Tout ne soit il digne qu’en telz mains aille,
Mais bon vouloir comme bon fait me vaille.”
In this instance, however, Christine associated with him his uncles Berry and Burgundy and his brother Orleans, who during his incapacity divided the real power between them:
“Et puis a vous, haulz ducs magnifiez,
Dicelle fleur fais et ediffiez,
Dont l’esplendeur s’espant par toute terre,
Par quel honneur fait los a France a querre.”
In her presentation copies she was not wont to measure her language, and probably Scrope’s extravagant eulogy of the Duke of Berry was based upon what he found in his MS., although, instead of translating the dedication as it stood, he chose to embody it in his preface. On the other hand, Christine of course was in no way responsible for the statement that the duke lived for a hundred years (p. 3). How it originated is a mystery, for there is no doubt whatever that he died on 15th June, 1416, at the age of seventy-six.[[84]] Jean Bouchet indeed in his Annales d’Aquitaine,[[85]] although he records the date of his death correctly, states that he was ninety or thereabouts, but he gives no authority, and it is enough to say that Berry’s father King John II. was born in 1319, and his eldest brother Charles V. in 1337. It will be seen that Scrope represents him as a perfect paragon of chivalrous qualities, unrivalled in his time both in war and in council, as well as for deeds of piety. In more sober history, however, he by no means appears to such advantage. His cultured and sumptuous tastes, his splendid buildings and his library and other rich collections, have shed a certain lustre on his name; but, as he showed especially in his government of Languedoc, he was cruel, rapacious, and unprincipled, and in critical times his life was that of a selfish and prodigal voluptuary. For war he had neither talent nor zest; his real element appears to have been diplomacy, and, apart from his patronage of art and letters and his benefactions to the church, his chief claim to credit rests on his repeated attempts to mediate between the Burgundian and Orleanist factions. Scrope’s estimate of him is in striking contrast with that of modern historians, such as Raynal[[86]] and Martin, the latter of whom in recording his death writes, “Ce prince laissa une mémoire souillée entre toutes dans cette êpoque de souillures. Il joignait à bien d’autres vices le vice que la France pardonne le moins à ses chefs, le péché irremissible, la lâcheté.”[[87]]
To pass from the preface to the “Epistle of Othea” itself, there is no reason to suppose that the translator had received the training of a scholar; on the contrary, the probability is that, owing to a sickly youth and other drawbacks, his education had been more or less neglected. It is not even certain that he had been regularly taught French. From a curious passage interpolated by Trevisa in his translation of Higden’s “Polychronicon,” which was finished in 1387, it seems that the fashion was then already dying out among the class to which by birth he belonged,[[88]] and possibly therefore he learnt all he knew of the language while he was with his stepfather in France. Be that as it may, his rendering of Christine de Pisan’s French may claim on the whole to be fairly well done. The verse of his “textes” is too much of the doggrel type and his meaning is sometimes obscure, but as a rule he follows the original closely, while the orthography of the MS., though atrociously bad, is no worse than what we are accustomed to in the Paston Letters and elsewhere at the same period. Occasionally, as is only natural, he goes astray, though it is of course possible that the fault lay with the MS. from which he translated. In most cases the source of his errors is obvious. Thus he translates “ton bon cuer” (p. 5) by “all good hertys,” having evidently mistaken “ton” for “tou[t]”; and again “en quant fraisle vaissel est sa vie contenue” (p. 28) by “in how frele (sc. frail) a vessel his lyff is all naked” (toute nue)! Similarly “conscience pour soy” (p. 16) appears as “conscience for feyth” (foy); “ala querre les autres dieux” (p. 62) as “thanne went he forth [to seek] the tothir iio” (deux); “mais a nostre propos [la fable] veult dire” (ibid.) as “Mars to owre purpose seith”; and “gard toy de lagait (l’agait) de tes ennemis” (p. 73) as “kepe the (sc. thee) from the peple (la gent) of thyn ennemyes.” It is not so easy to understand the process by which the simple sentence “Vanite fist lange devenir deable” (p. 15) was transformed into “Vanite made avoyde degre to becum a fende,” whatever that may mean; or why in the story of Acis and Galatea (p. 65) “un iouuencel qui Acis estoit nommez” became “and he was dede” (sc. dead), though possibly in this case there was some confusion between “acis” and “occis.” But the strangest mistranslation is in the words “Averyse and covetise be iio sausmakers the which sesseth neuer to seye, ‘Bryng, Bryng’” (p. 105), where the French text has “sont ii. sancsues,” sanguisugæ, or leeches. The reference of course is to Proverbs xxx. 15, “The horseleach hath two daughters, crying, ‘Give, give’”; and, as stated in the note, “horseleeches” is in fact the rendering given in another translation of Christine’s work. Scrope’s “sausmakers” can hardly be anything but “sauce-makers,”[[89]] but it is not impossible that he coined the mongrel word “sanc-suckers,” which the scribe miscopied.
The second English translation of the “Épître d’Othéa” referred to above can be so little known that a brief account of it will not be superfluous. It exists only in the form of a small printed octavo in black-letter with the title Here foloweth the C. Hystoryes of Troye, and there is no doubt that it was taken from Pigouchet’s French edition of 1490,[[90]] or one of the reprints; in fact it copies the second title in French, merely omitting the imprint “à Paris.” Many of its rough woodcuts, one of which accompanies each “texte,” also come from the same source, being generally reversed, but others are independent and their subjects often have no connexion whatever with the text. In place of the dedication to the Duke of Orleans the translator gives a prologue of his own in ten seven-line stanzas, the first two of which are as follows: