The single-minded and patriotic Du Guesclin was not forgotten by the poetic chroniclers. Jean Cuvelier, in 1384, put his deeds in verse.
Judicious historians have not disdained to avail themselves of these productions of the rhymers. They have extracted those passages from them which were despised by the matter-of-fact chroniclers, but which had an air of probability, and were calculated to add picturesque and interesting features to the narrative.
It is highly probable that every ancient narrative poem which was not inspired by mere emulation of former poets had some foundation in fact. The mere invention of subjects, as well as their treatment, is a feature of comparatively modern times. The personages figured by Reynard, Bruin, Isgrim, and the other animals of the great beast-epic of the middle ages, once lived and acted some way in the spirit of their four-footed substitutes.
Toward the end of the century, the taste for the old rhymes, romances, and narratives began to veer round to more trivial and simple subjects, and to take more interest in the distinctions between the different classes of the shorter pieces of poetry. Prosody had been in process of cultivation for some time, and now the attention of such dilettanti as filled courts and the castles of the nobles was more strongly arrested upon feet, accents, lengths, measures, and number of lines in each piece, than in the deed recorded or sentiments expressed.
While Froissart was searching for material for his chronicle, in 1392, Eustache des Champs was instructing poetic students in the difference between chansons, balades, virelais, and rondeaux. He was well entitled to do so, having himself composed 80 virelais, 171 rondeaux, 1,175 balades. These ballads he divided into Leonines, Sonnantes, equivoques, retrogrades, etc., etc.; but in the next century his merits were forgotten in presence of Henri de Croy, who subdivided his ballads into communes, balladantes, fatrisées, and the rondeaux into simple, twin, and double. Then care should be taken not to mix the rhymes beaten, broken, re-linked, doubled tailed, etc., in form of amorous complaint. The combination denominated ricquerac, and that called baguenaude we would explain but for the misfortune of being ignorant of their structure. The first, perhaps, was a disjointed affair, like some negro melody, the other, a perpetual hovering round the predominant idea, whatever it might be.
That was the golden age of bouts rimés, logogriphes, enigmas, chronographes, achrostiches, and fatfasies, (unmeaning combinations of words.) In Henri de Croy's great work, even the single fatrasies were distinguished from the double ones. The reign of these egregious morsels still lingers in some almanacs, people's penny periodicals, and even in the Paris Illustrated News, where the logogriph, consisting partly of letters and partly of pictured objects, keeps the subscribers in misery till next Saturday, when the solution appears.
The taste of the public with regard to spectacles was not superior to that of the readers of the time for such trifles as have been just mentioned. In 1313, when the young princes, sons of Philip the Fair, received the order of knighthood, a grand mystery was exhibited to the people of Paris, where the Infant Saviour was presented smiling on his mother and eating an apple, surrounded by the three kings of Cologne, (the Magi,) the twelve apostles saying their paternosters, the souls of the blessed in paradise singing hymns in unison with ninety angels, and the reprobate in hell howling for the entertainment of about a hundred demons.
Of translations, which were also included under the head rhetoric, we have already spoken. As Latin was almost the only language from which the versions were made, the spirit of that language must have had considerable influence on future compositions in the vulgar tongue.