SOURCE: Uitti, Karl D. “Renewal and Undermining of Old French Romance: Jehan de Saintré.” In Romance: Generic Transformation from Chrétien de Troyes to Cervantes, edited by Kevin Brownlee and Marina Scordilis Brownlee, pp. 135-54. Hanover, N.H.: Dartmouth College, 1985.

[In the following essay, Uitti examines the difficulty in classifying Little John of Saintré and contends that what some scholars view as the work's modernity is in actuality a faithful homage to the medieval literary tradition of restoring past events.]

The five centuries or so leading from the Old French Life of Saint Alexis to the completion of the prose narratives of Rabelais—the span of medieval vernacular literature in France—may justifiably be seen as one of the most extraordinary laboratories of literary experimentation in recorded history. Nowhere is this “experimental” character more pronounced than in the area of romance narrative. Even though we limit our concern to France (and, for the time being, set aside the pan-European implications of this production), the romance traditions of renewal and creativity remain staggering, with each century “inventing” anew, always however, I believe, within the framework of an ideal and constant “restoration.”

I propose here to discuss a text of narrative fiction—a prose text dating from the middle of the fifteenth century (probably 1456)—that, to judge from the bibliographies, has often been spoken and written about but that, curiously, has not been nearly so much read as one might have thought. (Indeed, despite the efforts of the late Charles A. Knudson and Jean Misrahi, the work still stands in need of a proper edition.) I refer to Jehan de Saintré, until recently known to most readers as Le Petit Jehan de Saintré, by Antoine de la Sale, composed when its author was in his late sixties.¹

Jehan de Saintré has done a superb job of defying attempts by critics to classify it generically. An older generation of scholars proved to be fascinated by what they considered to be the work's “realism”—its meticulous attention to observed detail and to the technical vocabulary of fourteenth- and fifteenth-century chivalry as well as to court life.² Others have detected “bourgeois”—anticourtly—elements in the work; for them, Antoine de la Sale professes much skepticism about chivalric values.³ (No phenomenon, it seems, has appeared with greater regularity for the convenience of literary historians than the “rise of the bourgeoisie.”) Still other scholars, while expressing boredom at the work's lavish and lengthy descriptions of coats-of-arms, of tourneys, and of jousting, nevertheless praise Antoine de la Sale's delicate and acute sense of psychology. His depiction of the central love affair between his young protagonist, Jehan de Saintré, and the slightly older lady who takes an interest in him is, in their view, worthy of the great French tradition of the “psychological novel,” a kind of antecedent, one suspects, of the Princesse de Clèves.⁴ All these views hold, then, in one way or another, that there is something essentially true to life in Jehan de Saintré and, consequently, one concludes, something not characteristically “medieval.” With Antoine de la Sale we are on our way to the Renaissance and, via Mme de Lafayette, to the “realist” novel of the nineteenth century.

Perhaps in part because Jehan de Saintré was placed on the program of a French university examination during the mid-1960s,⁵ it was unable to escape the attention of recent theorists of literature or of semioticians. Julia Kristeva's 1967 thesis, supervised by the late Lucien Goldmann and Roland Barthes, was devoted in extenso to this work.⁶ Shot through with an appalling ignorance of Old French literature,⁷ Kristeva's dissertation focuses, quite naturally, on the “otherness” of Jehan de Saintré. Saintré is “unlike” Arthurian romance; indeed, it is “disjunctive” in regard to older romance in general and it is therefore symptomatic of a crisis of both language and conscience;⁸ it is France's first “novel.”⁹ (Much pseudo algebra and many diagrams and neologisms are pressed into the service of Kristeva's transforms, but, in essence, she is content to refurbish the image of “modernity” offered of Antoine de la Sale by the scholars alluded to above.)¹⁰

Of course, both Kristeva and her historicist predecessors are “correct”: Antoine de la Sale displays great interest in what in France is called les intermittences du coeur, and he does so in a fashion that announces future novelists and dramatists. He explores with acumen the area of displacement between the appearances and realities of chivalry—of chivalric codes and practices and disjunction. The Saintré is, indeed, “other” with respect to narrative texts preceding it. All these things are true. But are they not equally true, say, of Chrétien de Troyes in regard to the earlier romances of Antiquity and Wace? Or of Guillaume de Lorris with respect to Chrétien,¹¹ and of Jean de Meun to Guillaume? Of Froissart to Machaut? Indeed, as we shall observe in due course, a case may be made supporting the contention that Antoine de la Sale rewrites Froissart in a fashion quite analogous to that great chronicler's replication-in-transformation of the tradition issued from the Romance of the Rose.¹² The error of Kristeva and earlier scholars resides, I believe, in their failure to take sufficient stock of the very medieval celebration and practice of restoration, which governs French romance narrative throughout its history and which, as such, is thematized in the Saintré. Jehan de Saintré is a self-consciously historical narrative, treating events that are presented as having happened a century before its own composition. It restores these events, and in restoring them, it recodifies them. Thus, in a very real sense, Jehan de Saintré resembles its great contemporary text, the Grand Testament of François Villon. What, then, has been perceived by some scholars as its “modernity” in fact is its extraordinary fidelity to quintessentially medieval poetic procedures. And, of course, these very procedures are utilized by Antoine de la Sale—as they had been by Chrétien, by Froissart, and by others—to gain a purchase on and to articulate a sense of the “real” or of the “historical.”

Summary of the plot of Jehan de Saintré would be helpful, I think, at this juncture, as well as some reference to the historical context which this romance elaborates for itself.

As its brief prologue indicates, the text purports to speak of a dame, or lady, who, because she is referred to by the Queen as Belle Cousine (she is related to royalty), is known only as the Dame des Belles Cousines. No name or surname, we learn, will be given for her, and for very good reason.¹³ The text also will speak of the most valiant knight, le sire de Saintré: a lady and the knight, a hint, perhaps, that “ladyness” is to be personified in Madame des Belles Cousines, whereas the youthful Jehan (his surname is not revealed until a third of the way into the book) will come to epitomize knightliness. A lady (that is, a category) will become a person; the boy (that is, a person, albeit as yet unformed) will become, so to speak, a category.

This story is designed to be the first of three tales. The second deals with the loyal love and pitiable end of Lord Floridan and Lady Elvyde and consists in a translation from Latin into French, which does not identify its characters except as it moves from episode to episode; the third story, so the author (who does not identify himself) informs us, is an adaptation of part of the “chronicles of Flanders.” The entire work is dedicated to Antoine de la Sale's former pupil Lord John of Anjou, Duke of Calabria and Lorraine (a fact not without piquancy as one reads, in the Saintré, of Madame's pedagogical efforts on behalf of Jehan). Jehan de Saintré thus forms part of a larger, tripartite work, although the second and third texts apparently are very short. Interestingly, however, Jehan de Saintré is presented as preceding a very classical romance-type love story and a rather more “historically” conceived—or chronicle-like—narrative. Translatio—both translation and adaptation—is also at issue.

The action of Jehan de Saintré is situated during the reign of “good” King John II of France, eldest son of Philip of Valois. In many respects, this was one of the blackest periods of French history. After acceding to the throne in 1350, John led the flower of French chivalry at the battle of Poitiers in September 1356, where it met a crushing defeat at the hands of the English. (The disaster was all the more humiliating in that it was largely the doing of “ignoble” English and Welsh crossbowmen, a detail not without relevance to the Saintré,) John himself was taken prisoner to England and was not released until an enormous ransom had been paid. His was a reign marked by military debacle, peasant uprisings, a seditious nobility, and plague.

The sad events of King John's reign had been amply described by earlier vernacular chroniclers, but usually, and especially in the case of Froissart, these disasters were depicted within an overriding context of praise for the chivalric ethos; Froissart never ascribes blame to the institutions of chivalry. Meanwhile, these events are never alluded to in Jehan de Saintré. Yet they stand out in the text if only by their very absence. Antoine de la Sale appears to work systematic distortions into his material. Thus, the King and his Queen—identified at the start of the work as “Bonne de Bouesme” (Bohemia)—are shown as presiding, respectively, over brilliant courts to which knights and noble ladies from all over Europe pay homage. Now Bonne of Luxemburg had indeed been John's first wife, but only while he was heir to the throne; she died of the plague in 1349, and he succeeded his father in 1350. She never became Queen of France. Moreover, unlike the “Bonne” of the Saintré the real Bonne was hardly thought of by her contemporaries as a paragon of ladylike virtue; on the contrary, it was notoriously rumored at the time that her son, the future Regent and King Charles V the Wise, had not been fathered by John II. Quite simply, Antoine de la Sale reverses, or inverts, what must have been known by his readers to be “historical” fact or, rather, perhaps he seemingly presents, in ironic fashion, as historical reality the idealistic ideology which, as they (and we) read, for example, in Froissart, the French chivalry and such allies as John of Luxemburg, the blind King of Bohemia (and real-life father of Bonne), affected to champion. In short, King John and his court—the world of the Saintré—is deliberately and outrageously romanticized by Antoine de la Sale so as to underscore the “straighter” kind of romanticizations found in Froissart. (Chrétien de Troyes some three centuries earlier had used analogous procedures in Cligés to pinpoint the essential romanceness of the Tristan story as recounted, for example, by Béroul.)

Some of my preceding analysis has been suggested by critics who, while praising Antoine de la Sale's “realism” in depicting concrete details, deplore what they consider his inconceivable distortion of courtly insufficiency. If, however, one takes stock of the intrinsically romance nature of King John's court—of its distorted state, precisely—matters become clearer. For John, like Arthur or Mark, is a romance king: namely, he is at the center of things but not himself particularly active. (Meanwhile, curiously, the real-life Bonne resembled more accurately the Guenevere, or Iseut, of romance tradition than Antoine's idealized Queen.) Feats of prowess and of love—the two courtly and romance activities par excellence—are the province of the knights and, to a very important extent, of the ladies affiliated with the court. In the Arthurian world, for example, it is not Arthur but Lancelot, Perceval, Yvain, Gauvain, Lunete, and Guenevere who, by their deeds, supply the action that brings luster or disgrace to the Round Table. Antoine de la Sale has shunted the factuality of precise but selectively chosen (and therefore distorted) historical coordinates into the frame of the self-referential, ostensibly unhistorical or antihistorical romance narrative text. In this way King John and his court are deliberately rendered potentially ambiguous, even though they are historically “real.” (Mme de Lafayette, as I suggested above, employs a similar procedure in the Princesse de Clèves, where she shifts the action of her novel to a period dating, like that of Jehan de Saintré, about a century earlier than that of the work's composition and reception.) In this way the kind of prose narrative epitomized by Froissart's Chronicles is further undermined by Antoine de la Sale. Froissart writes about and, for complex reasons, tends to idealize contemporary events, whereas Jehan de Saintré pointedly exploits an unmistakable recul historique—a historical detachment underpinned by a very specific distinction between the then of the story and the now of its writing. And, to be sure, the historical events intervening in France toward the close of the years between, roughly, 1350 and 1450—the Agincourt disaster, Joan of Arc, the end of the Hundred Years War—were obviously on the minds of both Antoine de la Sale and his readers. Perhaps, in a sense, the defeat at Poitiers and other earlier debacles simply no longer mattered to them too much; or, at the least, they were sufficiently remote so as to lend themselves by their absence in the Saintré text to Antoine de la Sale's subtle and ironic poetic manipulation.

But—and this, to my knowledge, has not yet been noticed by critics and scholars—Jehan de Saintré, in quintessentially romance fashion, inverts another of Froissart's narratives, the lengthy, “archaizing” (that is, pseudohistorical) verse romance entitled Méliador. Composed in traditional romance octosyllabic rhyming couplets, Méliador tells the story of the youth of the Arthurian court—of brilliant tourneys, of love, and of crusades in “pagan” Ireland, set in a time before the (hi)stories recounted by Chrétien de Troyes and his successors. This, then, as Peter F. Dembowski has demonstrated,¹⁴ is the story of Arthurian prehistory, when the ideal rules of the Arthurian game were being “invented.” Meanwhile, the Irish Crusade, narrated by Froissart as a brilliant feat of arms performed by the united chivalry of a unified Christian Europe, is, according to Dembowski's entirely convincing analysis, a transposition into romance terms of the frequent but sporadic participation of numerous—especially young—Christian knights and knights aspirant in the ongoing eastern European struggles against genuine Lithuanian pagans during the fourteenth century. Such participation was construed by these youths as both chivalric adventure and Christian duty. Froissart's Méliador, composed, I repeat, in verse at about the time he was abandoning his earlier courtly love poetry style for the writing of the prose Chronicles, can thus be read as a putting to good use of romance narrative procedures in what can be understood as at once the denunciation of the fratricidal wars between French and English—that is, Christian—chivalry and the idealization of a potentially pan-Christian, and proper, military effort. (The 1360s and beyond were also a period of great Turkish menace on the eastern frontiers of Christendom.) Jehan de Saintré, as we demonstrate later in greater detail, is largely a response to Méliador. One of the salient characteristics of medieval French romance, a characteristic directly related to the principle of restoration, is that each romance text by definition responds to a previous romance text or even to the body of earlier romance texts in general. Jehan de Saintré is no exception. Its inversion of Froissart constitutes part of its strength as a participant in the romance corpus, or “book.” And that strength lies at the root of its genuine efficacy as a historically oriented venture. In other words, while seeming to be a historical narrative—a kind of memoirbiography located in a recognizable past—Jehan de Saintré is in actuality a romance; and the very ambiguity of its status proves to be the source of its authenticity as an example of historiographical commentary. Meanwhile, I believe that Jehan de Saintré underscores what Antoine de la Sale considers to be the fundamental romanceness—the nonhistoriographical character—of the type of idealized historiography one finds in Froissart's Chronicles, in their merely apparent or ostensible contemporary witness and recording.

With this much posited, let us now return to the plot of the narrative. I am convinced that the events of this plot and their order (or “conjoining”) will take on surprising relevance as we place them within the romance and historical framework I have just briefly sketched—within the context, that is, of romance restoration. Froissart's “restoration” of the young Arthurian world in Méliador elicits Antoine de la Sale's “restoration-inversion” of both Méliador and the Chronicles.

We are first introduced to a young page, in his fourteenth year, at King John's court; we learn that he is called Jehan. (Antoine de la Sale himself began his career at age fourteen as a page, and we might remember Froissart's obsession with the sequence of his own “ages” in texts such as Le Joli Buisson de Jeunesse.) He is handsome, well liked, and judged by all to be full of promise. Meanwhile, at the court of Queen Bonne, John's consort, we find the young widow known as Madame des Belles Cousines. A lengthy digression on the virtuous and honorable state of widowhood ensues. The narrator, curiously, is simultaneously unidentified and referred to, in paragraph rubrics, as L'ACTEUR (actor, author); the narrative “I,” or ego, is present but downplayed through the use of circumlocutions. The reader or audience is frequently addressed as “vous.” (The story alludes continually to “real people”; in addition to King John and Queen Bonne, characters like Boucicaut and the Sire de Craon—whose real-life flourishing sometimes postdated the times of King John but who share, with the King, their presence in Froissart's Chronicles—rub elbows with totally fictitious personages. In addition, functions attributed to various characters often possess not only general but also specific historical accuracy, a kind of historical allusiveness. Thus, as lady-in-waiting to the Queen, Madame des Belles Cousines occupies a position very similar to that of the historical Christine de Pizan at the turn of the century—a celebrated and virtuous widow if ever there was one!) Like the widows of ancient Rome (and, by implication, like Christine de Pizan, who praised widows), Madame is a model of proper conduct and reputation, refusing to remarry or to engage in courtly dalliances. However, she displays an interest in young Jehan, whose naiveté and great promise—like Aeneas's, his future lies before him—prompts her to take him under her wing. With absolute secrecy—an attribute, incidentally, of the practice of fin'amors—she initiates him in the ways of courtly behavior, providing him with money to purchase suitable clothing and advancing his cause at court. She becomes his éminence grise, his means to social and professional advancement. She also takes charge of his moral and religious education, described with an extraordinary wealth of detail. Not only very gifted but also learned, Madame prepares a reading list for “young” (petit) Jehan—a veritable syllabus: Roman writers, “ancient poets,” Saint Augustine. (Again one is uncannily reminded of the learned Christine de Pizan whose moral fervor in defense of women as she participated in the Quarrel of the Romance of the Rose against the defenders of the rather misogynistic Jean de Meun and, especially, as she drew the portraits of virtuous women in her Livre de la Cité des Dames [1405]¹⁵ is replicated by the apparently equally authoritative courtly Madame des Belles Cousines. The Madame of the first two-thirds of the Saintré could easily have been the subject of one of Christine's biographical sketches. It is as though the fame of Christine de Pizan were being put to use in a fiction, only later, as we shall see, to be brutally undermined.) An amusing detail deserves mention. When Madame desires to meet with Jehan, she signals him at supper by cleaning her teeth fastidiously (and somehow sensually) with a silver toothpick. This remains her sign to him throughout the book and symbolizes concretely their secret pact.

A deep and loving affection develops between Madame and her young protégé; no hint is given of a liaison dangereuse. Jehan is devoted to her in all respects, and she loves him. Their intimacy is great, involving much hugging and kissing, though the completeness of their union is never precisely spelled out. Certainly, they come to spend many hours together, in each other's arms, at night. It would seem, however, that Madame does not accord the surplus to her young friend, that their love remains short of full physical consummation. (The reader thinks of such ambiguous romance couples as Perceval and Blanchefleur in Chrétien's Conte du Graal.)

In short, as matters turn out, Jehan de Saintré is Madame's creature: the signs of which he is made up—his code, how we are to “read” him—are entirely of her doing. He is, in effect, a systematic response to her. And, by the same token, her existence is, as far as we know it, completely a function of her oeuvre, of her playing the Pygmalion to his Galatea. He, as Galatea, creates—imprisons—her in her role as Pygmalion. They are both what the romance-type logic of their relationship causes them to become. Admirable as it may be in so many important respects—like the ladies' portraits in Christine's Cité?—this relationship, in its formality, presents traits of sterility and, especially, of circularity. What, one asks, will all this lead to? The issue of what I have called elsewhere romance dépassement¹⁶—of a kind of leap onto a higher plane (sometimes through sin or other types of lack of virtue) that romances typically effect (either “positively” or “negatively”)—raises itself, but no answer is immediately forthcoming. That particular romance “slot” is glaringly empty here.

The first third of the Saintré ends with the by now fully programmed Jehan ready to prove himself in tourneys both abroad—the first takes place at the court of Aragon—and at home. Jehan consistently wins these highly stylized encounters, gaining glory for himself and also for the prestige of French chivalry; he turns into the pure Froissardian hero. All Europe is the theater of Jehan's exploits: west and east, north and south—Poland, Italy, Spain, and England. The lavishly descriptive pages devoted to recounting Jehan's feats of prowess in these many tourneys resemble nothing so much as the chronicle of a brilliant and elegant, as well as costly, social season. Jehan is primus inter pares within a body of chivalry comprising both young and older knights. Meanwhile, the tender love affair between Jehan and the educated, well-dressed, and beautiful Madame—the chaste and unattainable widow—continues, as before, in secret; no one suspects the existence of their relationship. Jehan accedes, moreover, to a high position at court, well thought of by “good” King John. The program—one of purely formalized romance ritual—works itself out as flawlessly as the clockwork that fascinated Froissart in L'Horloge amoureuse. Tourney follows upon tourney, prize upon prize. During these expensive pageants (as in Méliador) nobody is seriously wounded, let alone killed; the entire second third of Jehan de Saintré is as devoid of bloodshed as, one is sure, the love affair between Jehan and Madame is empty of consummation. All this perfection—this romance stylization carried to an extreme in what is purveyed as a “real-life” situation—is, finally, a kind of gamesmanship, a lifeless play of rules.

But at this point, once again, Antoine de la Sale, with considerable genius, responds to Froissart's Méliador. Just as Froissart's youthful Arthurian chivalry encounters dépassement in its “crusade” against the “pagan” Irish—a transposition of Froissart's belief that the knights of his own time would do better to join forces with the Teutonic knights in the east against real infidels rather than continue their bloody and wasteful internecine warfare in the west—so Antoine de la Sale, more resolutely and directly “historical” (and in prose!), recounts in his fiction the fictitious story of how, under Jehan de Saintré's leadership, knights and reigning nobility from all over Europe (the list of these noblemen alone takes up over twenty pages!) undertake a “trip to Prussia” to engage and defeat the “Saracens” there. This enterprise simultaneously closes the second third of the Saintré and opens the final part. The Christian forces win a resounding victory, but at the cost, this time, of much bloodshed and death. Jehan at their head, they return home, covered with glory, to the immense relief and joy of King John, Queen Bonne, the court, and, naturally, Madame des Belles Cousines. (Incidentally, it is before the great battle in Prussia that Jehan finally receives the “order of knighthood” at the hands of none other than the “King of Bohemia”; henceforth he will be known as “le seigneur de Saintré.” This is clearly a reference to the universally admired, blind John of Luxemburg, the real King of Bohemia, who lost his life at Crécy in 1346. Froissart's romance/chronicle world is explicitly engaged on numerous levels.)

Of course, in reality no Jehan de Saintré or splendid army of the sort described by Antoine de la Sale ever set foot in Prussia; the reallife “trips to Prussia” usually were undertaken by small groups of mainly young knights under the general supervision of the Teutonic Order, not under the command of western leaders. Though purportedly historical, the episode is in fact as fictional as the Arthurian crusade in Ireland, and surely it was perceived as such by Antoine's readers. The episode constitutes yet another example of Antoine de la Sale's upending of Froissart by romanticizing—fictionalizing—a supposedly historical, or at least verisimilitudinous, event. Antoine de la Sale shows up Froissart by doing just the opposite of what he had done in Méliador.

It is when Jehan de Saintré returns to the court that, from the point of view of traditional romance programming, the text goes haywire. Within the framework of “normal” romance expectations, the triumphant hero (as in Méliador, for instance) should return to court, get the lady, inherit a kingdom, and live contentedly forever after. But, as we noted earlier, the very perfection—the exaggerated perfection—of Antoine's romance structure up to the Prussian battle imparts a definite bloodlessness, a sterility, a sort of closed, merry-go-round quality to his narrative—or rather, I venture to say, to the narrative's referentiality (especially to what it seemingly refers to). On the one hand, in that it is a romance text, the Saintré by definition refers to itself, to an inner system of dynamics. On the other hand, the dynamics are simply not very dynamic. The Prussian victory can legitimately be construed (outwardly) as a form of chivalric dépassement: the programming to which Jehan has been subjected—his “education”—has enabled him, quite literally, to earn his spurs and even, by his exemplarity, to earn respect for the chivalry he is called upon to incarnate. But this dépassement is undermined by the very fact of Antoine de la Sale's turning the Prussian victory into fiction. An all-too-real fourteenth-century political and military problem has, like the Waterloo of Stendhal's Chartreuse de Parme, been incorporated into a recognizable fiction, not, as in Froissart, transposed or transformed into an Irish “crusade.” The problem—the chanson de geste-like ideal of the “trip to Prussia”—has been trivialized or made into pure legend. Meanwhile, Saintre and Madame are stymied in their love. There is simply nowhere that their love can go; the author can invent nothing more to say about it. The very romancelike “Roman widow” motif—what Antoine de la Sale might very well have borrowed from Christine de Pizan—whose prevalence we noted at the start of the Saintré provides a possible key to the problem. Likened to the virtuous Roman widows of yore, Madame is now, in effect, required by Antoine de la Sale's text to play out the role of the Carthaginian widow Dido. Her Dido-ness—or perhaps the Dido-ness of her role in the Saintré—undermines the ostensibly “Roman” virtuousness of her character, as this character is revealed to us. There can be no question of marriage between Jehan and Madame, or so it would seem; yet Madame is neither a Guenevere nor an Iseut. Jehan de Saintré is in a bind: he cannot leave Madame as Aeneas abandoned Dido, for in the name of what genuine mission could he do so? Nor, really, can he continue with honor to be her creature. He is now ostensibly a mature man—a thirty-year-old who, like the Villon of the Testament, ought already to have “drunk all his shames”—but he is deprived by the romance format of any place to go. His “de-generation” is at issue here. And, as we shall see, Madame will have the occasion to assume the sinfulness—in romance, courtly terms, at least—of Dido's lustfulness.

Nevertheless, the problem of Jehan's destiny remains on two counts: (1) in romances the hero's destiny must be resolved, and (2) the text specifically purports to tell the story of Jehan's life (that is, it offers itself as his biography). Thus, in effect, the world of the Saintré falls apart for lack of glue to hold it together. Everything, at least up to this point, has been too perfect. No overwhelming passion as in the case of Lancelot and Guenevere, no ironic celebration of clerkly artistry as in Cligés, no black (and fascinating) sin as in Tristan, no quest as in Perceval or in the Rose. Just the possibility—and the romance impossibility—of a return to business as usual. But can either Madame or the Seigneur de Saintré accept it, no matter how much each would presumably wish to do so?

The answer to that question is, of course, no, and the consequences of that answer are momentous, both for the text of the Saintré and for romance textuality in general.

For no reason, except perhaps boredom—a reversal of the truly heroic destiny (one is reminded of the “folly” of Don Quijote, of Cligés's departure for Arthur's court, and indeed of the importance to that romance of “boring” descriptions of tourneys)—for once, on his own, Jehan decides to assemble a little troop of knights and to go off with them on a set of tourneys. He asks leave of no one. Like Chrétien's Yvain, he presents those to whom he owes allegiance—the King and Madame—with a fait accompli, replying to the King's displeasure by saying that he has given his word to his companions and it would be dishonorable of him to go back on his word. The King reluctantly allows Jehan to depart, remarking just the same that it is high time he hang up his spurs, stop behaving like an adolescent, and, presumably, take up some serious office at court. Madame is disconsolate and angry; she feels betrayed. She is definitely shunted into the role of Dido, but, as we shall see, with a difference. Her demise, like Dido's, results from passion and impotence, but instead of being a physical death it is, perhaps even more poignantly, a moral one: it is most intriguing that she will be forced either against her will or by the revelation, at long last, of her deepest will and nature (her true character)—the matter is profoundly ambivalent—to forsake her lineage as a Roman widow and, concomitantly, to complete the (maybe) too one-sided picture of virtuous womanhood given by Christine de Pizan in her Cité des Dames.¹⁷

Jehan and his party leave the court in order to play out their childish games. Through a series of ruses and feigning of physical illness (to account for her misery)—she still refuses to acknowledge her passion for Saintré—Madame obtains permission from the Queen to repair for some time to her own lands. She promises solemnly to return when she is feeling better. En route with her retainers (who are presented as a society of gullible and rather superficial ladies), she reaches the confines of her domains—an abbey church where she and her companions obtain the hospitality of the abbot. Quite taken with Madame, the abbot—a lubricious, clever fabliau-type character—plies her with rich food and drink. In most uncourtly fashion—indeed, burning with desire—she succumbs to his advances and, in very short order, becomes his most willing partner in lust, to the point of forgetting or no longer caring about her duties at court. She does not answer letters addressed to her by the Queen; her love for Saintré disappears. Her cynicism is complete. She eagerly commits all seven deadly sins—sloth, anger, lust, gluttony, and pride foremost among them. She has come to incarnate the fickleness and animality of womanhood denounced by so many medieval clerics. Nevertheless, we can never forget that all these developments were in fact provoked by Saintré's most inconsiderate, and yet inevitable, decision to leave her and the court.

On his return to court, Saintré learns of Madame's “illness.” He requests permission to visit her. He dines with her and the abbot, but is tricked into a wrestling match with his powerfully built rival (who speaks words of scorn concerning “knights and squires”). Saintré is vanquished in this ignoble struggle: his chivalric training is of no use in this base form of combat. He resembles the French knights at Crécy and Poitiers, decimated by churlish crossbowmen from remote England and Wales. Madame openly sides with her new lover. Humiliated and disgusted, Saintré is forced to seek revenge and, also by trickery, lures Madame and the abbot to a dinner in his quarters where he cajoles the abbot to arm himself. Outfitted as a knight, the abbot is obliged to accept combat with Saintré. This time, of course, Saintré wins, and, avenging himself, he pierces the abbot's cheeks and tongue with his dagger, telling him nevermore to speak ill of knights. He then addresses Madame, accusing her of disloyalty and removing the blue belt-cloth—symbol of loyalty—that she was wearing. The break between them is complete and irreparable.

Madame finally returns to court. In her presence Saintré tells the Queen and her ladies of the faithlessness of a lady to her knightly lover without, at first, revealing names. He asks the court—an improvised cour d'amour of the sort one frequently finds, for example, in the poetry of Machaut or of Alain Chartier¹⁸—to pronounce on the lady's guilt. After it has vehemently done so, he displays the blue belt-cloth. The secret of Madame and Saintré's love is at last disclosed, as is the fact of her treachery. She is disgraced. May all ladies heed her sad example! The story ends. The ACTEUR intervenes to say that Saintré lived a long life of chivalric service, even once taking on twenty-two renegade Christians at the Sultan's court in Cairo and defeating them; but, he adds, to tell further of such things would take too much time. When Saintré finally died, the grave diggers, preparing his last resting place, discovered—in true romance style—a little coffer containing a note that read: “Here will rest the body of the most valiant knight of France, and more—of the entire world!”¹⁹ A brief epilogue closes the text. Everything appears, simply, to peter out. To all intents and purposes Saintré's “life” had ended with his denunciation of Madame; the rest is not worth talking about.

Part 3 of Jehan de Saintré, with its introduction of the base-born abbot—a stock character in many Old French fabliaux—and with its almost stereotypically clerkly vindictiveness about female inconstancy, jars with everything that precedes it, although it depends as entirely on previous romance structures as do parts 1 and 2. Not nearly so much to blame as Jehan makes her out to be, Madame des Belles Cousines becomes a sort of spurned fairy-figure; Jehan himself is an Yvain who never really grows up; the artificiality and decay of King John's court—like that of Arthur in the later Lancelot-Grail texts—after having been hinted at in Antoine de la Sale's distortion of the realities of that court, finally become patent (it literally ceases to exist). The celebration of jubilant youthfulness one finds in Froissart's Méliador is replaced by Antoine's analysis of the potential, built-in debility of any mythic principle. Also, very significantly, part 3 takes on an extraordinary dramatic—that is, theatrical—tonality and form: act 1, Jehan's departure for the tourneys; act 2, the departure and fall of Madame; act 3, Jehan's first encounter with Madame and the abbot; act 4, Jehan's vengeance on the abbot; act 5, the court scene and Madame's disgrace. Even the epilogue is like that of a play. Staging seems to be called for. Reinforced by the presence of the ACTEUR, this theatrical progression constitutes a kind of present-tense resolution of, or commentary on, the narrative historicity (situated in the past) of parts 1 and 2 of the Saintré—a restoration and a conveying of the meaning of the two initial sections.²⁰ And what is being dramatized, I believe, is an attitude that pervades the work of Antoine de la Sale (we find it also in his Tannhaüser-like Paradis de la reine Sybille), namely, that of nostalgia for and yet recognition of the impossibility of what the Basel-born philologist Johann Jacob Bachofen labeled Mutterrecht: the notion of Woman—Mother, Lover, and Teacher—as lawgiver and repository of authentic order (the Roman widow motif developed at the start of the text).²¹ Forbidden by the very structure of Jehan de Saintré to become her protégé's wife—and thereby to combine, so to speak, in “real life” these three attributes of Woman—Madame's doom was sealed. Parts 1 and 2 of the Saintré recount in historical form the deployment of the Mutterrecht, or Eternal Feminine, principle—a past-centered narrative located in a time when, ironically, war, not love, prevailed in France; part 3, in theatrical fashion, plays out its present-centered destruction. The lady of medieval romance, or so Antoine de la Sale (along with Christine de Pizan) seems to be telling us, has (unrightfully?) lost her power, and with this loss—which, in fact, Antoine sadly commemorates, I think—a certain kind of chivalry also must cease to exist or be seen to have existed merely in the imagination of romancers. Ironies abound in Antoine's restoration of this fund of romance imagination. It is nevertheless because of his romance form that he can both share in and express the nostalgia of, for example, Villon, whose refrains “Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?” and “Mais où est le preux Charlemagne?” come directly to mind. Not only does Antoine de la Sale depict and judge the twilight of a certain order—he pulls no punches in indicting Jehan's empty chivalric estheticism—he also deplores this passing of the “best and the bravest,” the fact that, like Jehan himself in his later years, they no longer have a story worth telling. What is to replace the forms of the past, as well as their content? he seems to be inquiring. With Antoine de la Sale, I believe, the romance quest commences to be the active search for the earthly—the real—El Dorado (America?) and, perhaps above all, for Dulcinea. Antoine's extreme nominalism leads him (and the romance genre as a whole) to experiment with a new realism—with the imparting of romance names to (otherwise irreal?) places and people. Meanwhile, this new transformation of the real by romance will feed itself back into romance narrative too, restoring it, as Antoine de la Sale had done, by renovating and conjoining anew the very ideas of writing and adventure.

Notes

1. Until the mid-1920s the standard edition of the text was that of J.-M. Guichard (1843) and its derivatives. MS F, Paris Bibliothèque Nationale nouv. acq. fr. 10057, served as the base for P. Champion and F. Desonay, eds., Le Petit Jehan de Saintré (Paris: Ed. du Trianon, 1926), with reproductions of miniatures from other manuscripts. All references in this essay are to C. Knudson and J. Misrahi, Jehan de Saintré, 2nd ed., Textes Littéraires Français (Genève: Droz, 1967), which, unfortunately, by its thin introductory material and too brief glossary is not as useful as it might otherwise be. This edition offers a modified version of the text of Vatican Reg. Lat. 896. As the editors admit, they were working against the clock to “Faire paraître dans le plus bref délai possible une édition moderne de ce texte capital” (vii) and promised “une seconde édition amplifiée,” which never appeared.

2. See A. Coville, Le Petit Jehan de Saintré: recherches complémentaires (Paris: Droz, 1937); F. Desonay, “Le Petit Jehan de Saintré,” Revue du Seizième Siècle 14 (1927) 1-48, 213-280; and the sections “Armures, Costume, Joutes, Tournois, etc.” and “Blason” in Knudson and Misrahi xxv-xxviii.

3. See, for example, the short but rich appreciation of the Saintré by L. Foulet, “Le Petit Jehan de Saintré,” Histoire de la littérature française, 2 vols., ed. J. Bedier and P. Hazard (Paris: Larousse, n.d.): “Et ce qui est vaincu avec Jean de Saintré, on n'en saurait douter, c'est l'idéal qu'il représente, c'est la chevalerie elle-même” (1: 108).

4. “En revanche, les chapitres du début … sont d'une délicatesse charmante. L'éducation du page est traitée d'une main légère à souhait. On a comparé ces espiègleries et ces jolis sermons aux entretiens de la Comtesse et de Chérubin dans le Mariage de Figaro, mais le petit Saintré est plus naïf, plus naturel et plus sympathique que Chérubin, et ‘ma dame’, avec tout son latin, autrement vivante que la Comtesse. … Antoine de la Sale a écrit le premier roman où apparaisse, indistinct encore et peu flatté, l'esprit moderne” (Foulet 1: 108). See also J. M. Ferrier, Forerunners of the French Novel: An Essay on the Development of the Nouvelle in the Later Middle Ages (Manchester, Eng.: Manchester UP, 1954).

5. Knudson and Misrahi vii.

6. Julia Kristeva, Le Texte du roman: Approche sémiologique d'une structure discursive transformationelle, Approaches to Semiotics 6, ed. T. A. Sebeok (The Hague: Mouton, 1970). The published work is marred by countless misprints.

7. Kristeva's study of the roman never mentions Chrétien de Troyes; a potted survey of French literature “au temps d'Antoine de la Sale” informs us that by his time “l'Italie … a déjà accompli son renouvellement,” that French poetry is not in too bad a state, but that “la prose balbutie encore.” Froissart (a balbutieur?) is not named, nor are other prose chronicles or, for that matter, the Lancelot-Grail cycle. Consequently, we learn, Jehan de Saintré “est d'une originalité inattendue” (20). Statements of this ilk “justify” Kristeva's decision “de tenter de saisir les lois de l'élaboration du roman dans le texte d'Antoine de la Sale.” Her tabula rasa allows her axiomatically to affirm (or to deny) anything she chooses (for example, “le règne de la LITTERATURE est le règne de la VALEUR MARCHANDE” [53]; “la dévalorisation explicite dont la femme sera l'objet à partir du XIVe siècle dans la littérature bourgeoise [les fabliaux]” [61]; “Le type d'écriture qui s'installera à partir de la Renaissance sera une parole consciente d'avoir pour référent une autre parole” [105]).

8. The “disjunctiveness” of the novel (roman) in regard to older literary productions resides, however, in the “non-disjunctive function of the novelistic [romanesque] utterance” which “opposes” such utterances to “la disjonction exclusive du symbole et témoigne de l'effort de la pensée occidentale pour accéder à la dialectique” (189-90). The novel, in other words, symbolizes nothing: “le discours romanesque tourne dans la clôture de la non-disjonction en se donnant une infinité transformationnelle signifiante cernée par l'immobilité (l'équivalence) des ‘signifiés’” (189). Nevertheless, the development of the novel itself “symbolizes” an important step in what Kristeva construes to be Western civilization's efforts to free itself from Platonism and Christianity; it betokens progress, at times depicted by her as quite linear (190). She hedges her bet, however: “Si le roman a détruit le mythe de l'épopée, on parle de nos jours d'un retour du roman au mythe [here she presses into service Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus]. Ce retour dont l'importance est capitale pour notre civilisation, n'entre pas dans le cadre de notre recherche; signalons-le pourtant, puisqu'il dessine le trajet complet de cette transformation que le discours occidental accomplit pour revenir à son idéologème initial” (15; emphasis added to point out what must be the reactionary side to Western discourse, its Vico-like corsi and ricorsi).

9. Ignorance perhaps also underlies the following two statements: “‘Jehan de Saintré’ est le premier roman français écrit en prose” and, nine lines later, “Les historiens de la littérature française attirent fort peu l'attention sur Antoine de la Sale et ‘Jehan de Saintré’ qui est peut-être le premier écrit en prose qui puisse porter le nom de roman si nous considérons comme roman le texte qui relève de l'idéologème ambigu du signe” (22-23; emphasis added). Hedging again: words say anything and, once again, are forgotten; problems—“romance,” “novel”—are swept under the rug; enormously important blocks of text are simply not mentioned; what of prose (versus verse) narrative? And so on. For an interesting study of the ambiguity of sign-readings (and, by extension, of their equally ambiguous idéologèmes), so important to twelfth-century romance, see Michelle A. Freeman, “Transpositions structurelles et intertextualité: le Cligés de Chrétien,” Littérature 41 (Feb. 1981): 50-61. Freeman focuses on a key text of the period, which, as we shall observe, set up a framework of the problematics within which Antoine de la Sale very deliberately worked.

10. Kristeva 190-92. What Antoine de la Sale (and the novel) accomplished is credited by Kristeva with permitting “la formation de la sémiologie comme science des MODELES (signifiants) applicables à des signifiés.” We are indeed deep in the country referred to, disrespectfully, by Descartes as a pays de roman.

11. A single example suffices to illustrate this point, though the question of Guillaume's relationship to Chrétien deserves full and detailed study. Calogrenant's tale-within-a-tale (Chrétien de Troyes, Yvain, ed. Mario Roques, CFMA [Paris: Champion, 1971], vv. 142-580) uncannily foreshadows Guillaume de Lorris's Roman de la Rose: (1) its “classic” clerkliness (for example, a well-delineated prologue; a midpoint—locus of identity—at which words defining the adventure, or matter, of the text are also to be read as referring to the composition of the text); (2) in both instances, the narrator, adopting a clerkly stance, tells of a chivalric adventure that befell him some years earlier—an unsuccessful adventure in each case; (3) the Magic Fountain in Yvain bears a striking similarity to the Perilous Fountain of Guillaume; (4) the prologues to both texts employ the songe/mençonge rhyme (with Guillaume inverting Calogrenant in his evaluation of the truth of dreams), and so on. The analogies are too powerful to be ignored, especially when one remembers that at the time Guillaume was writing (1220-25), vernacular romancers were making systematic efforts to restore to favor a romance textuality accused by many as mendacious or frivolous.

12. See Karl D. Uitti, “From Clerc to Poète: The Relevance of the Romance of the Rose to Machaut's World”; Kevin Brownlee, “The Poetic Œuvre of Guillaume de Machaut: The Identity of Discourse and the Discourse of Identity”; M. A. Freeman, “Froissart's Le Joli Buisson de Jonece: A Farewell to Poetry?” in Machaut's World: Science and Art in the Fourteenth Century, ed. M. P. Cosman and B. Chandler, Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences 314 (New York: New York Academy of Sciences, 1978) 209-47.

13. “avoit une assez josne dame vesve qui des Belles Cousines estoit, mais de son nom et seignorie l'istoire s'en tait, a cause de ce que aprés pourrez veoir” (Knudson and Misrahi 2-3).

14. See Peter F. Dembowski, “Considérations sur Meliador,” Etudes de philologie et d'histoire littéraire offertes à Jules Horrent (Tournai: GEDIT, 1980) 121-31, and especially his monograph on Froissart's Méliador, Jean Froissart and His Méliador: Context, Craft, Sense, Edward C. Armstrong Monographs on Medieval Literature 2 (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1983). See also Beate Schmolke-Hasselmann, Der arturische Versroman von Chrestien bis Froissart: zur Geschichte einer Gattung, Beihefte zur Zeitschrift für romanische Philologie 177 (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1980).

15. Christine de Pizan's work, virtually unavailable in a reliable version of the French original, is now accessible in a splendid and accurate English-language translation done by E. Jeffrey Richards: The Book of the City of Ladies (New York: Persea, 1982), including a foreword by Marina Warner and an excellent scholarly introduction by Richards. The Cité des Dames in part derives from and both responds to and expands on Boccaccio's De claris mulieribus. Richards rightly stresses Christine's effort as an attempt to restore to women the values rightfully associated with them:

    In The Book of the City of Ladies [whose title alludes directly to Augustine's City of God] Christine expands her defense of women to the past and future so that she can expose the utter falseness of “masculine myths” once and for all. Christine sought a more perfect realization of the ideals transmitted by the tradition which she had inherited, which she had cultivated, and which she hoped to transform.

    (xxix)

    Both the form and the matière of Christine correspond to romance procedures.

16. See Karl D. Uitti, Story, Myth, and Celebration in Old French Narrative Poetry, 1050-1200 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1973) 217-31.

17. Christine de Pizan refers several times to Dido in the Cité des Dames, and devotes two chapters to her: “Here Reason speaks of the prudence and attentiveness of Queen Dido” and “Concerning Dido, queen of Carthage, on the subject of constant love in women.” (Dido obsessed Old French romancers from the very beginning; her story is told in the mid-twelfth-century Roman d'Enéas, and she, so to speak, constitutes the subtext for several of the heroines of Marie de France as well as for the Laudine of Chrétien's Yvain, for example.) Christine presents Dido with great sympathy as essentially a victim of male inconstancy and perversion. However, her first portrayal of Dido—as resourceful and prudent queen—in every respect corresponds to the Madame des Belles Cousines of parts 1 and 2 of the Saintré. The following is Reason's (that is, Christine's) summary:

    Because of her prudent government, they changed her name [from Elissa] and called her Dido, which is the equivalent of saying virago in Latin, which means “the woman who has the strength and force of a man.” Thus she lived for a long time in glory and would have lived so the rest of her life if Fortune had not been unfavorable to her, but Fortune, often envious of the prosperous, mixed too harsh a brew for her in the end, just as I will tell you afterward, at the right time and place.

    (Richards 95)

    From having been what I have called the Roman widow, Dido/Elissa is, like Madame, transformed by Fortune into the Dido of romance tradition, the new (and not entirely accurate) symbol of womanly animality and fickleness; in both instances the role of Fortune is assumed by men (Aeneas in the first case, Jehan/abbot in the second). The active and strong Dido/Elissa of Christine (pt. 1, ch. 46) (again analogous to Madame in Antoine de la Sale, pts. 1 and 2) turns into the passive, victimized Dido/Madame des Belles Cousines of, respectively, Christine (pt. 2, ch. 55) and Antoine part 3. Assuming, as I believe we must, that Christine's Cité acts as an important subtext for the Saintré, Madame, though disgraced at court (but, really, what kind of court is at issue here!), remains exemplary as victim; the blame is not all hers. One more point deserves mention. Christine stresses Dido's generosity toward Aeneas. Dido gives Aeneas shelter, clothes, money, and the like; he has nothing. Is that not precisely the behavior of Madame toward Jehan in part 1 of the Saintré (a behavior, incidentally, described as “curious” by L. Foulet, op. cit.)? Does not the moral “afterlife” of Christine's Dido live on, or adhere to, Antoine's Madame?

18. For example, Machaut's Le Jugement du roy de Navarre and Le Jugement du roy de Bohême, or the controversy surrounding Chartier's La Belle Dame sans merci.

19. “Cy reposera le corps du plus vaillant chevalier de France, et plus, que pour lors sera” (Knudson and Misrahi 308). This trivializes a scene like that of Chrétien's Lancelot discovering his future tomb and its portentous writing (Le Chevalier de la Charrette, ed. Mario Roques, CFMA [Paris: Champion, 1970], (vv. 1856ff.).

20. On this complex issue of restoration and completion, see the interpretation of Marie de France's general prologue, vv. 15-16 (“K'i peüssent gloser la lettre / E de lur sen le surplus mettre”) in Alfred Foulet and K. D. Uitti, “The Prologue to the Lais of Marie de France: A Reconsideration,” Romance Philology 35.1 (August 1981): 242-49.

21. See Myth, Religion, and Mother Right: Selected Writings of J. J. Bachofen, trans. Ralph Manheim, Preface by George Boas, Introduction by Joseph Campbell, Bollingen Series 84 (Princeton: Princeton UP, 1967).