Mimesis (43 page)

And when the commander heard Madame speak so valiantly, with a thoughtful sigh he thanked Jesus Christ, the most high and powerful God, that from the heart of a female and weak creature could come such high and virtuous words as those Madame spoke, having thus entirely abandoned the love of her only and most beloved son and all for the love of him. Then in brief words he said to her: “My dear, as far as the love of my heart can reach, more than ever I now thank you for the high and grievous gift you have now given me. I have just heard the watch sound daybreak, and although we have not slept this night, I must arise; but you rest a little.”—“Rest,” she said, “alas, my lord, I have neither heart nor eye nor limb to my body which agrees to that. But I shall rise and we shall go to mass together to thank Our Lord for everything.”)

After this scene the narrative continues at great length. Again the Prince’s heralds appear, to demand the surrender and threaten the boy’s execution. They are dismissed. Then the commander decides to try a sortie to save the boy by force. At this point the narrative shifts to the enemy’s camp, where the Prince has the boy led out to execution in chains and forces the Seigneur du Chastel’s herald (whose name is also Chastel) to join the procession, despite his resistance. Then we are taken back inside the fortress and told how the commander’s wife tries to make him give up the projected sortie and how she swoons, while the guards see the enemy’s men returning from the execution, which means that it is too late for the sortie; how the commander has his wife put to bed and how he consoles her; and how the herald Chastel returns to the fortress and reports the events to the commander, repeating numerous details which had already been presented in another form. However, I will here quote the description of the boy’s death as the herald tells it:

Mais l’enffant qui, au resconffort des gardes, cuidoit que on le menast vers le chastel, quand il vist que vers le mont Reont alloient, lors s’esbahist plus que oncques mais. Lors tant se prist à plourer et desconfforter, disant à Thomas, le chief des gardes: “Ha! Thomas, mon amy, vous me menez morir, vous me menez
morir; hellas! vous me menez morir! Thomas, vous me menez morir! hellas! monsieur mon pere, je vois morir! hellas! madame ma mere, je vois morir, je vois morir! hellas, hellas, hellas, je vois morir, morir, morir, morir!” Dont en criant et en plourant, regardant devant et derrière et entour lui, à vostre coste d’arme que je portoye, lasse my! et il me vist, et quant il me vist, à haute voix s’escria, tant qu’il peust. Et lors me dist: “Ha! Chastel, mon amy, je voiz morir! hellas! mon ami, je voiz morir!” Et quant je ainssi le oys crier, alors, comme mort, à terre je cheys. Et convint, par l’ordonnance, que je fusse emporté après luy, et là, à force de gens, tant soustenu que il eust prins fin. Et quant il fust sur le mont descendu, là fust un frere qui, par belles parolles esperant en la grâce de Dieu, peu à peu le eust confessé et donné l’absolucion de ses menus pechiez. Et car il ne povoit prendre la mort en gré, lui convint tenir le chief, les bras et les jambes lyez, tant se estoit jusques aux os des fers les jambes eschiees, ainsi que depuis tout me fut dit. Et quand ceste sy très cruelle justice fut faitte, et à chief de piece que je fus de pasmoison revenu, lors je despouillay vostre coste d’armes, et sur son corps la mis. …

(But the child, who thought, after the guards’ consoling words, that he was being taken toward the fortress, when he saw that they were going toward Mont Réont, was frightened more than ever. He now began to weep and despair and said to Thomas, the leader of the guards: “Oh, Thomas, my friend, you take me away to die, you take me away to die. Alas, you take me away to die, Thomas, you take me away to die. Alas, my lord father, I shall die. Alas, my lady mother, I shall die. I shall die! Alas, alas, alas, I shall die, die, die, die!” And crying thus and weeping, looking before and behind and around him, he saw me, woe unto me!, with your coat of arms which I wore, and when he saw me, he called aloud, as loud as he could. And he said to me: “Ah, Chastel, my friend, I shall die! Alas! My friend, I shall die!” And when I heard him cry thus, then like dead I fell to the ground. And according to orders I was carried after him and there by many men was held until he met his end. And when he was set down on the mount, there was there a friar who, by beautiful words of hope in the grace of God, little by little confessed him and absolved him from his little sins. And because he could not take death willingly, they had to hold his head and bind his arms and
legs so that the legs were bruised by the iron down to the bones, as it was all told to me afterward. And when this very cruel sentence was executed and I had at last revived from my faint, I took off your coat of arms and put it on his body. …)

The herald concludes his report with the bitter words which passed between himself and the Prince when he asked for and received the boy’s dead body. Then we are told how the Seigneur, having heard all this, speaks a prayer:

Beaux sires Dieux, qui le me avez jusques à aujourd’uy presté, vueillez en avoir l’âme et lui pardonner de ce que il a la mort mal prinse en gré, et à moi aussi, quant pour bien faire l’ay mis en ce party. Hellasse! povre mere, que diras-tu quant tu saras la piteuse mort de ton chier filz, combien que pour moy tu le avoyes de tous poins abandonné pour acquittier mon honneur. Et, beau sires Dieux, soiez en ma bouche pour l’en resconforter.

(Fair Lord God, who until this day hast lent him to me, deign now to receive his soul and forgive him that he took death unwillingly, and forgive me too that to do right I brought him to this pass. Alas, poor mother, what will you say when you learn the pitiful death of your beloved son, although for me you had given him up entirely to save my honor. Oh, fair Lord God, be in my mouth to comfort her for it.)

Then follows the solemn burial and the scene at table when, in the presence of a great gathering, the commander tells his wife of the boy’s death, which he has so far kept from her. She remains calm. A few days later the Prince is obliged to raise the siege. The commander has an opportunity to launch a successful surprise attack, in which a considerable number of the enemy are taken prisoner. The twelve of highest rank, who offer large sums of ransom money, he causes to be hanged on a high gallows, which can be seen from far off. The others have their right eyes pierced and their right hands and right ears cut off; after which he sends them back:

Allez à vostre seigneur Herodes, et luy dittes de par vous grant mercis des autres yeulx, oreilles et poings senestres que je vous laisse, pour ce que il donna le corps mort et innocent de mon filz à Chastel mon herault.

(Go to your master Herod and thank him for your left eyes,
ears, and hands, which I let you keep because he gave the dead and innocent body of my son to Chastel, my herald.)

This text, which I have presented in somewhat greater detail (in part because its circumstantiality is one of its significant characteristics and in part because to most readers it is less readily accessible than those already discussed), is more than a century younger than Boccaccio’s
Decameron
. But the impression it produces is incomparably more medieval and un-modern. This general impression is spontaneous and very strong. I shall try to clarify the various elements which produce it.

In regard to form, neither the structure of individual sentences nor the composition of the story as a whole displays any of the humanists’ antiquity-inspired plasticity, versatility, clarity, and order. The sentences are not, it is true, predominantly paratactic in structure, but the hypotaxes are often clumsy, full of heavy emphasis, and at times unclear in their connectives. A sentence like this (from the wife’s speech):
Et car pour ce il est mon vray filz, qui moult chier m’a cousté à porter l’espasse de IX mois en mes flans, dont en ay receu maintes dures angoisses et par maints jours, et puis comme morte à l’enffanter, lequel j’ay si chierement nourry, amé et tenu chier jusques au jour et heure que il fut livré
—exhibits in the sequence of its relative subordinations a certain lack of clarity as to what belongs with what. The words
et puis comme morte à l’enffanter
fall completely outside the syntactic order, although the entire passage is not at all intended as an emotionally disordered outburst but as a careful and solemn discourse. The elaborate solemnity, the pompous ceremony of this style are certainly, in the last analysis, based upon the rhetorical traditions of antiquity—but wholly upon its pedantic medieval transformation, not upon the humanistic renewal of its original character. This also accounts for the solemnly invocational accumulation of pleonastic or quasi-pleonastic expressions like
nourry, amé et tenu chier
, which occur constantly—for instance again in the very next sentence:
liberalement de cuer et franchement, sans force, contrainte ne viollence aucune, vous donne, cede et transporte toute la naturelle amour, l’affection et le droit
. … This is reminiscent of the pompous style of legal and diplomatic documents, and the numerous invocations of God, the Virgin, and the saints are perfectly in place in the same style. As in such solemn documents, the matter at issue is frequently introduced by an array of formulas, apostrophes, adverbial phrases, and sometimes
even by a whole procession of preparatory clauses, so that it makes its appearance like a prince or king who is preceded by heralds, bodyguards, court officials, and flag-bearers. The night conversation offers a wealth of pertinent illustrations; and so do the scenes of the heralds arriving with their messages. And although in these latter instances the procedure necessarily results from the subject matter itself, it is impossible to miss the relish with which La Sale exploits it to the full whenever he sees an opportunity. When we read:
Monseigneur le cappitaine de ceste place, nous, comme officiers d’armes et personnes publicques, de par le prince de Galles, nostre très redoubté seigneur, ceste foiz pour toutes à vous nous mande, de par sa clemence de prince, vous signiffier, adviser et sommer …
, it is unmistakable that, even at a moment when he is deeply moved and horrified by the Prince’s cruelty, La Sale derives supreme pleasure from getting this emphatic but syntactically confused display of class pomp down on paper. And there we have it in a nutshell; his language is a class language; and everything determined by class is non-humanist. The stable class-determined order of life, in which everything has and keeps its place and its form, is reflected in this solemn and circumstantial rhetoric, with its abundance of formulas, its superabundance of conventional gestures and invocations. Every person has a proper form of address. Madame du Chastel calls her husband
Monseigneur
, he says
m’amye
to her. Every person makes the gesture which befits his rank and the circumstances, as though in accordance with an eternal model established once and for all (
à jointes mains vous supplie
). When the Prince forces the commander’s herald to witness the boy’s execution (the scene is described twice), we hear this: …
alors, en genoulx et mains jointes je me mis et lui dis: “A! très redouté prince, pour Dieu, souffrez que la clarté de mes malheureux yeux ne portent pas à mon très dollent cuer la très piteuse nouvelle de la mort de l’innocent filz de mon maistre et seigneur; il souffist bien trop se ma langue, au rapport de mes oreilles, le fait à icelui monseigneur vrayement.” Lors dist le prince: “Vous yrez, veuilliez ou non.”
The tradition which we have here reentered is most strikingly to be felt in outstandingly solemn passages where, as we said, the matter at issue is surrounded by a defense in depth of solemnly introductory formulas. From such passages it becomes clear that we are dealing with formations of the late antique period of decadence, formations which, from the early Middle Ages onward, were absorbed and developed by class-determined cultures. In the vernaculars this tradition extends from the compact and magnificent
rhetoric of the Strasbourg Oaths to the preambles of royal edicts (
Louis par la grâce de Dieu
, etc.). As for the structure of the narrative as a whole, it is hardly possible to speak of any conscious organization. The attempt to proceed chronologically leads to much confusion and repetition. And even though we may wish to make allowances because the author was an old man (there is something of senile circumstantiality in the style of the work), the same paratactic and slightly confused kind of composition is already to be found in the novel of little Jehan de Saintré, which was written some years earlier. It is the style of the chronicles, which enumerates events one after the other with frequent and somewhat abrupt shifts from one scene to another. The naive quality of this procedure is further emphasized by the formula with which every such shift is introduced: and now let us stop telling this and let us turn to that. … The mixture of heavily pompous language with the naïveté of enumeration in composition produces an impression of dragging and ponderous monotony in tempo which is not without its peculiar magnificence. It is a variety of the elevated style; but it is class-determined, it is nonhumanist, nonclassical, and entirely medieval.

The same impression of the class-determined medieval approach is also produced by the content of the story, and here I wish to point out especially how striking a thing it is to a modern reader that a political and military occurrence, which belongs in a historical context well known to us, is viewed exclusively as a problem in the ethos of class. Nothing is ever said about the actual importance of the fortress, about the unfortunate consequences which its fall would have for the cause of France and her king. On the contrary, the entire concern is with the knightly honor of the Seigneur du Chastel, with a pledged word and its interpretation, with the fealty of a vassal, with an oath, with personal responsibility. The commander once even offers to meet the Prince in knightly single combat to settle the differences of opinion which have arisen in regard to the interpretation of the agreement. Everything factual is smothered under a luxuriant growth of solemn knightly ceremony; but this does not preclude the prevalence of a brutal cruelty, which is not yet modern, purposeful, and as it were rationalized, but is still entirely personal and emotional. The execution of the boy is a completely senseless act of barbarism, and equally senseless is the commander’s revenge upon more than a hundred innocent victims, who are hanged or mutilated—and who otherwise, but for the commander’s personal lust for vengeance, would have been
sent back for ransom. The impression all this makes is as if the political and military direction of war were still completely unrationalized, as if any effective control of operations did not exist, so that the measures taken depend largely upon the personal relations, the emotional reactions, and the concepts of knightly honor of the commanders who happen to be facing each other in any particular encounter. As a matter of fact, this may well have still been the case during the Hundred Years’ War. Even much later, in the very period of full-fledged absolutism, there are still to be found—especially in military life, where the conventions of the knightly spirit were longest preserved—unmistakable traces of a relationship between friends and foes which is wholly of the personal and knightly type. Still, it is precisely during the fifteenth century, the time when La Sale lived, that a change begins to make itself felt. The political and military methods of knighthood meet with failure, its ethos shows signs of breaking down, and its functions begin to be more and more exclusively decorative. La Sale’s novel of little Jehan de Saintré is eloquent though unintentional testimony to the ostentatious and parasitic senselessness of knightly feats of arms at this epoch. But of the impending change, La Sale refuses to take notice. He lives enveloped in a class-determined atmosphere with its distinctive conception of honor, its ceremonies, and its heraldic pomp. Even his learning, which is more strongly apparent in his other works than in the
Réconfort
, is a mosaic of moral quotations in the late scholastic spirit; it is specifically a scholastic compilation serving the ends of feudal and knightly class education.