Tales from the Old French

by Unknown

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.