SOURCE: Kibler, William W. “The Narrator as Key to Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans mercy.” The French Review 52, no. 5 (April 1979): 714-23.

[In the following essay, Kibler contends that, rather than being “a piece of escapist literature written only to divert the court,” as it is often characterized, La Belle Dame sans mercy responds to the political and social upheaval caused by the Hundred Years' War by urging “a return to the chivalric virtues of honesty, truthfulness, loyalty and honor.”]

In the summer of 1422, Alain Chartier, secrétaire du roi de France, composed an impassioned plea to the three estates to end corruption and restore the rule of honesty and honor, to cease quarreling among themselves and to rediscover their common purpose in opposition to the English. This masterpiece of oratorical prose, known as the Quadrilogue invectif, was written when France was near the nadir of her fortunes in the Hundred Years War.¹ The Burgundian-Armagnac civil war had been raging for twenty years; France's king, Charles VI, had been insane for thirty years; and Paris had been opened to the English since 1418. The population of France had been halved in the previous seventy-five years,² towns had been leveled, churches burned, the countryside ravaged. The Quadrilogue, a shocking indictment of the nobility in particular, paints an unforgettable picture of the debasement and debauchery of each of the traditional three estates: a famine and plague-ravished populace, burdened with impossible taxes and levies; a morally corrupt nobility, no longer able to assure the rule of justice; a cowardly clergy given over to sensual pleasures.

In the same period Chartier also wrote two Latin pieces deploring the war and its calamities,³ and a Débat patriotique in which a knight-herald from an earlier generation, having overheard a young vassal quarreling with a vilain, intervenes to deplore the youthful generation of knights, which prefers pursuing its own pleasures to defending the kingdom.⁴ The intervention provokes a debate on the nobles, the military leaders and the prince. Two years after the Quadrilogue and Débat, when Chartier composed his Belle Dame Sans Mercy (BDSM), the political situation had gone from bad to worse: both the French and English kings had died and the English and Burgundians had proclaimed the infant Henry VI king of both Britain and France. The Dauphin, the future Charles VII, of whom Chartier had become a staunch partisan, had been repudiated and declared illegitimate even by his own mother, and was known derisively as the Roi de Bourges.

Such, then, was the political atmosphere in which the BDSM was composed in 1424, yet since the classic studies by Piaget, Champion and Hoffman, it has been a critical commonplace to bemoan the BDSM's conventionality, to castigate its divorce from the current moral and political concerns, and to see it as a piece of escapist literature written only to divert the court. Piaget wrote in 1901: “La Belle Dame Sans Mercy est un exemple [du] divorce entre les événements extérieurs. … d'une part, et les préoccupations poétiques des courtisans d'autre part.”⁵ Forty years later Hoffman echoes Piaget: “Historically speaking, the Belle Dame Sans Mercy is a conventional piece of late medieval courtois poetry. It reflects the customary indifference of the author to external events, an indifference that springs from the existing concept of poetry.”⁶ Even as recently as 1964 we can read that

… while Chartier's greatest prose works, his Curial, Quadrilogue invectif and Traité de l'Espérance, reveal an intense personal concern for the miseries suffered by France after the Agincourt disaster of 1415, his Belle dame sans mercy, quite enclosed in the conventional world of late-mediæval courtois poetry, utterly fails to reflect the ruin and havoc outside.⁷

Yet how could Chartier, one of the most important advisors of the dauphin, have divorced himself so completely from the concerns of the kingdom, concerns which had so passionately occupied him in his earlier works? I would like to suggest that he could not, and that the BDSM, like the Quadrilogue invectif, like the Latin pieces, and like the Débat patriotique, was written to urge a return to the chivalric virtues of honesty, truthfulness, loyalty and honor which for centuries had been the foundation stones of French—and indeed, of Western European—society. But to do that I must first challenge a second critical commonplace enounced by Piaget, Hoffman, and others, that (to quote Piaget again), “on sent que les sympathies de Chartier [in the BDSM] sont toutes pour la jeune dame, et qu'il réserve ses jugements les plus séveres pour les amoureux” (Piaget, p. 27).

The BDSM consists of 800 octosyllabic lines divided into 100 huitains. The first twenty-four and the last four huitains create a frame for the central matter of the poem, an artfully balanced débat⁸ in alternating huitains between the lover and his lady. At first glance, the balanced presentation of opposing arguments tends to create an ambiguity to the message, which led to the famous quarrel surrounding the poem.⁹ Certain witty replies by the dame, which mark her modernity and characterize her as a forthright and sensible bourgeoise in opposition to the courtly, traditional, lover, have been singled out and seized upon to support the argument that Chartier sympathizes uniquely with the woman and offers a “sharp and vigorous defense of women's rights in the matter of love” (Hoffman, p. 68). “The Dame evidently has the best answers. Hard, cynical, wise in the ways of men … She is more than a match for the Amant, who is pitiful in comparison, lachrymose, building his pleas on pure emotion” (Hoffman, pp. 57-58).

One must certainly concede that to us today there is nothing quite so appealing as a young woman who vivaciously states that her eyes are for looking, that she may flirt openly with whom she wishes, and that she is free and intends to remain so:

“Choisisse qui vouldra choisir.
Je suis france et france vueil estre,
Sans moy de mon cuer dessaisir
Pour en faire un autre le maistre.”

(285-88)¹⁰

Yet I believe that this witty and Belle Dame was not originally intended to elicit our sympathies, and that there are, scattered throughout the poem, hints enough to teach us how to read it. Daniel Poirion's perceptive article on the BDSM (see note 9) treats the language and tradition of the Belle Dame herself and concludes that “le scepticisme et l'égoïsme de la Dame-sans-merci ruinent l'équilibre de l'échange sur lequel est fondé le service amoureux ou féodal: … En refusant sa pitié, sa générosité, sa charité, cette Dame annonce une autre mentalité, peut-être celle de la bourgeoisie commerciale, où les paroles sont faites pour séduire, non pour engager” (p. 703). Alain Chartier, as Poirion goes on to note, would never sympathize with this sceptical and destructive point of view, and has intended no more here than to “donner la parole à l'ennemi” (p. 703). If we have let ourselves be seduced by the lady's words, it is because we have on the one hand failed to read them with their intended irony, and because on the other hand we have not properly understood the role of the narrator in the prologue and frame story, which has been nearly universally ignored.¹¹

The prologue to the BDSM introduces us initially not to the lover who will participate in the debate, but to the poet-narrator who will overhear and record it. The narrator, a male, is in many respects a double of the lover. As we meet him he is deeply saddened, for his own lady has recently died. The opening huitain of the poem repeatedly stresses his woebegone condition:

Nagaires, chevauchant, pensoye
Com home triste et doloreux,
Au dueil ou il fault que je soye
Le plus dolent des amoureux,
Puis que, par son dart rigoreux,
La mort me tolly ma maistresse
Et me laissa seul, langoreux
En la conduite de Tristesse.

(1-8)

In the following five huitains the narrator announces his desire to abandon poetry altogether, leaving to the “amoreux malades / Qui ont espoir d'alegement” (lines 25-26) to “faire chançons, diz et balades” (line 27). Although it is (presumably) spring, the season par excellence for love and for composing poems in love's name, the narrator is out of harmony with the season.

These opening stanzas introduce an autobiographical note into the BDSM, since for the past several years the poet Chartier had been courting a lady whose death in the period just preceding the composition of the BDSM inspired Chartier's “Complainte contre la Mort.”¹² Although it is rare to find subjective material in Old French verse, as Zumthor cogently points out in chapter 2 of his Essai de poétique médiévale (Paris: Seuil, 1972), by the Middle French period the moi has begun to creep into poetry, and we can rightly extend what Zumthor writes of Guillaume de Machaut to his émule Alain Chartier: “[sa] Poétique semble bien avoir reposé sur une identification des événements de sa vie et de la fabrication des livres” (p. 69). While allowing for a certain ironic distance in the best of medieval poets—Chaucer is the finest example—it would seem to be complicating the facts unnecessarily not to acknowledge that the attitudes of the narrator reflect in most regards those of Chartier the poet. The error comes, rather, in failing to see the irony in the lady's words, and in thus attributing to Chartier the modernité with which she is tainted.

Arriving alone at the edge of his own city, the narrator overhears the gay sounds of a fête and, against his wishes, is forced by his friends to attend the festivities. The gathering which he then describes represents an ideal courtly social situation, balanced and harmonized, in which all initially appears to be in order.

As the narrator enters he is welcomed by the dames and demoiselles, who employ their courtly skills and graces in conversation and flirtation to make him forget his grief:

Et de la courtoisie d'elles
Me tindrent ilec tout ce jour
En plaisans parolles nouvelles
Et en tresgracïeux sejour.

(69-72)

At dinner the men serve the ladies, who hold the key to their happiness:

Telz y ot qui a ce jour virent
En la compaignie lïens
Leurs juges, dont semblant ne firent,
Qui les tiennent en leurs lïens.

(77-80)

To this point we have the depiction of an idealized and time-honored courtly situation, in which the social positions are based on feudal order: the man, vassal and servant to his lady and lord.

Yet just as the narrator is out of harmony with the springtime, so at this feast there is a young man, dressed in black, who cannot enter fully into the festivities. The narrator's profound melancholy permits him to recognize a kindred spirit and to empathize with him immediately. He realizes that the young man's trembling, paleness, and suffering are due to the shafts of love, and remarks to himself:

“Autel fumes comme vous estes.”

(120)

Having thus linked his own experience directly to that of the young lover, it comes as no surprise that the terms he now uses to describe the youth, who is sighing for a lady present, are immediately empathetic: “son regart qu'il assëoit / Sur elle si piteusement” (lines 111-12), “ses yeulx / Tout empenné d'umbles requestes” (lines 117-18), “trestendrement souspiroit / Par doloreuxe souvenance” (lines 123-24), “le triste amoureux” (line 131).

Since the narrator has linked his own experience so directly to that of the youthful lover clad in black, and since the terms he has used to describe the lover's condition are so clearly sympathetic, we must wonder if indeed Chartier's treatment of the Belle Dame is as favorable as the critics would have it. It is instructive, in this respect, to look closely at the poet's first description of her in huitains 18 and 19:

18. Bien avoit a mon gré visé
Entre celles que je vi lors,
S'il eust au gré du cuer visé
Autant que a la beauté du corps; (140)
Qui croit de legier les rappors
De ses yeulx sans autre esperance,
Pourroit mourir de mille mors
Avant qu'ataindre a sa plaisance.
19. En la dame ne failloit riens, (145)
Ne plus avant ne plus arriere.
C'estoit garnison de tous biens
Pour faire a cuer d'amant frontiere:
Jeune, gente, fresche et entiere;
Maintien rassis et sans changier; (150)
Doulce parolle et grant maniere,
Dessoubz l'estendart de Danger.

(137-52)

It is worthy of note that the physical description contained in huitain 19 is preceded by a warning couched in sententious language that the young lover should pay as much (or more) heed to the lady's heart as to her body (lines 139-40). Her beauty is, of course, exceptional, yet before she has ever spoken a word in the narrator's hearing he is able to perceive, through her manners and gestures, that behind her sprightly, flirtatious exterior lurks a cold heart. Huitain 19 highlights the Belle Dame's physical beauty, which had been only suggested by “la beauté du corps” of line 140; yet, here again the poet is careful to stress that this beauty is only skin deep. He signals the lady's aloofness in lines 150-51:

Maintien rassis et sans changier,
Doulce parolle et grant maniere …

then culminates with the unexpected and therefore thunderingly effective

Dessoubz l'estendart de Danger,

which brings with it a panoply of literary associations that his medieval audience could scarcely have overlooked.

Through these two huitains the poet creates a disharmony or tension between the ideal exterior physical beauty and the interior hardness and aloofness of the lady. This disharmony echoes that earlier tension between the joy of the (springtime) season and the melancholic state of the narrator.

What I have termed the prologue closes with the first words of the lover to his lady, and her curt reply. The lover sets the tone and presents the principal arguments he will employ in the ensuing dialogue: that he has suffered since first he set eyes on her, that he will surely die if she refuses to reward him, that loving him will not destroy her honor, that he is totally submissive to her and wants only to serve her, and that he will always be totally loyal to her. Her brief response underscores the aloofness and cold rationality which will characterize her part of the dialogue:

Elle respondy bassement
Sans müer couleur ne courage
Mais tout amesureement:
“Beau sire, ce foul pensement
Ne vous laissera il jamais?
Ne penserez vous autrement
De donner a voustre cuer paix?”

(218-24)

Yet it is impossible to deny the lady's evident attraction and the clever rationality of her arguments. Moreover, her replies counterbalance those of the lover.¹³ If she does not give in to the lover's impassioned and heartfelt pleas, it is not so much that she fails to respond to him personally, but to the type he represents. He seems to her to be too much like the others in whom she has lost faith. Although he may well be speaking the truth, how is she to sort out the truth from the deceits which are rampant at court? In summing up the major thematic wave of the débat, she remarks pertinently:

Male Bouche tient bien grant court:
Chascun a mesdire estudie;
Faulx amoureux au temps qui court
Servent tous de goulïardye.
Le plus secret veult bien qu'on die
Qu'il est d'aucune mescreüz,
Et pour riens qu'omme a dame die
Il ne doit plus estre creüz.”

(713-20)

The lover insists that the wheat must be winnowed from the chaff, that the good will be recognized by their works:

“Des bons le bien se moustrera
Et des mauvais la vilonnye.”

(723-24)

and

“Fault il doncq faire touz onniz
Les humbles servans et les faulx,
Et que les bons soient puniz
Pour le pechié des desloyaulx?”

(741-44)

The lady replies that she has seen too many lies and false airs in the courtly society of her day and that it is better to avoid all men than to risk being caught by their deceits:

“Mais pour les mauvais eschever
Il se fait bon garder de tous.”

(747-48)

It is understandable that the low-born and ill-educated live by prevarication, but now even those whom noble birth should have taught better are caught up in the circle of untruths:

“Quant meschans fol parler eüssent,
Ce mechief seroit pardonnez;
Mais ceulx qui mieulx faire deüssent
Et que Noblece a ordonnez
D'estre condicïonnez,
Sont les plus avant en la fengue
Et ont leurs cueurs abandonnez
A courte foy et longue langue.”

(729-36)

So the Belle Dame, too, is in her own way a bastion of courtly society. She will not play the game because the odds are no longer equitable. The courtly game has become degraded and lost its meaning. Unlike the lover, however, she is a “modern” in her reaction to this realization. Whereas the lover believes it is still possible to restore the virtues which characterized feudal society at its best, she recognizes that “le bon vieux temps” can never be recaptured, and she models her actions accordingly.

The foregoing analysis of the prologue suggests thus, that the judgment that Chartier's sympathies are uniquely with the lady at the expense of the lover is much too simplistic. Although her witty replies cause her to appear forthright and sensible, a “modern,” the lover's emotional appeals, based in the traditional courtly values of loyalty, truthfulness, honesty and service, are values which cannot be lightly shunted aside. In the dialogue or débat section of the poem, the lover's arguments are stalemated; however, the frame seems to tip the balance in favor of the black-clad lover's and the narrator's conservative position. In the courtly context it is the lover who faithfully fulfills the obligations imposed upon him: recognition of beauty, service, loyalty, suffering, subjection. In the rightful course of events it is now the lady's move—to reward him for his patient service. It is right, just, and expected that this faithful service be rewarded; to do otherwise is to break the social code which, we have noted, is modeled closely on the feudal code. To break one is, symbolically at least, to break the other.

That the lady breaks the code is thus the most evident indictment of its failure. It is not the lover's failure, but society's. Chartier is at great pains to underscore the genuineness of the lover's feelings—to the point that he has him die in the end of frustration (lines 781-84). While the black-clad lover feels firmly that the best solution would be a return to earlier values, the more cynical lady refuses to pursue that chimera. Her rejection of the courtly game exposes its fraud in all its contemporary reality. Both the lover in his way and the Belle Dame in hers underscore the failures of contemporary society; more hopeful, the lover would restore the age of chivalry; more cynical, the lady is equipped to live in the age of deceit.

Is it possible to determine which of these alternate solutions Chartier himself favors? On the one hand, the spirit and clarity with which the lady presents her point of view suggest that Chartier wishes us to recognize that feudal society is definitively dead—like the lover at the end of the poem—and that we should look forward to establishing a new order (see Hoffman, and esp. Rieger, pp. 705-06); on the other hand, our analysis of the prologue and the role of the narrator, as well as the cumulative evidence of Chartier's other works (the Curial, the Quadrilogue invectif, the Latin pieces, the Débat patriotique, even the Livre des Quatre Dames), suggests that Chartier looks backward toward reestablishing the old order. Perhaps the answer is to be found in the final two huitains. The lady is not left with the final word. The double moralities, one addressed to men and the other to women, further stress traditional values. In huitain 99 the poet-narrator urges lovers to dissociate themselves from the braggards and slanderers who undermine loyalty and honor, thus bringing disgrace upon all men:

Sy vous pri, amoureux, fuyez
Ces vanteurs et ces mesdisans;
Et comme infames les huyez,
Car ilz sont a voz faiz nuysans.
Pour non les faire voir disans,
Reffus a ses chasteaulz bastiz,
Car ilz ont trop mis puis dix ans
Le païs d'Amours a pastiz.

(785-92)

In huitain 100, he entreats the ladies to renounce cruelty and reward fidelity—that is, to repudiate the self-seeking, sordid morality of the early fifteenth century and to believe once again in time-honored values:

Et vous, dames et damoiselles
En qui Honneur naist et asemble,
Ne soyés mie si crüelles,
Chascune ne toutes ensemble.
Que ja nulle de vous ressemble
Celle que m'oyez nommer cy,
Qu'on appellera, ce me semble,
La belle dame sans mercy!

(793-800)

As much as the battle of Agincourt ten years earlier, which inspired Chartier's Livre des Quatre Dames, the BDSM illustrates the low level to which contemporary French nobility had sunk and how far it was out of touch with reality. Like the Quadrilogue invectif, the Latin pieces, and the Débat patriotique, the BDSM was composed in a time of egregious moral and political decline to chastize those nobles who had abandoned venerable feudal virtues in favor of an egoistic, worldly morality. The BDSM must no longer be ranked among the joyeuses escritures which “reflect the customary indifference of the author to contemporary events”; rather, under the guise of a courtly débat, the BDSM takes a staunchly conservative political stand in the face of a pleasure-seeking, debauched courtly circle. Chartier is much less a defender of the “modern” woman than he is a spokesman for the old order; if he lets the Belle Dame speak so fluently, it is because her line of argument ironically underscores the loss of the feudal morality, a loss which Chartier repeatedly deplores in his writings.

Notes

1. Edited by Eugénie Droz, Classiques français du moyen âge, No. 32 (Paris, 1923).

2. J. C. Russell, Population in Europe 500-1500, The Fontana Economic History of Europe, No. I (London: Collins Cleartype Press, 1969), pp. 5, 19-25.

3. The Epistola de detestione belli Gallici et suasione pacis (1424-25) and the Dialogus familiaris amici et sodalis super deploratione Gallice calamitatis (1424?). The most reliable and detailed study of Alain Chartier's life and the dating and attributions of his works is that by C. J. H. Walravens, Alain Chartier, études biographiques, suivies de pièces justificatives, d'une description des éditions et d'une édition des ouvrages inédits (Amsterdam: Meulenhoff-Didier, 1971). For the two Latin pieces, see pp. 71-74. In addition, Pierre Champion's long essay on “Maître Alain Chartier,” in the Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, Bibliothèque du XV^e siècle, vol. 27 (Paris: Champion, 1923), can still be consulted with profit.

4. The Débat patriotique, also frequently referred to as the Débat du hérault, du vassault et du villain, is generally dated 1422, but may have been composed as early as 1421 or as late as the first half of 1425 (Walravens, op. cit., pp. 68-71).

5. A. Piaget, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci et ses imitations,” Romania, 39 (1901), 23.

6. Edward Joseph Hoffman, Alain Chartier, His Work and Reputation (New York: Wittes Press, 1942), p. 64.

7. W. B. Kay, “La Belle dame sans mercy and the Success of Failure,” Romance Notes, 6 (1964), 69-73; ibid., p. 69.

8. On the débat, see Alfred Jeanroy, Les Origines de la poésie lyrique en France (Paris: H. Champion, 1965), pp. 45-60.

9. The texts of the debate have been published by A. Piaget, “La Belle Dame Sans Merci et ses imitations,” Romania, vols. 30-34 (1901-05). For a pertinent discussion see Daniel Poirion, “Lectures de la Belle Dame Sans Mercy,” in Mélanges … Le Gentil (Paris: S.E.D.E.S., 1973) pp. 691-705. Following R. Garapon, “Introduction à la lecture d'Alain Chartier,” Annales de Normandie, IX (1959), 91-108, Poirion underlines the balance in presentation of arguments in the débat section. But he too notices that, “la rigoureuse symétrie de La Belle Dame sans mercy n'a pas empêché les lecteurs de prêter surtout attention au personnage féminin, faussant, en apparence, le message moral de Chartier” (p. 695). Poirion's article, which concentrates on the Belle Dame herself, reaches a conclusion with which we are very much in harmony: “le language moderne est mis, par l'auteur, au service d'une thèse ancienne” (p. 698).

10. All citations from the BDSM are from the recent critical edition by J. C. Laidlaw, The Poetical Works of Alain Chartier (London: Cambridge University Press, 1974). Line numbers will be given in the text immediately following the quotations.

11. The only considerations of the prologue are in C. S. Shapley's essay on the BDSM, the second chapter of his Studies in French Poetry of the Fifteenth Century (The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970), in which he analyzes the poem strophe by strophe to demonstrate its aesthetic and moral qualities; and in Dietmar Rieger, “Alain Chartier's Belle Dame sans Mercy oder der Tod des höfischen Liebhabers: Uberlegungen zu einer Dichtung des ausgehenden Mittelalters,” in Sprachen der Lyrik: Festschrift für Hugo Friedrich zum 70. Geburtstag (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1975), pp. 683-706, esp. pp. 700-01. Shapley and Rieger are the only critics to recognize clearly that the BDSM does not turn its back on the social realities of the period. Shapley pointedly places the poem within the total context of Chartier's literary production and concludes, in words with which we agree, that it is “a moral indictment as devastating as the Quatre Dames or the Quadrilogue” (p. 116). However, his view of the narrative as “non-committal in relation to the two characters” (p. 116) is a point of view which the present article seeks to rectify. For Rieger, the physical death of the lover symbolizes the death of the courtly society he is seen to represent: “Der Ausammenhang zwischen dem Tod des höfischen Liebhabers auf der objektiven Ebene und dem Tod der höfischen Dame auf der subjektiven Ebene des Dichters ist evident; beide Elemente, deren Korrelation die Belle Dame sans Mercy strukturiert, bezeichnen das reale, dem ahnenden Ich des Dichters durch die Beobachtung der Umwelt zur Gewissheit werdende Ende des höfischen Mittelaters und entlarven damit die Fiktionalität der aristokratischen Scheinkultur des beginnenden 15. Jahrhunderts, deren ausführliche Darstellung im Verlauf der St. IX—XXIII die Kulisse für den unmittelbar nachfolgenden Dialog des höfischen Liebhabers mit seiner Dame aufbaut” (Ibid., pp. 700-01). Yet Reiger's argument, that Chartier is writing in opposition to the world of the court—with its implication that the poet takes the side of the Belle Dame, obliges him to brush aside the concluding double morals (p. 705: “Trotz der jede Einseitigkeit bewusst vermeidenden Schlussmoral …”), and leads him to somewhat the opposite conclusion we reach. His study remains, nonetheless, with that of Poirion previously mentioned, an important reevaluation of the BDSM.

12. The text of the complainte is published in Laidlaw, op cit., pp. 320-27. For its autobiographical character, see Walravens, p. 77; Champion, p. 62.

13. For an analysis of the debate, see Poirion, loc. cit., particularly pp. 696-701.