CHAPTER VII
FRANCE—FIFTEENTH CENTURY
The earliest productions of the French press will not bear comparison with those of either the German or the Italian: they have neither the massive dignity of the one, nor the artistic grace of the other. The worthy professors at the Sorbonne, who called to their aid the Swiss or German printers, Crantz Gering and Friburger, bestowed, as we have seen in our first chapter, considerable trouble on the decoration by hand of special copies for presentation to influential friends or patrons, but in other respects, their books were wholly destitute of ornament. When, after little more than two years, they gave up their press, the three printers started again on their own account with a rather ugly gothic type, nor did Gering, who afterwards worked both by himself and in combination with other printers, produce a really handsome book until about 1480. The semi-gothic types of another firm of German printers in Paris, Peter Caesaris and Stoll, are much more attractive, but the average French work during the seventies is dull.
The first attempt at decoration appears to have been made, not at the capital, but at Lyons, where,
in August 1478, an anonymous printer, probably Martin Husz, completed a double-column edition of Le Miroir de la redemption humaine, translated from the Latin by Julien Macho, with cuts previously used in a German edition of the Speculum, printed at Basel in 1476. In 1478, also, Barthélemy Buyer printed an edition of the romance of Baudoin, Comte de Flandre, with no cuts, but with rude printed initials. In an edition of Les Quatre Filz Aymon, unsigned and undated, but printed at Lyons about 1480, the first page bears four grotesque woodcuts representing the reception of the youths by Charlemagne, the buffet which the Emperor's son gave one of them over a game of chess, the fatal blow with the golden chess-board by which the buffet was returned, and then the four youths fighting amid a crowd. On the next page a larger picture shows their expulsion from Charlemagne's court. Throughout the book are curious woodcut initials, interwoven with grotesque faces. About 1481 Ortuin and Schenck produced (anonymously) an edition of the Roman de la Rose with eighty-six small woodcuts, which were imitated in later editions both at Lyons and Paris, and were not without a certain rude merit. In 1483 Mathieu Husz and Pierre Hongre issued a Légende dorée, with large pictures of Christ in Glory on the Last Day, and of the Crucifixion, and numerous very rough cuts at the head of the different chapters. In the same year, Husz published, in conjunction with Jean Schabeler,
an illustrated translation of Boccaccio's De Casibus illustrium virorum ('Du dechier des nobles hommes et femmes'). Meanwhile, at Albi, in Languedoc, of all places in the world, Neumeister had reprinted in 1481 an illustrated edition of the Meditationes of Turrecremata, which he had produced two years previously at Mainz. In 1484 we hear of illustrated books in three other towns. At Rennes, Pierre Bellescullée and Josses printed the Coutumes de Bretagne, with a woodcut of the arms of Brittany, used again the next year in the same printers' Floret en francoys, a book noticeable for having a woodcut title printed in white on a black ground. At Vienne, Pierre Schenck printed another edition, in double-columns, of L'Abuzé en court, with small cuts at the chapter headings. At Chambéry, Antoine Neyret finished, on July 6th, an edition of the Exposition des Évangiles en romant of Maurice de Sully, and in the following November the romance of Baudoin comte de Flandre. The Bishop's sermons have, on the first page, a large initial I and a very rough cut of the disciples loosing the ass and her colt for Christ's use. With their other illustrations I am not acquainted. The romance of Count Baldwin has a full-page cut of the Count riding on a gaily-decked charger, and thirteen smaller illustrations of his adventures, of which, however, several are repeated. The execution of them all is as rude as can well be conceived. Two years later, Neyret printed the first edition of a very famous book,