A Short History of French Literature Part 6

[Sidenote: Definition of Fabliaux.]

The interest of the Fabliaux as a literary study is increased by the precision with which they can be defined, and the well-marked period of their composition. According to the excellent definition of its latest editor, the Fabliau[61] is 'le recit, le plus souvent comique, d'une aventure reelle ou possible, qui se pa.s.se dans les donnees 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 Trouvere Ruteboeuf, 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 ma.n.u.script 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 pa.s.sed 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 ill.u.s.trious 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.

[Sidenote: Subjects and character of Fabliaux.]

Until MM. de Montaiglon and Raynaud undertook their edition, which has been slowly completed, the study of the Fabliaux was complicated by the somewhat chaotic 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 _debats_, 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 cla.s.sify 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 princ.i.p.al 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 Poupee--

'Qui a un seul coup de s'espee Coupe bien a 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 a.s.signing 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 a.s.s's foal being bought instead of the required animal. _Le Mantel Mautaillie_ is the famous Arthurian story known in English as 'The Boy and the Mantle.' _Le Vilain Mire_ is the original of Moliere's _Medecin malgre 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 p.r.o.nounced, certain thieves take for 'Es tu la?'

[Sidenote: Sources of Fabliaux.]

Such are a very few, selected as well as may be for their typical character, of these stories. It is not unimportant to consider briefly the question of their origin. Many of 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 cla.s.sics 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.

[Sidenote: The Roman du Renart.]

Closely connected with the Fabliaux is one of the most singular works of mediaeval imagination, the _Roman du 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 princ.i.p.al 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 ma.n.u.script of _Renart le Contrefait_, or the different developments of the _Ancien Renart_, recently published by M. Ernest Martin.

[Sidenote: The Ancien Renart.]

The order and history of the building up of this vast composition are as follows. The oldest known 'branches,' 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. .h.i.therto been the standard edition of _Renart_, Meon 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, const.i.tute 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 (n.o.ble the lion, who is king, Chanticleer the c.o.c.k, 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 ill.u.s.trated the t.i.tles 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.

[Sidenote: Le Couronnement Renart.]

The next stage of the composition shows an alteration and a degradation.

_Renart le Couronne_, or _Le 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 ma.n.u.script 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 n.o.ble 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 fict.i.tious 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.

[Sidenote: Renart le Nouvel.]

The next poem of the cycle is of much greater length, and of at least proportionately greater value, though it has not the freshness and _verve_ of the earlier branches. _Renart le Nouvel_ was written in 1288 by Jacquemart Gielee, 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.

[Sidenote: Renart le Contrefait.]

The cycle was finally completed in the second quarter of the fourteenth century by the singular work or works 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 ma.n.u.scripts which contain it. Two of these are in Paris and one in Vienna, the latter being apparently identical with one which Menage saw and read in the seventeenth century. One of the Parisian ma.n.u.scripts 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 pa.s.sages 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 cla.s.ses, with some striking legends ill.u.s.trative thereof, such as the story of a n.o.ble dame, who, hearing that a va.s.sal'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 n.o.ble 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.

[Sidenote: Fauvel.]

Renart is not the only b.e.s.t.i.a.l personage who was made at this time a vehicle of satire. In the days of Philippe le Bel a certain Francois de Rues composed a poem ent.i.tled _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 deles 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 pinca une peleure, quar molt ama la lecheure, quant diex li dona a avoir.

ne beoit pas a grant avoir, mais a tos ses bons acomplir.

l'une pertris cort envar: 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. 'aincois va pis, quar mengies les a li chas.'

li vilains saut isnel le pas, seure li cort comme enragies.

ja li eust les iex sachies, quant el crie 'c'est gas, c'est gas.

fuiies,' 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'at, tantost que li prestres me vit, si me pra, se tant l'ama.s.se, que je les pertris li moustra.s.se, 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 fu.

mes je gueres ne le sivi, ains le vous fis moult tost savoir.'

cil respont 'bien pues dire voir or le laissons a itant estre.'

ainsi fu engingnies le prestre et Gombaus qui les pertris prist.

par example cis fabliaus dist: fame est faite por decevoir.

menconge fait devenir voir et voir fait devenir menconge.

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-fis.h.i.+ng._)

Ce fu un poi devant Noel 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 juer et boivre: un seel i estoit laissiez.

la vint Renarz toz eslaissiez et son compere apela.

'sire,' fait il, 'traiiez vos ca: ci est la plente 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.