A Distant Mirror (83 page)

Deschamps was concerned with men as they are, not as they should be. Pimps, sorcerers, monks, scolds, lawyers, tax-collectors, prostitutes, prelates, rascals, female procurers, and a variety of repugnant hags
populate his verses. As he grew older, his vision grew sourer, perhaps owing to the number of his ailments, including toothache, “the cruellest of sufferings.” For a regimen of good health he advised drinking light red wine mixed with running water, abstaining from spiced drinks, cabbage, strong meats, fruits, chestnuts, butter and cream, and sauces of onion and garlic, dressing warmly in winter and lightly in summer, taking exercise, and never sleeping on the stomach.

Though he never lost his indignation at social injustice, Deschamps looked with a satiric eye on the human species, which though endowed with reason, prefers folly. The sins of the age he most condemned were impiety causing disobedience to God, pride that generates all other vices, sodomy the “unnatural” sin, sorcery, and love of money. In the new reign, though he held a post as
maître d’hôtel
to Louis d’Orléans, he felt himself displaced at court by frivolous and over-dressed young men of doubtful courage, equivocal habits, and uncertain faith. His complaint of court life was the same as is made of government at the top in any age: it was composed of hypocrisy, flattery, lying, paying and betraying; it was where calumny and cupidity reigned, common sense lacked, truth dared not appear, and where to survive one had to be deaf, blind, and dumb.

After fifty years, the purpose of the war had faded and men could hardly remember its cause. Although the Duke of Gloucester and the “boars” of England were as bellicose as ever, they could not raise the funds for another expedition. In France, the aborted invasion of England had drained desire for aggression. Anti-war sentiment was growing, even if, in the case of Mézières, it was in the interest of turning hostility against the infidel. “All Christendom has been disturbed for fifty years by your ambition to gain a little ground. The rights and wrongs of the matter have long been obscured and all Christians must now be held responsible for the shedding of so much Christian blood.” To bring Christians together for a crusade was not seen by a man like Mézières as war but as the use of the sword for the glory of God.

After six months’ parley, a three years’ truce, but still no definitive settlement, was concluded in June 1389, with intricate provisions for negotiating each transfer of territory or sovereignty in case of dispute. With communication restored, Coucy was now able to send a messenger to Philippa in England “from his great desire to know certainly of her welfare.” He was appointed Captain of Guienne to supervise the truce in the south and to guard and defend the country from Dordogne to the sea, including Auvergne and Limousin.

The news of peace was received by the common people, in at least one case, with skepticism and a curious revival of the prophecy once attributed to Coucy about the King and his spade. The citizens of Bois-Gribaut in the Limousin fell to discussing the news of the truce brought by a bourgeois of their village on his return from Paris. Some were unimpressed, saying they would soon be assembling against England again. A poor witless shepherd named
Marcial le Vérit, who was said to have been held in prison by the English in great misery, expressed a more subversive opinion for which he was later arrested: “Don’t you believe it. You will never see peace. As for me, I don’t believe it, because the King has destroyed and pillaged Flanders as he did Paris. And what’s more, the Seigneur de Coucy brought him a spade and told him that when he had destroyed his country, he would have to use that.” The saying had evidently struck a responsive chord.

Coucy appeared as a symbol of another kind in a challenge addressed to him before the truce was signed by Thomas Mowbray, Earl of Nottingham and future Duke of Norfolk, one of the Lords Appellant whom Richard was courting and had appointed Earl Marshal of England for life. To this young man of 23, Coucy represented the epitome of chivalry; to encounter him in combat was to learn prowess and gain honor. When piety and virtue, the supposed springs of knightly conduct, were conspicuous by their absence, the cloak of honor and valor was all the more anxiously sought. Human beings of any age need to approve of themselves; the bad times in history come when they cannot.

As “a man of approved honor, valor, chivalry and great renown, as is known in many honorable places,” Coucy was challenged by Nottingham to name a day and place for a joust of three points of the lance, three of the sword, three of the dagger, and three blows of the ax on foot. He was to send, sealed with his seal, “a good and loyal safe-conduct” from his King, and if Calais were chosen as the site, Nottingham would in turn supply a safe-conduct from his King. He suggested that the combat take place in front of “as many persons as you and I shall be prepared to supply with safe-conduct and lodging.” No record exists of a reply or of any such joust taking place. Coucy was either uninterested or unwilling to engage while the truce was still pending.

Foiled of glory, Nottingham took up the famous challenge of St. Ingelbert in the following year when the dashing Boucicaut and two companions, angered by English boasting after the truce, offered to hold the lists against all comers in any form of combat for thirty days. Prudent counsel advised against re-opening a quarrel so soon after the truce for the whims of “wild young knights,” and friends advised the
three that it would be beyond their powers. Boucicaut was not one to be moved by prudence. At sixteen he had fought his first battle at Roosebeke where a huge Fleming, mocking his youth and small size, told him to go back to his mother’s arms. Drawing his dagger, Boucicaut had plunged it into the man’s side with the words, “Do the children of your country play games like these?” He and his companions maintained the lists of St. Ingelbert with great courage and he went on to become Marshal of France and share in Coucy’s last adventure.

Nottingham’s craving for combat was to have a darker conclusion. Ten years later it led him as Duke of Norfolk to the historic duel with Bolingbroke which was to precipitate the downfall of Richard II. Banished together with his opponent at the time of the duel, Nottingham was to die in exile within a year.

Moving from place to place, visiting, investigating, asking questions, Jean Froissart came to Paris in the month when the truce was signed to visit “the
gentil
Sire de Coucy … one of my seigneurs and patrons.” In the twenty years since the death of his first patron, Queen Philippa of England, Froissart had enjoyed some support from the Emperor Wenceslas and had obtained a clerical living through the patronage of Guy de Châtillon, Count of Blois, with no duties but to continue his history. When Guy de Blois went bankrupt, Coucy had proposed Froissart for a canonry of Lille which had so far not materialized. Meantime,

While the recipient of patronage is likely in turn to be generous with compliments, Froissart’s for Coucy seem more than merely conventional; they add up to a distinct individual.
“Gentil”
was a word routinely applied to any important and well-considered noble, meaning no more than that he or she was nobly born; Coucy, in addition, is “subtle,” “prudent,” and especially
“imaginatif”
or
“fort-imaginatif,”
meaning intelligent, thoughtful, or far-seeing, and the all-inclusive
“sage”
or
“très-sage,”
which could mean wise, sensible, wary, rational, discreet, judicious, cool, sober, staid, well-behaved, steady, virtuous, or presumably any or all of these. He is also described as
“cointe,”
meaning elegant in manner and dress, gracious, courteous, valiant—a compendium of the attributes of chivalry.

Book One of Froissart’s
Chronicles
, in which chivalry immediately recognized a celebrator, had appeared in 1370, at once creating a wide demand. The oldest extant manuscript copy of Book One, now in the Royal Library of Belgium, bears the Coucy coat-of-arms.

Multiple copying of manuscripts was no longer the monopoly of lonely monks in their cells but the occupation of professional scribes who had their own guilds. Licensed in Paris by the University, supposedly to ensure accurate texts, the scribes were the agony of living authors, who complained bitterly of the copyists’ delays and errors. The “trouble and discouragement” a writer suffers, wailed Petrarch, was indescribable. Such was the “ignorance, laziness, and arrogance of these fellows” that when a writer has given them his work, he never knows what changes he will find in it when he gets it back.

The rise of a bourgeois audience in the 14th century and the increased manufacture of paper created a reading public wider than the nobles who had known literature from recitation or reading aloud in their castle halls. The mercantile class, familiar by reason of its occupation with reading and writing, was ready to read books of all sorts: verse, history, romance, travel, bawdy tales, allegories, and religious works. Possession of books had become the mark of a cultivated man. Since the magnates and newly rich imitated the manners, ideals, and dress of the nobility, the chronicles of chivalry had a great vogue.

What books Enguerrand VII may have owned in addition to Froissart’s
Chronicles
are not known except for those listed in the royal archives as gifts to him from the King. In addition to the French Bible from Genesis to Psalms, which he was given for his services in subduing the Duke of Brittany, he received in 1390 the romance of
King Peppin and His Wife Bertha Bigfoot
and the rhymed
Gestes de Charlemagne
, “well-inscribed on three columns to the page in a very large volume,” which had belonged to the Queen and which “the King took from her and gave to Monsieur de Coucy.”

Froissart arrived in Paris from the south, where he had visited another patron, the Count of Foix, and had been received by the Pope in Avignon. He had also attended the wedding of the Duc de Berry to a twelve-year-old bride, the occasion of much ribald comment. Eager for first-hand reports of these affairs, Coucy invited Froissart to accompany him on a journey to his fief at Mortagne. Riding together,
they exchanged news, Coucy telling the chronicler what he knew of the truce parleys, and Froissart full of tales about his effulgent host at Foix. It appeared that the Count of Foix, who had the wardship of Berry’s bride, had taken cool advantage of the Duke’s ardor; he had strung out the marriage negotiations until Berry, in his impatience, agreed to pay 30,000 francs to cover the maiden’s expenses while she had been Foix’s ward.

In the course of persistent questioning, Froissart had drawn from the Count of Foix a contemporary view of the 14th century, seen from a position of privilege. The history of his own lifetime, Gaston Phoebus said, would be more sought after than any other because “in these fifty years there have been more feats of arms and more marvels in the world than in 300 years before.” To him the ferment of the times was exciting; he had no misgivings. In the midst of events there is no perspective.

No misgivings about knighthood played a part in a frenzied celebration of that dignity on the occasion of the knighting of twelve-year-old Louis II of Anjou and his younger brother aged ten. In the ceremony’s four days of all-too secular festivities staged in the royal Abbey of St. Denis, 14th century France relived the decadence of Rome, and indeed the knighting of little boys was not so far removed from the emperor who made a Consul of his horse. The surpassing pomp of the occasion and the selection of St. Denis as the site were intended to promote enthusiasm for the Angevin recovery of the Kingdom of Naples. Radical alterations were made in the abbey’s precincts to accommodate tournaments, dances, and banquets. Religious services gave way to the hammering of carpenters and the coming and going of laborers and their materials. At the ceremony, after ritual baths and prayers, the two princelings, robed in floor-length furred mantles of double red silk, were escorted to the altar by squires holding naked swords by their points with golden spurs hanging from the hilts. In his enthusiasm for chivalric forms, Charles VI resurrected antique rituals which had fallen into disuse in his father’s time and were already so faded that spectators “thought it all strange and extraordinary” and inquired what the rites signified.

The same nostalgia was enacted in the next day’s tournament, when knights in polished armor were conducted to the lists by noble ladies “to imitate the gallantry of ancient worthies.” Each of the ladies in turn drew from her bosom a ribbon of colored silk to bestow graciously upon her knight. After each day’s jousts and tourneys, the celebrants “turned night into day” with dances, masquerades, feasting, drunkenness, and, according to the indignant Monk of St. Denis, “libertinage
and adultery.” Knighthood, represented by the two half-forgotten little principals, was not noticeably enhanced.

Government expenditure continued to mount through the year 1389 to an excess as extravagant as the uncles’, although its purpose was civil rather than military. Its climax was the ceremonial entry into Paris of Isabeau of Bavaria, for her coronation as Queen, an event of spectacular splendor and unparalleled marvels of public entertainment. Though its cost contradicted the good intentions of the new government, the performance was in itself a form of government in the same sense as a Roman circus. What is government but an arrangement by which the many accept the authority of the few? Circuses and ceremonies are meant to encourage the acceptance; they either succeed or, by costing too much, accomplish the opposite.

Some of the Queen’s thunder was stolen by
Valentina Visconti, the new wife of Louis d’Orléans, who arrived just in time for the occasion. Since her marriage by proxy to Louis in 1387, the two intervening years had been required by her father, Gian Galeazzo, to amass her unprecedented dowry of half a million gold francs, plus Asti and other territories of Piedmont. Valentina was his only remaining child, to whom he was so attached that he left Pavia rather than be present at her departure, “and this was because he could not take leave of her without bursting into tears.” As the daughter of his dead wife, Isabelle of France—and thus Louis of Orléans’ first cousin—Valentina had grown up in a household which her father had made “a harbor for the famous, for men skilled in all learning and art whom he held in high honor.” She spoke Latin, French, and German fluently, and brought her own books and harp with her to France. Thirteen hundred knights escorted her across the Alps, her trousseau may be extrapolated from a robe embroidered with 2,500 pearls and sprinkled with diamonds, her future household with Louis was carpeted in Aragon leather and hung with vermilion velvet embroidered with roses and crossbows. The household accounts show silk sheets costing 400 francs as New Year’s gifts, but all the luxuries could not keep melancholy from pervading the marriage.