Tales from the Old French Part 8

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 cla.s.sed 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 p.a.w.n 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 Perten.o.ble 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 "ign.o.ble 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. Pet.i.t 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 mediaeval setting. M. Gaston Paris, in _La Poesie 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 devots_ 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 superst.i.tions 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 h.e.l.l, 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.

Just as the spirit of the _fabliaux_ is found again in the farces, so that of the _contes devots_ continues in the miracle plays. But when, in the fifteenth century, prose drives out verse narrative, all three types of tale cease. In the renaissance and for long after they were neglected. It was in the eighteenth century, with its curiosity concerning the mediaeval, that men turned back to the ma.n.u.scripts so long disregarded. Barbazan brought out a collection of texts, and Legrand d'Aussy published a collection of abridgments of twelfth and thirteenth century tales. Since then, various editors, both French and German, have made the best of the tales available to us.

Taken together, apart from the pleasure of the story for the story's sake, they give us a fresh sense of the time in which they were written, its feasts and tourneys bright with the gold and the vair; its wars, its interrupted traffic and barter; its license, its asceticism; its prayers and its visions. More than that, they interest us as standing midway between the old and the new. In them one may look for fragments of vanished stories, bits of myth and folklore, salvage of an age that told its tales instead of writing them; and, at the same time, we find in them the beginnings of modern literature, the first of that long and goodly line, the French short story. For all their simplicity they show the beginnings of a shrewd observation, of delicate description, and above all of compact narrative where no words are wasted. Already there is a conscious artistic pride; Marie de France tells us she has waked many a night in rhyming her verses; and "Know ye," one of the _fabliaux_ charges us, "it is no light thing to tell a goodly tale."

Bibliography

List of Texts followed in These Translations

The Lay of the Bird, _Le Lai de l'Oiselet_, edited by Gaston Paris, Paris, 1884. Privately printed.

The Two Lovers, The Woful Knight (Chaitivel), Eliduc: _Die Lais der Marie de France_, edited by Karl Warnke, Halle, 1900.

Melion, _Lai d'Ignaures, Suivi des Lais de Melion et du Trot_, edited by Monmerque et Francisque Michel, Paris, 1832.

The Lay of the Horn: _Le Lai du Cor_, edited by F. Wulf, Lunt, 1888.

Also Tobler's notes on the same, _Zeitschrift fur Romanische Philologie_, XII., 266.

Of the Churl who Won Paradise, The Divided Blanket, The Gray Palfrey: _Recueil des Fabliaux des xii^e et xiii^e Siecles_, edited by A. de Montaiglon and G. Raynaud, 6 vols., Paris, 1872-90.

The Knight of the Little Cask: _Zwei Altfranzosische Dichtungen_, _La Chastelaine de Saint Gille_, _Du Chevalier au Barisel_, edited by O. Schultzgora, Halle, 1889.

The Angel and the Hermit: _Nouveau Recueil de Fabliaux et Contes_, edited by M. Meon, 2 vols. Paris, 1823.

The Jousting of Our Lady: Chrestomatie de l'ancien francais, Karl Bartsch, Leipzig, 1880.

The Order of Chivalry: _Fabliaux et Contes_, edited by E. Barbazan, and revised by M. Meon, 4 vols., Paris, 1808.

Translator's Note

NOTE.--In recent years, in various small books, a number of mediaeval French tales, chiefly the lays, have been rendered accessible to English readers, but no attempt has been made to bring together in a single collection examples of the different types of tales. The translator has tried within a small compa.s.s to show something of the range and scope of the Old French short story, and at the same time to choose, as far as might be, tales that had not been previously translated.

Three of those included in the volume have, however, already been done into English. _The Two Lovers_ and _Eliduc_ appeared in _Seven Lays of Marie de France_, by Edith Rickert, London, 1901; and a metrical translation by William Morris of _The Order of Chivalry_ was printed in the Kelmscott Press edition of Caxton's _Order of Chivalry_. Of the others, I believe, no complete English version has been made. Condensed renderings, however, of _The Order of Chivalry_ and _The Lay of the Bird_ occur in Way's Selections of Fabliaux and Tales, London, 1796 and 1800. Also Leigh Hunt used the plot of _Le Vair Palefroi_ for his poem _The Palfrey_; and in Parnell's _Hermit_ an often told story is again repeated, and the anchorite and his divine comrade move, strange figures, through the ordered, eighteenth century landscape.

Many of the Old French tales have been preserved to us in but a single ma.n.u.script, with the result we have few critical texts. Such excellent editions as Warnke's _Lais of Marie de France_ are rare, and the translator often encounters difficulties by the way. Some of the readings must perforce be conjectural, and others can but reproduce the ambiguities of the original. At the end of _The Gray Palfrey_ I have omitted altogether a long but incomplete sentence that begins to tell us what happened next between the hero and his uncle. Zorak's text of _Melion_ (_Zeitsckrift fur Romanische philologie_, vol. vi.) unfortunately did not come to my notice until these translations were in press, too late to do more than borrow a few readings where Michel is most unsatisfactory.

A word should be said as to the grouping of the tales. The types are not so distinct but that there is a borderland between the _lai_ and the _fabliau_ in which are found a few examples with the characteristics of each. _The Lay of the Bird_ is a case in point. Gaston Paris, in his _Litterature Francaise au Moyen Age_, cla.s.ses it as a _fabliau_ because the story is not of Celtic but Eastern origin; yet M. de Montaiglon does not admit it to his complete edition of the _Fabliaux_. Indeed, the enchanted orchard, the talking bird, the sentiments, the praise of love are all in the manner of the courtly poetry. It is therefore, on account of its accessories, here included among the _lais_.