Tales from the Old French

by Unknown

Epilogue

The tales in this volume are among the earliest examples of the French short story that have come down to us. They grew up in that little renaissance of the XII and XIII centuries, when the tradition that literature must be epic, that it must tell of national heroes or the history of some great house, was passing, and the trouvère was free to take his matter where he found it and make of it what he would. Celtic traditions, stories from the East or the classics, every day happenings, old legends and new manners, all were turned to account, and woven, it might be, into a long romance full of leisurely digressions, or retold in a tale admirably compact.

The short stories, like most of the literature of the time, were composed in octo-syllabic rhyming couplets, verse narratives for minstrels to recite. Of their authors for the most part we know nothing. Their very names have vanished save in the few cases where they were wrought into prelude or epilogue, and made part of the text: and to none, with the exception of Marie de France can more than one or two tales be attributed. So impersonal, however, are the stories that their being anonymous matters little. We look to them not for the flavour of any one man's mind, but for an impression of the age in which they were produced, its shows and fashions, its manners, its sentiments and ideals, its inheritance of early legends, of old, word-of-mouth story-telling, stories which the trouvères dressed anew and preserved to us.

The tales fall into three main groups: lais, fabliaux, and contes dévots. The lais, like the romances to which they are close akin, belong to the courtly literature of the time and found their audience in hall and castle. Denis Pyramus, a contemporary, in writing of Marie de France, tells us her lays were "beloved and held right dear by counts and barons and knights," and that "ladies likewise took great joy and delight in them." Like the romances which they helped to foster and which superseded them, the lays tell of love and adventure, of enchantment and strange happenings. In them side by side with the knights and squires and ladies move fays and giants and werewolves. Their material is that of folklore and fairy-tale. A knight hunting in the lande adventureuse meets a maiden in the forest who leads him to a castle with green walls and shining towers. There he spends three days, and when he would return home again, learns that three hundred years have gone by, that the king, his uncle is dead and his cities have fallen, and there lingers but a legend of the king's nephew who went out to hunt the white boar and was lost in the forest. Often in such lays the old fairy-tale simplicity, its matter-of-fact narration of the marvellous survives; and yet in their somewhat spare brevity they have a grace and charm that lets one feel the beauty, the wonder, or the tragedy of the story.

But the interest in the lays is not always that of the land of faery; sometimes it is human enough, as in The Two Lovers where, despite the old-time test and the magic potion, our delight is all in the maid and the damoiseau "who hath in him no measure." Sometimes, as in Eliduc, we find old, rude material—here a primitive Celtic tale of a man with two wives ill cloaked by its additions of mediæval Christianity—retold with a strange gentleness and sweetness, and turned at moments into a story of emotion and scruple.

Both types occur in the lays of Marie de France,—the best that have come down to us. Besides her lays she versified a collection of fables, Isopet, and translated from the Latin The Purgatory of Saint Patrick,—one of those other-world journeys that preceded the Divine Comedy. Yet apart from her works we have no record of her life. She herself in the prologue of her fables, tells her name: "I am called Marie, and I am of France"; but that is all, and it is only the internal evidence of her writings, their Anglo-Norman dialect, and a few chance hints and phrases that have made scholars decide that she was a Norman, or from that part of the Isle de France which borders upon Normandy, that she lived and wrote in England in the second half of the twelfth century, and that the unnamed king to whom she dedicated the lays was Henry II.

Marie makes no claim to originality of theme; in her prologues she tells us she is but rhyming anew the stories "whereof the Bretons have made lays." Just what the source was of the Celtic matter used by Marie and other French writers of the time is a point of dispute among scholars. Some will have it the tales came wholly from the Celts of Brittany, others that they are derived only from those of Wales. But there is reason in both theories, and the tendency now is to unite them. The Normans of the continent had not a little to do with their Breton neighbors of Armorica; sometimes they fought as enemies and sometimes as allies. Again, in England the Normans early settled in South Wales, and intermarriages were frequent. In both regions, then, they may well have learned to know the songs and tales of the folk about them.

But were they Welsh or Armorican, both history and romance bear testimony to the popularity of Breton minstrels in France during the twelfth century. No feast was complete without their music. Their lays were sung to the accompaniment of a little harp called the rote, and seem to have been given in their own tongue. But constantly in Marie and other writers we find a distinction between the lai and the conte, and it seems probable that the songs were preceded by a short prose narrative, or that prose and verse were interspersed after the manner of Aucassin and Nicolette. In just what form the tales came to Marie, how much she added to them, we cannot tell. We only know that her rendering of them was to the liking of the time and was long popular. Denis Pyramus tells us her writings were often repeated and often copied, and we have manuscripts of them that date from a hundred years after her time.

As the lai was the favorite literature of the courts the fabliau was that of the bourgeoisie, the proper kind of tale for telling at fairs or guild-hall feasts, at gatherings where women were not present. In time they are a little later than the lais, for beginning in the twelfth, the thirteenth century is their chief period. They deal not with the fanciful and the sentimental, but with the real and the comic; they forego magic and miracle for the happenings of every-day life. "When a tale is historic," says M. de Montaiglon, who has given us a complete edition of this type of story, "or when it is impossible, when it is devout or didactic, when it is imaginative or romantic, lyric or poetic, it can by no means be classed as a fabliau."

At their worst they are often gross, often puerile, mere contes pour rire from which the laughter has long ago faded; but at their best they interest by the very fact that they mark an early venture into the real. They show us plainly the figures of the time, knights that put their lands in pawn that they might follow tourneys, the rich bourgeois riding armed to one of the great fairs, the minstrel ready to recite a chanson de geste or carry a love message. Light and gay, always brief and to the point, they tell good humoredly of the odd chances of life, they satirize manners and morals. Unlike the lays that idealize women, they ridicule them; and they are ready to mock the villein, the lords of the earth, or the saints in heaven.

Often the story they tell is of eastern origin, often one of those stories that reappear in all times and among many races. Sometimes it is only a situation, a figure or two that they give us. Two minstrels meet and mock one another; each boasts his skill and decries that of the other, each enumerates his repertory, and in so doing hopelessly confuses the names and incidents of well-known romances of the time: "I know all about Kay the good knight; I know about Perceval of Blois, and of Pertenoble le Gallois." Each, as he brags, sets before us the stock in trade of the minstrel of the time; each shows his own utter incompetence,—and that is all the story. If the tale has a moral, as in The Divided Blanket, it is but the moral of common sense. If it tells a romance, as in The Gray Palfrey, it is still kept within the solid world of pounds and pence. We are told precisely concerning everybody's income. The heroine shows herself as accurate in her knowledge of the property of the hero's uncle as would one of the practical-minded damsels of Balzac. Her rescue is brought about not by the help of magic or knightly adventure, but by a lucky chance; the conclusion turns upon a sleepy escort and a horse's eagerness for his stable. Time and place, again, are definitely specified. In the lays it is usually, "Once upon a time," or "Of old, there lived a king," but The Divided Blanket begins: "Some twenty years ago, a rich man of Abbeville left his home and came up to Paris."

More limited in scope than the other tales of the period, they at least accomplish their aim, that is, they give us a swift and entertaining narrative. "A little tale wearies less than a long one," says one of the prologues, and most of the fabliaux contrive to tell their story in four or five hundred lines. Peculiarly Gallic in character, they influenced the literature of other countries less than did the French lays and romances, they were less often imitated and translated. In France they were popular for two hundred years; then we hear no more of them. But in the fifteenth century, when printed books and the stage were taking the place of the minstrel, we find, as M. de Montaiglon points out, similar plots and situations, the same shrewd though not deep observation, the same fashion of treating the every-day incidents of life from the comic point of view recurring again in the farces.

The church in the middle ages looked askance upon the minstrels and their stock in trade; the sermons of the time denounce their "ignoble fables," their "tales all falsehood and lying." But the church did not only censure, it tried to supplant, and produced within its own boundaries, quite apart from its more learned work in Latin, a large body of narrative literature in the vulgar tongue. These religious stories were written by lay clerks or by monks in the monastery schools, and like other tales were spread abroad by minstrels. Those who recited them were shown some favour, and M. Petit de Julleville quotes a Somme de Penitence of the thirteenth century which would admit to the sacraments those "jongleurs who sing the exploits of princes and the lives of the saints, and use their instruments of music to console men in their sadness and weariness."

Besides the lives of saints we have tales of miracles performed by Our Lady, tales of penitence, tales of good counsel. As a whole they are less interesting than the lay literature of the time. Written for edification, many of them are rather bare little "examples" and their authors show themselves more concerned with the lesson in point than with the story. Others are told with more elaboration and skill and give us good tale-telling. Sometimes, as in The Angel and the Hermit, an ancient story is given a mediæval setting. M. Gaston Paris, in La Poésie au Moyen Age, has traced the history of this tale, which, originally of Jewish invention, has travelled all over Europe; a tale that was given a place in the Koran, and that was told both by Luther and Voltaire, besides its good rendering by some unknown clerk of France. Another story, Theophilus, gives a version of the Faust legend, and tells the story of a man who has made a compact with the devil, but who in this case is saved in the end by Our Lady.

But if among the contes dévots tales as vivid as that of the proud knight on whom was laid the penance of the cask are rare, there are yet not a few that charm us by their mere sincerity and simplicity, that interest by revealing to us the superstitions and the beliefs of the time. They show us how vividly present to men's minds was the triple division of the world, how concrete that heaven and hell, whence issued on the one side the demons, on the other the Virgin and the saints to take share in the combat on earth for men's temptation and salvation. To turn the pages of a collection of these stories is like looking up at the dim, stiff figures of some early fresco, to see again, say, the strife of angels and devils for souls in The Triumph of Death on the walls of the Campo Santo in Pisa.

Just as the spirit of the fabliaux is found again in the farces, so that of the contes dévots continues in the miracle plays. But when, in the fifteenth century, prose drives out verse narrative, all three types of tale cease. In the renaissance and for long after they were neglected. It was in the eighteenth century, with its curiosity concerning the mediæval, that men turned back to the manuscripts so long disregarded. Barbazan brought out a collection of texts, and Legrand d'Aussy published a collection of abridgments of twelfth and thirteenth century tales. Since then, various editors, both French and German, have made the best of the tales available to us.

Taken together, apart from the pleasure of the story for the story's sake, they give us a fresh sense of the time in which they were written, its feasts and tourneys bright with the gold and the vair; its wars, its interrupted traffic and barter; its license, its asceticism; its prayers and its visions. More than that, they interest us as standing midway between the old and the new. In them one may look for fragments of vanished stories, bits of myth and folklore, salvage of an age that told its tales instead of writing them; and, at the same time, we find in them the beginnings of modern literature, the first of that long and goodly line, the French short story. For all their simplicity they show the beginnings of a shrewd observation, of delicate description, and above all of compact narrative where no words are wasted. Already there is a conscious artistic pride; Marie de France tells us she has waked many a night in rhyming her verses; and "Know ye," one of the fabliaux charges us, "it is no light thing to tell a goodly tale."