Je chante par couverture."
It is, you see, the old motif, in melodramatic pathos that of the harlequin Dorkins, who must play his part in the pantomime even though his child lie dying, in tragedy that of Lady Macbeth, who must play the queen by day and suffer the torments of the murderess at night. It is not the novelty but the universality and truth of the idea or sentiment that makes Christine's verses rank as poetry.
But love songs alone could not support a family of five; the Church, so often the refuge of forlorn women, might have offered Christine a refuge, but not support for those dependent on her, since she had not sufficient influence to assure herself of any office of dignity and emolument in the convents of the proud and wealthy. Her pen must be her resource; and thus Christine de Pisan became not merely an authoress, but the first authoress to support herself by her pen. For some of her shorter poems she received not inconsiderable sums; but longer works, works of more permanent value must be undertaken, and Christine valiantly set to work.
Her first task was to secure a patron, for only some great lord could afford to pay sums sufficient to enable her to live: there was no eager public of thousands, educated by the printing press to expect, to welcome, to demand fresh intellectual food. One of her patrons was the great Duke of Burgundy, Philippe le Hardi, to whom she dedicated a very long and partly autobiographical poem called La Mutation de Fortune. She tells her story with rather too much display of the fact that she knows all the famous apologues and anecdotes that might apply to her case; still, it is an earnest and in some ways interesting account of how she had been compelled to take up a profession not then regarded as befitting a woman how,--as she says, she had turned herself "from woman to man." She read this work to Philippe de Bourgogne in that same palace where she had once been a familiar inmate, where she had played as a child, where she had learned to know the famous men through whose aid Charles V. had well-nigh regenerated France. It is not surprising that Philippe de Bourgogne should think of her as specially fitted to undertake a task requiring intimate knowledge of that king and his time. The duke, sending for her one day as she sat in the midst of a pile of books, pen in hand, asked her to undertake the writing of a life of his great brother.
With ready devotion she set about writing the life of Charles V., of the king who, "when I was a child, gave me my bread." In due time her book, Le Livre des faits et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V., was completed; but he for whom she had written it had died in 1404, before half was done. The loss of her generous friend and protector was a serious blow to the poetess. Her mother had also died; while Christine must plod wearily on, though "her heart was filled with joy when she remembered that the day was not very far off when she herself would go to join the loved ones."
The history of Charles V. is a work of which one hardly knows what to say. As history, it is manifestly a failure, for Christine had either no wish or no opportunity to present facts in a narrative at once accurate, detailed, and clear; her work lacks both the accuracy and the breadth of view of genuine history; it is rather, as one critic remarks, an éloge, a eulogy upon Charles V.--which, indeed, had been what Philippe desired. The book is in prose, and though the style lacks the clearness and vividness to which we are accustomed in such men of genius as Villehardouin, Joinville, and her own contemporary, Froissart, we must remember that these men had reached the high-water mark of French style, not to be equalled, in sober truth, till the Renaissance, the "New Birth," had regenerated the fallen life and literature of Europe. As prose of the early fifteenth century, Christine's work is better than any other then written, except that of Froissart; and not a little of his charm comes less from the style than from the matters of which he chose to write. There is in Christine's book little of the gorgeousness of chivalry: was not the king in whose praise she wrote a king who won his battles at the council table, while Du Guesclin, upon the field of battle, gave the hard knocks which his sovereign, weak and sickly, could neither give nor take? Where Christine does succeed is in her portraits of the king and his courtiers, whose characters she knew perfectly and whose good and bad traits she does not scruple to depict with such even justice as she may. To quote the words of one of her most recent critics, who does not fail to call attention to the awkward Latinisms of her diction and the lopsided Ciceronian periods in her attempts at elevation or eloquence: "No one has made us feel more distinctly the winning grace of the Duke d'Orléans, brother of Charles VI., nor has any one better depicted the physical aspect of Charles V.; clearly do we see the long face, the broad forehead, the prominent eyes, and the thin lips; the beard is very thick, the cheekbones high and prominent, the skin brown and pale, the whole countenance thin to emaciation; it is the face of an ascetic, tempered by the gentleness of the expression and something staid and thoughtful in the whole look. Nor is there mere banality and commonplace in the moral portrait of the king; if she praises his chevalerie (chivalry), she does not conceal the fact that, weak and sickly, his hand never drew the sword from the day of his accession to the day of his death."
The mere list of Christine's works would fill much space, and in the end we should not be much edified thereby; for she was a voluminous writer, really a hack writer, and therefore turned out a huge pile of ill-considered stuff, in prose and in verse, which she well knew would win no fame for her it were sufficient could it but win bread for her children! Much of this work is mere paraphrase of Latin authors of great repute and much read in the Middle Ages, though now all but forgotten: the moral Seneca, the martial Vegetius and Frontinus, Valerius Maximus, and honest Plutarch (whom critics praise, and only unfortunate boys read). It is from these and the like of these that she gleaned much of such works as L'Epître d'Othéa à Hector, on the training of a prince; Le Chemin de Long Estude, a long moral poem (1402); Le Livre de Prudence; Le Livre des Faits d'armes et de chevalerie; Le Livre de Police (political economy). With such compilations, doubtless both useful and interesting when there were fewer books of general information, encyclopedias and the like, Christine filled many a manuscript, and much of her work still remains in manuscript, though the Société des anciens textes français is slowly reprinting her works, which will fill four large volumes with verse alone and overflow into several more with prose.
With the great mass of the work left by Christine de Pisan we shall not even attempt to deal; but the presentation of one of her favorite enthusiasms will prove, we hope, of some interest. Though forced to earn her own bread and so to compete with men, Christine never forgot that she was a woman; neither in conduct nor in her writings did she ever so behave or so write as to forfeit that dearest of her privileges as a woman, the respect of men. Not only did she respect herself, but she was determined that men should respect her, and moreover that they should not with impunity malign woman. We have shown in a previous chapter how outrageous was the literary attitude toward the fair sex, whom the satirists, big and little, were never tired of belaboring as the authors of all the evil in the world. Marriage and love are, of course, fertile subjects of satiric humor, as when the groom is told, in the sermon joyeux on the Maux de mariage (Misfortunes of Marriage), that, from the very wedding day: "all his money will take wings and fly away, but his wife will stay," and stay, and stay, until he is dead and buried, and then, as the church bell tolls his knell his dear wife will be thinking of how she can manage to marry his servant. "Verily," says another, speaking of the pilgrimage of marriage, "'tis a road to which there is no end till the weaker of the two be dead." It was this attitude against which Christine entered a vigorous protest, and she got into a little war of words with two of her contemporaries.
In several of the minor poems noted above there are allusions to the wrong of boastfulness, mendacity, and evil speaking about women; but in the Épître au Dieu d'Amour (properly the Epistle of, not to, the God of Love), she brings upon the scene Love himself, who complains of and ridicules tale-telling and blabbing gallants, always ready to recount imaginary conquests of any woman whose name is mentioned. What honor is there, she asks, in deceiving a woman? This was in May, 1399, and it was not many years before she began to assault the chief citadel of the scorners of womanhood, the great Roman de la Rose. Her Dit de la Rose is dated on a day of all others most propitious to lovers, Saint Valentine's day, in the year 1402. Her poem contains the graceful conception of an order of chivalry whose symbol shall be the rose (so long fraught with evil associations through the influence of ungenerous clerks), and the chief of the vows exacted of the good knights shall be, never to be licentious, in word or in deed, with regard to women. The gauntlet thus thrown down before the admirers of the satirist one might almost say misogynist Jean de Meung, was not long in finding those willing to take it up. Two secretaries of Charles VI., Jean de Montreuil and Gonthier Col, assumed the defence of the Roman de la Rose, and various letters, sometimes couched in terms of good-humored raillery, sometimes sly and cutting, were exchanged between them and Christine. Which side, considered merely as debaters, really had the better of the literary duel we need not care; for the common-sense and the moral point of view was certainly not that which justified general condemnation of woman as an inferior and wicked creature, and also justified the degradation of the noblest emotions to mere sensuality. Christine, however, thought that she had made out such a good case for maligned femininity that she collected her letters and the answers, and dedicated the whole correspondence to Isabeau de Bavière. It would be a pleasant relief to the gaudy colors in the picture of that unworthy queen if we could feel that she appreciated the delicate compliment thus paid her, or in any way encouraged the worthy defender of her sex.
This collection of prose and verse was not the only plea Christine made for women. She composed two other works, in prose, whose dominant notion is the rehabilitation of honest womanhood. The first of these, called La Cité des Dames, is one of those compilations descending in the main from Boccaccio's Latin work, De Claris Mulieribus, "Concerning Famous Women," of which Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women are the greatest examples: the present work itself, indeed, is a record of this nature. But that which Chaucer and Tennyson treat poetically, imaginatively, with all the art of minds supremely artistic, Christine treats in a rather matter-of-fact way; that is, she is concerned to tell such anecdotes of famous women as will support her thesis of the essential nobility of the feminine character. In this way she has accumulated a considerable amount of evidence showing the patience, the devotion, the fidelity, the heroism of which women are capable under all circumstances of life. The heroines of antiquity are not alone in eliciting Christine's praises; for she devotes some attention to the patterns of virtue in her own day, to princesses, and to simple bourgeoises, and to one Anastasia, who is of peculiar interest to us because she was a fine illuminator, and may have been the artist who executed the beautiful illuminations in the manuscripts of Christine's own works.