Aude replies: “Strange words! God forbid, and His saints and angels, that I should live after Roland.” And she falls dead at the emperor’s feet.
As was fitting, the poem closes with the trial of the traitor Ganelon, by combat. His defence is feudal: he had defied Roland and all his companions; his treachery was proper vengeance and not treason. But his champion is defeated, and Ganelon himself is torn in pieces by horses, while his relatives, pledged as hostages, are hanged. All of which is feudalism, and can be matched for savagery in many a scene from the Arthurian romances of chivalry—not always reproduced in modern versions.
So the chansons de geste are a mirror of the ways and customs of feudal society in the twelfth century. The feudal virtues are there, troth to one’s liege, orthodox crusading ardour, limitless valour, truth-speaking. There is also enormous brutality; and the recognized feudal vices, cruelty, impiousness, and treason. In the Raoul de Cambrai, for example, the nominal hero is a paroxysm of ferocity and impiety. All crimes rejoice him as he rages along his ruthless way to establish his seignorial rights over a fief unjustly awarded him by Louis, the weak son of Charlemagne. His foil is Bernier, the natural son of one of the rightful heirs against whom Raoul carries on raging feudal war. But Bernier is also Raoul’s squire and vassal, who had received knighthood from him, and so is bound to the monster by the strongest feudal tie. He is a pattern of knighthood and of every feudal virtue. On the day of his knighting he implored his lord not to enter on that fell war against his (Bernier’s) family. In vain. The war is begun with fire and sword. Bernier must support his lord; says he: “Raoul, my lord, is worse (plu fel) than Judas; he is my lord; he has given me horse and clothes, my arms and cloth of gold. I would not fail him for the riches of Damascus”: and all cried, “Bernier, thou art right.”[700]
But there is a limit. Raoul is ferociously wasting the land, and committing every impiety. He would desecrate the abbey of Origni, and set his tent in the middle of the church, stabling his horse in its porch and making his bed before the altar. Bernier’s mother is there as a nun; Raoul pauses at her entreaties and those of his uncle. Then his rage breaks out afresh at the death of two of his men; he burns the town and abbey, and Bernier’s mother perishes with the other nuns in the flames.
Now the monster is feasting on the scene of desolation—and it is Lent besides! After dining, he plays chess: enter Bernier. Raoul asks for wine. Bernier takes the cup and, kneeling, hands it to him. Raoul is surprised to see him, but at once renews his oath to disinherit all of Bernier’s family—his father and uncles. Bernier speaks and reproaches Raoul with his mother’s death: “I cannot bring her back to life, but I can aid my father whom you unjustly follow up with war. I am your man no longer. Your cruelty has released me from my duties; and you will find me on the side of my father and uncles when you attack them.” For reply, Raoul breaks his head open with the butt of his spear; but then at once asks pardon and humiliates himself strangely. Bernier answers that there shall be no peace between them till the blood which flowed from his head returns back whence it came. Yet in the final battle he still seeks to turn Raoul back before attacking him who had been his liege lord. Again in vain; and Raoul falls beneath Bernier’s sword. Here are the two sides of the picture, the monster of a lord, the vassal vainly seeking to be true: a situation utterly tragic from the standpoint of feudal chivalry.
It is not to be supposed that a huge body of poetic narrative could remain utterly truculent. Other motives had to enter;—the love of women, of which the Roland has its one great flash. The ladies of the chansons are not coy, and often make the first advances. Such natural lusty love is not romantic; it is not l’amour courtois; and marriage is its obvious end. The chansons also tend to become adventurous and to fill with romantic episode. An interesting example of this is the Renaud de Montaubon where Renaud and his three brothers are aided by the enchanter, Maugis, against the pursuing hate of Charlemagne and where the marvellous horse, Bayard, is a fascinating personality. This diversified and romantic tale long held its own in many tongues. In the somewhat later Huon de Bordeaux we are at last in fairyland—verily at the Court of Oberon—his first known entry into literature.[701] Thus the chansons tend toward the tone and temper of the romans d’aventure.
The latter have the courtly love and the purely adventurous motives of the Arthurian romances, with which the men who fashioned them probably were acquainted, as were the jongleurs who recast certain of the chansons de geste to suit a more courtly taste. Of the romans d’aventure, so-called, the Blancandrin or the Amadas or the Flamenca may be taken as the type; or, if one will, Flore et Blanchefleur and Aucassin et Nicolette, those two enduring lovers’ tales.[702] Courtly love and knightly ventures are the themes of these romans so illustrative of noble French society in the thirteenth century. They differ from the Arthurian romances in having other than a Breton origin; and their heroes and heroines are sometimes of more easily imagined historicity than the knights and ladies of the Round Table. But they never approached the universal vogue of the Arthurian Cycle.
It goes without saying that tastes in reading (or rather listening) diverged in the twelfth century, just as in the twentieth. One cannot read the old chansons de geste in which fighting, and not love, is the absorbing topic, without feeling that the audience before whom they were chanted was predominantly male. One cannot but feel the contrary to have been the fact with the romances in verse and prose which constitute that immense mass of literature vaguely termed Arthurian. These two huge groups, the chansons de geste and the Arthurian romances, overlap chronologically and geographically. Although the development of the chansons was somewhat earlier, the Arthurian stories were flourishing before the chansons were past their prime; and both were in vogue through central and northern France. But the Arthurian stories won adoptive homes in England, Germany, Italy, and elsewhere. Indeed their earlier stages scarcely seem attached to real localities: nor were their manners and interests rooted in the special traditions of any definite place.
The tone and topics of these romances suggest an audience chiefly of women, and possibly feminine authorship. Doubtless, with a few exceptions, men composed and recited them. But the male authors were influenced by the taste, the favour and patronage, and the sympathetic suggestive interest of the ladies. Prominent among the first known composers of these “Breton” lays was a woman, Marie de France as she is called, who lived in England in the reign of Henry II. (1154-1189). Her younger contemporary was the facile trouvère Chrétien de Troies, of whose life little is actually known. But we know that the subject of his famous Lancelot romance, called the Conte de la charrette, was suggested to him (about 1170) by the Countess Marie de Champagne, daughter of Louis VII. Surely then he wrote to please the taste of that royal dame, whose queenly mother, Eleanor of Aquitaine, was also a patroness of this courtly poetry.
These are instances proving the feminine influence upon the composition of these romances. And the growth of this great Arthurian Cycle represents, par excellence, the entry of womanhood into the literature of chivalry. Men love, as well as women; but the topic engrosses them less, and they talk less about it. Likewise men appreciate courtesy; but in fact it is woman’s influence that softens manners. And while the masculine fancy may be drawn by what is fanciful and romantic, women abandon themselves to its charm.