long-winded and long-lived poets
of the close of the fourteenth century. Bouchet is said to have composed a
hundred thousand verses, and even M. d'Héricault avers that he read two-
thirds of the number without discovering more than six quotable lines. Such

works of Bouchet as we have examined fully confirm the statement. Still,
he was an authority in his way, and had something of a reputation. His
fanciful nom de plume 'Le Traverseur des Voies Périlleuses' is the most
picturesque thing he produced, and is not uncharacteristic of the later
middle age tradition. Rabelais himself, who was a fair critic of poetry when
his friends were not concerned, but who was no poet, and was even
strikingly deficient in some of the characteristics of the poet, admired and
emulated Bouchet in heavy verse; and a numerously attended school, hardly
any of the pupils being worth individual mention, gathered round the
lawyer. Charles de Bordigné is only remarkable for having, in his Légende
de Pierre Faifeu, united the rhétoriqueur style with a kind of Villonesque or
rather pseudo-Villonesque subject. The title of the chief poems of
Symphorien Champier, Le Nef des Dames Amoureuses, sufficiently
indicates his style. But Champier, though by no means a good poet, was a
useful and studious man of letters, and did much to form the literary
cénacle which gathered at Lyons in the second quarter of the century, and
which, both in original composition, in translations of the classics, and in
scholarly publication of work both ancient and modern, rendered invaluable
service to literature. Gratien du Pont[169] continued the now very stale
mediaeval calumnies on women in his Controverses des Sexes Masculin et
Féminin. Eloy d'Amerval, a Picard priest, also fell into mediaeval lines in
his Livre de la Déablerie, in which the personages of Lucifer and Satan are
made the mouthpieces of much social satire. Jean Parmentier, a sailor and a
poet, combined his two professions in Les Merveilles de Dieu, a poem
including some powerful verse. A vigorous ballade, with the refrain Car
France est Cymetièreaux Anglois, has preserved the name of Pierre Vachot.
But the remaining poets of this time could only find a place in a very
extended literary history. Most of them, in the words of one of their number,
took continual lessons ès œuvres Crétiniques et Bouchetiques, and some of
them succeeded at last in imitating the dulness of Bouchet and the
preposterous mannerisms of Crétin. Perhaps no equal period in all early
French history produced more and at the same time worse verse than the
reign of Louis XII. Fortunately, however, a true poet, if one of some
limitations, took up the tradition, and showed what it could do. Marot has
sometimes been regarded as the father of modern French poetry, which,
unless modern French poetry is limited to La Fontaine and the poets of the
eighteenth century, is absolutely false. He is sometimes regarded as the last

of mediaeval poets, which, though truer, is false likewise. What he really
was can be shown without much difficulty.

Clément Marot[170] was a man of more mixed race than
was usual at this period, when the provincial distinctions Clément Marot.
were still as a rule maintained with some sharpness. His
father, Jean Marot, a poet of merit, was a Norman, but he emigrated to
Quercy, and Marot's mother was a native of Cahors, a town which, from its
Papal connections, as well as its situation on the borders of Gascony, was
specially southern. Clément was born probably at the beginning of 1497,
and his father educated him with some pains in things poetical. This, as
times went, necessitated an admiration of Crétin and such like persons, and
the practice of rondeaux, and of other poetry strict in form and allegorical in
matter. As it happened, the discipline was a very sound one for Marot,
whose natural bent was far too vigorous and too lithe to be stiffened or
stunted by it, while it unquestionably supplied wholesome limitations which
preserved him from mere slovenly facility. It is evident, too, that he had a
sincere and genuine love of things mediaeval, as his devotion to the Roman
de la Rose and to Villon's poems, both of which he edited, sufficiently
shows. He 'came into France,' an expression of his own, which shows the
fragmentary condition of the kingdom even at this late period, when he was
about ten years old. His father held an appointment as 'Escripvain' to Anne
of Brittany, and accompanied her husband to Genoa in 1507. The
University of Paris, and a short sojourn among the students of law,
completed Clément's education, and he then became a page to a nobleman,
thus obtaining a position at court or, at least, the chance of one. It is not
known when his earliest attempt at following the Crétinic lessons was
composed; but in 1514, being then but a stripling, he presented his
Jugement de Minos to François de Valois, soon to be king. A translation of
the first Eclogue of Virgil had even preceded this. Both poems are well
written and versified, but decidedly in the rhétoriqueur style. In 1519,
having already received or assumed the title of 'Facteur' (poet) to Queen
Claude, he became one of the special adherents of Marguerite
d'Angoulême, the famous sister of Francis, from whom, a few years later,
we find him in receipt of a pension. He also occupied some post in the
household of her husband, the King of Navarre. In 1524 he went to Italy
with Francis, was wounded and taken prisoner at Pavia, but returned to

France the next year. Marguerite's immediate followers were distinguished,
some by their adherence to the principles of the Reformation, others by free
thought of a still more unorthodox description, and Marot soon after his
return was accused of heresy and lodged in the Châtelet. He was, however,
soon transferred to a place of mitigated restraint, and finally set at liberty.
About this time his father died. In 1528 he obtained a post and a pension in
the King's own household. He was again in difficulties, but again got out of
them, and in 1530 he married. But the next year he was once more in
danger on the old charge of heresy, and was again rescued from the chats
fourrés by Marguerite. He had already edited the Roman de la Rose, but no
regular edition of his own work had appeared. In 1533 came out not merely
his edition of Villon, but a collection of his own youthful work under the
pretty title Adolescence Clémentine. In 1535 the Parliament of Paris for a
fourth time molested Marot. Marguerite's influence was now insufficient to
protect him, and the poet fled first to Béarn and then to Ferrara. Here, under
the protection of Renée de France, he lived and wrote for some time, but the
persecution again grew hot. He retired to Venice, but in 1539 obtained
permission to return to France. Francis gave him a house in the Faubourg
Saint Germain, and here apparently he wrote his famous Psalms, which had
an immense popularity; these the Sorbonne condemned, and Marot once
more fled, this time to Geneva. He found this place an uncomfortable
sojourn, and crossed the Alps into Piedmont, where, not long afterwards, he
died in 1544.
Marot's work is sufficiently diverse in form, but the classification of it
adopted in the convenient edition of Jannet is perhaps the best, though it
neglects chronology. There are some dozen pieces of more or less
considerable length, among which may specially be mentioned Le Temple
de Cupido, an early work of rhétoriqueur character for the most part, in
dizains of ten and eight syllables alternately, a Dialogue of two Lovers, an
Eclogue to the King; L'Enfer, a vigorous and picturesque description of his
imprisonment in the Châtelet, and some poems bearing a strong Huguenot
impression. Then come sixty-five epistles written in couplets for the most
part decasyllabic. These include the celebrated Coq-à-l'Âne, a sort of
nonsense-verse, with a satirical tendency, which derives from the mediaeval
fatrasie, and was very popular and much imitated. Another mediaeval
restoration of Marot's, also very popular and also much imitated, was the

blason, a description, in octosyllables. Twenty-six elegies likewise adopt
the couplet, and show, as do the epistles, remarkable power over that form.
Fifteen ballades, twenty-two songs in various metres, eighty-two rondeaux,
and forty-two songs for music, contain much of Marot's most beautiful
work. His easy graceful style escaped the chief danger of these artificial
forms, the danger of stiffness and monotony; while he was able to get out of
them as much pathos and melody as any other French poet, except Charles
d'Orléans and Villon. Numerous étrennes recall the Xenia of Martial, and
funeral poems of various lengths and styles follow. Then we have nearly
three hundred epigrams, many of them excellent in point and elegance, a
certain number of translations, the Psalms, fifty in number, certain prayers,
and two versified renderings of Erasmus' Colloquies.
It will be seen from this enumeration that the majority of Marot's work is
what is now called occasional. No single work of his of a greater length
than a few hundred lines exists; and, after his first attempts in the
allegorical kind, almost all his works were either addressed to particular
persons, or based upon some event in his life. Marot was immensely
popular in his lifetime; and though after his death a formidable rival arose
in Ronsard, the elder poet's fame was sustained by eager disciples. With the
discredit of the Pléiade, in consequence of Malherbe's criticisms, Marot's
popularity returned in full measure, and for two centuries he was the one
French poet before the classical period who was actually read and admired
with genuine admiration by others besides professed students of antiquity.
Since the great revival of the taste for older literature, which preceded and
accompanied the Romantic movement, Marot has scarcely held this pride of
place. The Pléiade on the one hand, the purely mediaeval writers on the
other, have pushed him from his stool. But sane criticism, which declines to
depreciate one thing because it appreciates another, will always have hearty
admiration for his urbanity, his genuine wit, his graceful turn of words; and
his flashes of pathos and poetry.
It is, as has been said, one of the commonplaces of the subject to speak of
Marot as the father of modern French poetry; the phrase is, like all such
phrases, inaccurate, but, like most such phrases, it contains a certain amount
of truth. To the characteristics of the lighter French poetry, from La
Fontaine to Béranger, which has always been more popular both at home
and abroad than the more ambitious and serious efforts of French poets,

Marot does in some sort stand in a parental relation. He retained the
sprightliness and sly fun of the Fabliau-writers, while he softened their
crudity of expression, he exchanged clumsiness and horse-play for the play
of wit, and he emphasised fully in the language the two characteristics
which have never failed to distinguish it since, elegance and urbanity. His
style is somewhat pedestrian, though on occasion he can write with
exquisite tenderness, and with the most delicate suggestiveness of
expression. But as a rule he does not go deep; ease and grace, not passion or
lofty flights, are his strong points. Representing, as he did, the reaction from
the stiff forms and clumsily classical language of the rhétoriqueurs, it was
not likely that he should exhibit the tendency of his own age to classical
culture and imitation very strongly. He and his school were thus regarded
by their immediate successors of the Pléiade as rustic and uncouth singers,
for the most part very unjustly. But still Marot's work was of less general
and far-reaching importance than that of Ronsard. He brought out the best
aspect of the older French literature, and cleared away some disfiguring
encumbrances from it, but he imported nothing new. It would hardly be
unjust to say that, given the difference of a century in point of ordinary
progress, Charles d'Orléans is Marot's equal in elegance and grace, and his
superior in sentiment, while Marot is not comparable to Villon in passion or
in humour. His limitation, and at the same time his great merit, was that he
was a typical Frenchman. A famous epigram, applied to another person two
centuries later, might be applied with very little difficulty or alteration to
Marot. He had more than anybody else of his time the literary
characteristics which the ordinary literary Frenchman has. We constantly
meet in the history of literature this contrast between the men who are
simply shining examples of the ordinary type, and men who cross and blend
that type with new characters and excellences. Unquestionably the latter are
the greater, but the former cannot on any equitable scheme miss their
reward. It must be added that the positive merit of much of Marot's work is
great, though, as a rule, his longer pieces are very inferior to his shorter.
Many of the epigrams are admirable; the Psalms, which have been unjustly
depreciated of late years by French critics, have a sober and solemn music,
which is almost peculiar to the French devotional poetry of that age; the
satirical ballade of Frère Lubin is among the very best things of its kind;
while as much may be said of the rondeaux 'Dedans Paris' in the lighter
style, and 'En la Baisant' in the graver. Perhaps the famous line—

Un doux nenny avec un doux sourire,

supposed to have been addressed to the Queen of Navarre, expresses
Marot's poetical powers as well as anything else, showing as it does grace
of language, tender and elegant sentiment, and suppleness, ease, and
fluency of style.
Marot formed a very considerable school, some of
whom directly imitated his mannerisms, and composed The School of
Marot.
blasons[171] and Coq-à-l'Âne in emulation of their
master and of each other, while others contented themselves with displaying
the same general characteristics, and setting the same poetical ideals before
them. Among the idlest, but busiest literary quarrels of the century, a
century fertile in such things, was that between Marot and a certain
insignificant person named François Sagon, a belated rhétoriqueur, who
found some other rhymers of the same kind to support him. One of Marot's
best things, an answer of which his servant, Fripelipes, is supposed to be the
spokesman, came of the quarrel; but of the other contributions, not merely
of the principals, but of their followers, the Marotiques and Sagontiques,
nothing survives in general memory, or deserves to survive. Of Marot's
disciples, one, Mellin de Saint Gelais, deserves separate mention, the others
may be despatched in passing. Victor Brodeau, who, like his master, held
places in the courts both of Marguerite and her brother, wrote not merely a
devotional work, Les Louanges de Jésus Christ notre Seigneur, which fairly
illustrates the devotional side of the Navarrese literary coterie, but also
epigrams and rondeaux of no small merit. Étienne Dolet, better known both
as a scholar and translator, and as the publisher of Marot and
(surreptitiously) of Rabelais, composed towards the end of his life poems in
French, the principal of which was taken in title and idea from Marot's
Enfer, and which, though very unequal, have passages of some poetical
power. Marguerite herself has left a considerable collection of poems of the
most diverse kind and merit, the title of which, Marguerites de la
Marguerite des Princesses[172], is perhaps not the worst thing about them.
Farces, mysteries, religious poems, such as Le Triomphe de l'Agneau, and
Le Miroir de l'Âme Pécheresse, with purely secular pieces on divers
subjects, make up these curious volumes. Not a few of the poems display
the same nobility of tone and stately sonorousness of verse, which has been

and will be noticed as a characteristic of the serious poetry of the age, and
which reached its climax in Du Bartas, D'Aubigné, and the choruses of
Garnier and Montchrestien. Bonaventure des Périers, an admirable prose
writer, was a poet, though not a very strong one. François Habert, 'Le Banni
de Liesse,' must not be confounded with Philippe Habert, author of a
remarkable Temple de la Mort in the next century. Gilles Corrozet, author of
fables in verse, who, like many other literary men of the time, was a printer
and publisher as well, Jacques Gohorry, a pleasant song writer, Gilles
d'Aubigny, Jacques Pelletier, Étienne Forcadel, deserve at least to be
named. Of more importance were Hugues Salel, Charles Fontaine, Antoine
Héroet, Maurice Scève. All these were members of the Lyonnese literary
coterie, and in connection with this Louise Labé also comes in. Salel,
famous as the first French translator of the Iliad, or rather of Books I-XII
thereof, distinguished himself as a writer of blasons in imitation of Marot,
as well as by composing many small poems of the occasional kind. Charles
Fontaine exhibited the fancy of the time for conceits in the entitling of
books by denominating his poems Ruisseaux de la Fontaine, and was one
of the chief champions on Marot's side in the quarrel with Sagon, while he
afterwards defended the style Marotique against Du Bellay's announcement
of the programme of the Pléiade. But perhaps he would hardly deserve
much remembrance, save for a charming little poem to his new-born son,
which M. Asselineau has made accessible to everybody in Crepet's Poètes
Français[173]. He also figures in a literary tournament very characteristic of
the age. La Borderie, another disciple of Marot, had written a poem entitled
L'Amye de Cour, which defended libertinism, or at least worldly-
mindedness in love, in reply to the Parfaite Amye of Antoine Héroet, which
exhibits very well a certain aspect of the half-amorous, half-mystical
sentiment of the day. Fontaine rejoined in a Contr'Amye de Cour. Maurice
Scève is also a typical personage. He was, it may be said, the head of the
Lyonnese school, and was esteemed all over France. He was excepted by
the irreverent champions of the Pléiade from the general ridicule which they
poured on their predecessors, and was surrounded by a special body of
feminine devotees and followers, including his kinswomen Claudine and
Sibylle Scève, Jeanne Gaillarde, and above all Louise Labé. Scève's
poetical work is strongly tinged with classical affectation and Platonic
mysticism; and his chief poem, De l'Objet de la plus haute Vertu, consists
of some four hundred and fifty dizains written in what in England and later

has been, not very happily, called a metaphysical style. Last of all comes
the just-mentioned Louise Labé, 'La belle Cordière,' one of the chief
ornaments of Lyons, and the most important French poetess of the sixteenth
century. Louise was younger, and wrote later than most of the authors just
mentioned, and in some respects she belongs to the school of Ronsard, like
her supposed lover, Olivier de Magny. But the Lyons school was essentially
Marotique, and much of the style of the elder master is observable in the
writings of Louise[174]. She has left a prose Dialogue d'Amour et de Folie,
three elegies, and a certain number of sonnets. Her poems are perhaps the
most genuinely passionate of the time and country, and many of the sonnets
are extremely beautiful. The language is on the whole simple and elegant,
without the over-classicism of the Pléiade, or the obscurity of her master
Scève. Strangely enough the poems of this young Lyonnese lady have in
many places a singular approach to the ring of Shakespeare's sonnets and
minor works, and that not merely by virtue of the general resemblance
common to all the love poetry of the age, but in some very definite traits.
Her surname of 'La belle Cordière' came from her marriage with a rich
merchant, Ennemond Perrin by name, who was by trade a ropemaker. Her
poems have had their full share of the advantages of reprints, which have of
late years fallen to the lot of sixteenth-century authors in France.

Mellin de Saint Gelais[175], the last to be mentioned but
the most important of the school of Marot, has been very Mellin de St.
Gelais.
variously judged. The mere fact that he was probably the
introducer of the sonnet into France (the counter claim of Pontus de Tyard
seems to be unfounded) would suffice to give him a considerable position in
the history of letters. But Mellin's claims by no means rest upon this
achievement. He was a man of higher position than most of the other poets
of the time, being the reputed son of Octavien de Saint Gelais, and himself
enjoying a good deal of royal favour. In his old age, as the representative of
the school of Marot, he had to bear the brunt of the Pléiade onslaught, and
knew how to defend himself, so that a truce was made. He was born in
1487, and died in 1558. His name is also spelt Merlin, and even Melusin,
the Saint Gelais boasting descent from the Lusignans, and thus from the
famous fairy heroine Mélusine. In his youth he spent a good deal of time in
Italy, at the Universities of Bologna and Padua. On returning to France, he
was at once received into favour at court, and having taken orders, obtained

various benefices and appointments which assured his fortune. It is
remarkable that though he violently opposed Ronsard's rising favour at
court, both the Prince of Poets and Du Bellay completely forgave him, and
pay him very considerable compliments, the latter praising his 'vers
emmiellés,' the former speaking, even after his death, of his proficiency in
the combined arts of music and poetry. Saint Gelais was a good musician,
and an affecting story is told of his swan-song, for which, as for other
anecdotes, there is no space here. His work, though not inconsiderable in
volume, is, even more than that of Marot and other poets of the time and
school, composed for the most part of very short pieces, epigrams,
rondeaux, dizains, huitains, etc. These pieces display more merit than most
recent critics have been disposed to allow to them. The style is fluent and
graceful, free from puns and other faults of taste common at the time. The
epigrams are frequently pointed, and well expressed, and the
complimentary verse is often skilful and well turned. Mellin de Saint Gelais
is certainly not a poet of the highest order, but as a court singer and a skilful
master of language he deserves a place among his earlier contemporaries
only second to that of Marot.
Something of the same sort may be said of all the writers
in verse of the first half of the century. Their importance Miscellaneous
Verse. Anciennes
is chiefly relative. Few of their works are conceived or Poésies Françaises.
executed on a scale sufficient to entitle them to the rank
of great poets, and, saving always Marot, the excellence even of the trifling
compositions to which they confined themselves is very unequal and
intermittent. But all are evidences of a general diffusion of the literary spirit
among the people of France, and most of them in their way, and according
to their powers, helped in perfecting the character of French as a literary
instrument. The advance which the language experienced in this respect is
perhaps nowhere better shown than in the miscellaneous and popular poetry
of the time, a vast collection of which has been made accessible by the
reprinting of rare or unique printed originals in the thirteen volumes of MM.
de Montaiglon and de Rothschild's Anciennes Poésies Françaises,
published in the Bibliothèque Elzévirienne[176]. This flying literature, as it is
well called in French, lacks in most cases the freshness and spontaneity of
mediaeval folk-song. But it has in exchange gained in point of subject a
wide extension of range, and in point of form a considerable advance in

elegance of language, absence of commonplace, and perfection of literary
form and style. The stiffness which characterises much mediaeval and
almost all fifteenth-century work has disappeared in great measure. The
writers speak directly and to the point, and find no difficulty in so using
their mother tongue as to express their intentions. The tools in short are
more effective and more completely under the control of the worker. A
certain triviality is indeed noticeable, and the tendency of the middle ages to
perpetuate favourite forms and models is by no means got rid of. But much
that was useless has been discarded, and of what is left a defter and more
distinctly literary use is made. Had French remained as Marot left it, it
would indeed have been unequal to the expression of the noblest thoughts,
the gravest subjects, to the treatment and exposition of intricate and
complicated problems of life and mind. But in his hands it attained perhaps
the perfection of usefulness as an exponent of the pure esprit gaulois, to use
a phrase which has been tediously abused by French writers, but which is
expressive of a real fact in French history and French literature. It had been
suppled and pointed: it remained for it to be weighted, strengthened, and
enriched. This was not the appointed task of Marot and his contemporaries,
but of the men who came after them. But what they themselves had to do
they did, and did it well. To this day the lighter verse of France is more an
echo of Clément Marot than of any other man who lived before the
seventeenth century, and, with the exception of his greater follower, La
Fontaine, of any man who came after him at any time[177].

FOOTNOTES:
[165] De Belges, though the less usual, is the more accurate form. We are at
length promised a complete edition of him in the admirable series of the Belgian
Academy, one of the best in appearance and editing, and by far the cheapest of
all such series. He was born in 1475, held posts in the household of the
Governors of the Netherlands, was historiographer to Louis XII., and died either
in 1524 or in 1548.
[166] See Poètes Français, i. 532. It is perhaps well to say that M. C.
d'Héricault, though a very agreeable as well as a very learned writer, is
particularly open to the charge that his geese are swans.
[167] Ed. C. d'Héricault. Paris, 1855.
[168] See Poètes Français, vol. i. ad fin., for the poets mentioned in this
paragraph and others of their kind.

[169] He was in his old age conspicuous among the enemies of Étienne Dolet.
See Étienne Dolet, by R. C. Christie. London, 1880.
[170] Ed Jannet et C. d'Héricault. 4 vols. Paris, 2nd ed. 1873. M. d'Héricault has
prefixed a much larger study of Marot than is to be found here to his edition of
the 'beauties' of the poet, published by Messrs. Garnier. The late M. Guiffrey
published two volumes of a costly and splendid edition, which his death
interrupted.
[171] The blason (description) was a child of the mediaeval dit. Marot's
examples, Le beau Tétin and Le laid Tétin, were copied ad infinitum. The first is
panegyric, the second abuse.
[172] Ed. Frank. 4 vols. Paris, 1873-4.
[173] i. 651.
[174] Ed. Tross. Paris, 1871.
[175] Ed. Blanchemain, 3 vols. Paris, 1873.
[176] This great collection, which awaits its completion of glossary, etc., was
published between 1855 and 1878, and is invaluable to any one desiring to
appreciate the general characteristics of the poetical literature of the time.
[177] Much help has been received in the writing of this chapter, and indeed of
this book, from the excellent work of MM. Hatzfeld and Darmesteter, Le
Seizième Siècle en France (Paris, 1878), one of the best histories extant in a
small compass of a brief but important period of literature. We may hope for a
still more elaborate study of the same subject in English from Mr. Arthur Tilley,
of King's College, Cambridge. An introductory volume to this study appeared in
1885.

CHAPTER III.
RABELAIS AND HIS FOLLOWERS.

At the beginning of the sixteenth century prose fiction in
France was represented by a considerable mass of Fiction at the
beginning of the
literature divided sharply into two separate classes of Sixteenth Century.
very different nature and value. On the one hand the
prose versions of the Chansons de Gestes and the romances, Arthurian and
adventurous, which had succeeded the last and most extensive verse
rehandlings of these works in the fourteenth century, made up a
considerable body of work, rarely possessing much literary merit, and
characterised by all the faults of monotony, repetition, and absence of
truthful character-drawing which distinguish late mediaeval work. On the
other hand, there was a smaller body of short prose tales[178] sometimes
serious in character and of not inconsiderable antiquity, more frequently
comic and satirical, and corresponding in prose to the Fabliaux in verse. It
has been pointed out that in the hands, real or supposed, of Antoine de la
Salle this latter kind of work had attained a high standard of perfection. But
it was as yet extremely limited in style, scope, and subject. Valour, courtesy,
and love made up the list of subjects of the serious work, and the stock
materials for satire, women, marriage, priests, etc., that of the comic.
Although we have some lively presentment of the actual manners of the
time in Antoine de la Salle, it is accidental only, and of its thoughts on any
but the stock subjects we have nothing. There was thus room for a vast
improvement, or rather for a complete revolution, in this particular class of
work, and this revolution was at a comparatively early period of the new
century effected by the greatest man and the greatest book of the French
Renaissance.

François Rabelais[179] was born at Chinon about 1495
(the alternative date of 1483 which used to be given is Rabelais.
improbable if not impossible), and at an early age was
destined to the cloister. He not only became a full monk, but also took

priest's orders. Before he was thirty he acquired the reputation of a good
classical scholar, and this seems to have brought him into trouble with his
brethren the Cordeliers or Franciscans, who were at this time among the
least cultivated of the monastic orders. With the consent of the Pope he
migrated to a Benedictine convent, and became canon at Maillezais. This
migration, however, did not satisfy him, and before long he quitted his new
convent without permission and took to the life of a wandering scholar. The
tolerance of the first period of the Renaissance however still existed in
France, and he suffered no inconvenience from this breach of rule. After
studying medicine and natural science under the protection of Geoffrey
d'Estissac, Bishop of Maillezais, he went to Montpellier to continue these
studies, and in the early years of the fourth decade of the century practised
regularly at Lyons. He was attached to the suite of Cardinal du Bellay in
two embassies to Rome, returned to Montpellier, took his doctor's degree,
and again practised in several cities of the South. Towards 1539 Du Bellay
again established him in a convent, probably as a safeguard against the
persecution which was then threatening. But the conventual life as then
practised was too repugnant to Rabelais to be long endured, and he once
more set out on his travels, this time in Savoy and Italy, the personal
protection of the king guaranteeing him from danger. He then returned to
France, taking however the precaution to soften some expressions in his
books. At the death of Francis he retired first to Metz, and then to Rome,
still with Du Bellay. The Cardinal de Chatillon, soon after gave him the
living of Meudon, which he held with another in Maine for a year or two,
resigning them both in 1551, and dying in 1553. Such at least are the most
probable and best ascertained dates and events in a life which has been
overlaid with a good deal of fiction, and many of the facts of which are
decidedly obscure. Rabelais did not very early become an author, and his
first works were of a purely erudite kind. During his stay at Lyons he seems
to have done a good deal of work for the printers, as editor and reader,
especially in reference to medical works, such as Galen and Hippocrates.
He edited too, and perhaps in part re-wrote, a prose romance, Les Grandes
et Inestimables Chroniques du Grant et Énorme Géant Gargantua. This
work, the author of which is unknown, and no earlier copies of which exist,
gave him no doubt at least the idea of his own famous book. The next year
(1532) followed the first instalment of this—Pantagruel Roi des Dipsodes
Restitué en Son naturel avec ses Faicts et Proueses Espouvantables. Three

years afterwards came Gargantua proper, the first book of the entire work
as we now have it. Eleven years however passed before the work was
continued, the second book of Pantagruel not being published till 1546, and
the third six years later, just before the author's death, in 1552. The fourth or
last book did not appear as a whole until 1564, though the first sixteen
chapters had been given to the world two years before. This fourth book,
the fifth of the entire work, has, from the length of time which elapsed
before its publication and from certain variations which exist in the MS. and
the first printed editions, been suspected of spuriousness. Such a question
cannot be debated here at length. But there is no external testimony of
sufficient value to discredit Rabelais' authorship, while the internal
testimony in its favour is overwhelming[180]. It may be said, without
hesitation, that not a single writer capable of having written it, save
Rabelais himself, is known to literary history at the time. It has been
supposed, with a good deal of probability, that the book was left in the
rough. The considerable periods which, as has been mentioned, intervened
between the publications of the other books seem to show that the author
indulged a good deal in revision; and, as the third book was only published
just before his death, he could have had little time for this in the case of the
fourth. This would account for a certain appearance of greater boldness and
directness in the satire as well as for occasional various readings. In genius
both of thought and expression this book is perhaps superior to any other;
and, if it were decided that Rabelais did not write it, much of what are now
considered the Rabelaisian characteristics must be transferred to an entirely
unknown writer who has left not the smallest vestige of himself or his
genius. It is not possible to give here a detailed abstract of Gargantua and
Pantagruel: indeed, from the studied desultoriness of the work, any such
abstract must of necessity be nearly as long as the book itself[181]. It is
sufficient to say that both Gargantua and his son Pantagruel are the heroes
of adventures, designedly exaggerated and burlesqued from those common
in the romances of chivalry. The chief events of the earlier romance are,
first, the war between Grandgousier, Gargantua's father, the pattern of easy-
going royalty, and Picrochole, king of Lerne, the ideal of an arbitrary despot
intent only on conquest; and, secondly, the founding of the Abbey of
Thelema, a fanciful institution, in which Rabelais propounds as first
principles everything that is most opposed to the forced abstinence, the real
self-indulgence, the idleness and the ignorance of the debased monastic

communities he knew so well and hated so much. Pantagruel is Gargantua's
son, and, like him, a giant, but the extravagances derived from his
gianthood are not kept up in the second part as they are in the first. A very
important personage in Pantagruel is Panurge, a singular companion, whom
Pantagruel picks up at Paris, and who is perhaps the greatest single creation
of Rabelais. Some ideas may have been taken for him from the Cingar of
Merlinus Coccaius, or Folengo, a Macaronic Italian poet[182], but on the
whole he is original, and is hardly comparable to any one else in literature
except Falstaff. The main idea of Panurge is the absence of morality in the
wide Aristotelian sense with the presence of almost all other good qualities.
After a time, in which Pantagruel and his companions (among whom, as in
the former romance, Friar John is the embodiment of hearty and healthy
animalism, as Panurge is of a somewhat diseased intellectual refinement)
are engaged in wars of the old romance kind, a whim of Panurge determines
the conclusion of the story. He desires to get married; and an entire book is
occupied by the various devices to which he resorts in order to determine
whether it is wise or not for him to do so. At last it is decided that a voyage
must be made to the oracle of the Dive Bouteille. The last two books are
occupied with this voyage, in which many strange countries are visited, and
at last, the oracle being reached, the word Trinq is vouchsafed, not only, it
would seem, to solve Panurge's doubts, but also as a general answer to the
riddle of the painful earth.
Besides his great work, Rabelais was the author of a few extant letters, and
probably of a good many that are not extant, of a little burlesque almanack
called the Pantagrueline Prognostication, which is full of his peculiar
humour, of a short work entitled Sciomachie, describing a festival at Rome,
and of a few poems of no great merit. In Gargantua and Pantagruel,
however, his whole literary interest and character are concentrated. Few
books have been the subject of greater controversy as to their meaning and
general intention. The author, as if on purpose to baffle investigation, mixes
up real persons mentioned by their real names, real persons mentioned in
transparent allegory, and entirely fictitious characters, in the most
inextricable way. Occasionally, as in his chapters on education, he is
perfectly serious, and allows no touch of humour or satire to escape him.
Elsewhere he indulges in the wildest buffoonery. Two of the most notable
characteristics of Rabelais are, first, his extraordinary predilection for

heaping up piles of synonymous words, and huge lists of things; secondly,
his habit of indulging in the coarsest allusions and descriptions. Both of
these were to some extent mere exaggerations of his mediaeval models, but
both show the peculiar characteristics of their author. The book as a whole
has received the most various explanations as well as the most various
appreciations. It has been regarded as in the main a political and personal
satire, in every incident and character of which some reference must be
sought to actual personages and events of the time; as an elaborate
pamphlet against the Roman Catholic Church; as a defence of mere
epicurean materialism, and even an attack on Christianity itself; as a huge
piece of mischief intended to delude readers into the belief that something
serious is meant, when in reality nothing of the kind is intended. Even more
fantastic explanations than these have been attempted; such, for instance, as
the idea that the voyage of Pantagruel is an allegorical account of the
processes employed in the manufacture of wine. The true explanation, as far
as there is any, of the book seems, however, to be not very difficult to make
out, provided that the interpreter does not endeavour to force a meaning
where there very probably is none. The form of it was pretty well prescribed
by the old romances of adventure, and must be taken as given to Rabelais,
not as invented by him for a special purpose; a war, a quest, these are the
subjects of every story in verse and prose for five centuries, and Rabelais
followed the stream. But when he had thus got his main theme settled, he
gave the widest licence of comment, allusion, digression, and adaptation to
his own fancy and his own intellect. Both of these were typical, and, except
for a certain deficiency in the poetical element, fully typical of the time.
Rabelais was a very learned man, a man of the world, a man of pleasure, a
man of obvious interest in political and ecclesiastical problems. He was
animated by that lively appetite for enjoyment, business, study, all the
occupations of life, which characterised the Renaissance in its earlier
stages, in all countries and especially in France. Nor had science of any
kind yet been divided and subdivided so that each man could only aspire to
handle certain portions of it. Accordingly, Rabelais is prodigal of learning in
season and out of season. But independently of all this, he had an immense
humour, and this pervades the whole book, turning the preposterous
adventures into satirical allegories or half allegories, irradiating the
somewhat miscellaneous erudition with lambent light, and making the
whole alive and fresh to this day. The extreme coarseness of language,

which makes Rabelais difficult to read now-a-days, seems to have arisen
from a variety of causes. The essence of his book was exaggeration, and he
exaggerated in this as in other matters. His keen appetite for the ludicrous,
and a kind of shamelessness which may have been partly due to individual
peculiarity, but had not a little also to do with his education and studies,
inclined him to make free with a department of thought where ludicrous
ideas are, as it has been said, to be had for the picking up by those whom
shame does not trouble at the expense of those whom it does. But besides
all this, there was in Rabelais a knowledge of human nature, and a faculty
of expressing that knowledge in literary form, in which he is inferior to
Shakespeare alone. Caricatured as his types purposely are, they are all
easily reducible to natural dimensions and properties; while occasionally,
though all too rarely, the author drops his mask and speaks gravely,
seriously, and then always wisely. These latter passages are, it may be
added, unsurpassed in mere prose style for many long years after the
author's death.
Altogether, independently of the intrinsic interest of Rabelais' work, we go
to him as we can go to only some score or half score of the greatest writers
of the world, for a complete reflection of the sentiment and character of his
time. As with all great writers, what he shows is in great part characteristic
of humanity at all times and in all places, but, as also with all great writers
except Shakespeare, more of it is local and temporary merely. This local
and temporary element gives him his great historical importance. Rabelais
is the literary exponent of the earlier Renaissance, with its appetite for the
good things of the world as yet unblunted. Yet even in him there is a
foretaste of satiety, and the Oracle of the Bottle has something, for all its
joyousness, of the conclusion of the Preacher.
The popularity of Rabelais was immense, and of itself sufficed to protect
him against the enmity which his hardly veiled attacks on monachism, and
on other fungoid growths of the Church, could not have failed to attract. In
such a case imitation was certain, and, long before the genuine series of the
Pantagrueline Chronicles was completed, spurious supplements and
continuations appeared, all of them without exception worthless. A more
legitimate imitation coloured the work of many of the fiction writers of the
remaining part of the century, though the tradition of short story writing, on
the model of the Fabliaux and of the Italian tales borrowed from them,

continued and was only indirectly affected by Rabelais. In this latter class
one mediocre writer and two of the greatest talent—of talent amounting
almost to genius—have to be noticed. In 1535, Nicholas of Troyes, a
saddler by trade, produced a book entitled Grand Parangon de Nouvelles
Nouvelles, in which he followed rather, as his title indicates, the Cent
Nouvelles Nouvelles than any other model. His sources seem to have been
the Decameron and the Gesta Romanorum principally, though some of his
tales are original. Very different books are the Contes of Marguerite de
Navarre, usually termed the 'Heptameron,' and the Contes et Joyeux Devis
of her servant Bonaventure des Périers. Neither of these books was
published till a considerable period after the death, not merely of Rabelais,
but of their authors.
There are few persons of the time of whom less is
known than of Bonaventure des Périers[183], and, by no Bonaventure des
Périers.
means in consequence merely of this mystery, there are
few more interesting. He must have been born somewhere about the
beginning of the sixteenth century, and his friend Dolet calls him Aeduum
poetam, which would seem to fix his birth somewhere in the neighbourhood
at least of Autun. He was undoubtedly one of the literary courtiers of
Marguerite d'Angoulême. Finally, it seems that in the persecution which,
during the later years of Francis I.'s reign, came upon the Protestants and
freethinkers, and which the influence of Marguerite was powerless to
prevent, he committed suicide to escape the clutches of the law. Henri
Estienne, however, attributes the act to insanity or delirium. However this
may be, there is no doubt that Des Périers was a remarkable example of a
humanist. He was certainly a good scholar, and he was also a decided
freethinker. He has left poems of some merit, but not great perhaps, some
translations and minor prose pieces, but certainly two works of the highest
interest, the Cymbalum Mundi (1537) and the Nouvelles Récréations et
Joyeux Devis (1558). The Cymbalum Mundi betrays the influence of
Lucian, which was also very strong on Rabelais. It is a work in dialogue,
satirising the superstitions of antiquity with a hardly dubious reference to
the religious beliefs of Des Périers' own day. The Nouvelles Récréations et
Joyeux Devis are compact of less perilous stuff, while they exhibit equal
and perhaps greater literary skill. They consist of a hundred and twenty-nine
short tales, similar in general character to those of the Cent Nouvelles

Nouvelles and other collections. Although, however, a great licence of
subject is still allowed, the language is far less coarse than in the work of
Antoine de la Salle, while the literary merits of the style are very much
greater. Des Périers was beyond all doubt a great master of half-serious and
half-joyous French prose. Nor is his matter much less remarkable than his
style. Like Rabelais, but with the difference that his was a more poetical
temperament than that of his greater contemporary, he has sudden accesses
of seriousness, almost of sentiment. At these times the spirit of the French
Renaissance, in its more cultivated and refined representatives, comes out
in him very strongly. This spirit may be defined as a kind of cultivated
sensuality, ardently enamoured of the beautiful in the world of sense, while
fully devoted to intellectual truth, and at the same time always conscious of
the nothingness of things, the instant pressure of death, the treacherousness
of mortal delights. The rare sentences in which Des Périers gives vent to the
expression of this mental attitude are for the most part admirably written,
while as a teller of tales, either comic or romantic, he has few equals and
fewer superiors.
The same spirit which has just been described found
even fuller expression, with greater advantages of scale The Heptameron.
and setting, in the Heptameron[184] of Marguerite of
Navarre. The exact authorship of this celebrated book is something of a
literary puzzle. Marguerite was a prolific author, if all the works which
were published under her name be unhesitatingly ascribed[185] to her.
Besides the poems printed under the pretty title of Les Marguerites de la
Marguerite, she produced many other works, as well as the Heptameron
which was not given to the world until after her death (1558). The House of
Valois was by no means destitute of literary talent. But that which seems
most likely to be the Queen's genuine work hardly corresponds with the
remarkable power shown in the Heptameron. On the other hand, Marguerite
for years maintained a literary court, in which all the most celebrated men
of the time, notably Marot and Bonaventure des Périers, held places. If it
were allowable to decide literary questions simply by considerations of
probability, there could be little hesitation in assigning the entire
Heptameron to Des Périers himself, and then its unfinished condition would
be intelligible enough. The general opinion of critics, however, is that it was
probably the result of the joint work of the Queen, of Des Périers, and of a