CHRISTINE DE PISAN
"SEULETE suy et seulete veuil estre,
Seulete m'a mon doulz ami laissiee,
Seulete suy sans compagnon ne maistre,
Seulete suy dolente et courrouciee,
Seulete suy en langueur mesaisiee,
Seulete suy plus que nulle esgaree,
Seulete suy sans amis demouree."
(Alone am I in the world, and alone would I remain,
Alone has my dear love left me,
Alone am I, a poor lone woman, without companion or master,
Alone am I, stricken with sorrow and anguish of mind,
Alone am I, and ill at ease,
Alone am I, more lonely than one who has lost her way,
Alone have I been left without friends.)
This complaint of one who has lost her lover, or been betrayed and
forsaken by him, might well have been the lament of France, betrayed by
Isabeau de Baviere and left naked to her enemies. But the author of the
lament, though one ready enough to find matter for her pen in the
condition of her adopted country, had no thought of France in this case;
for the little _ballade_ was composed by Christine de Pisan with no
other reference than to her own life.
The age of the mad king and the bad queen would not have been, one would
think, favorable to the advancement of literature; and yet some of the
best literature of medieval France was composed while Isabeau de Baviere
was still alive. We shall allude at this time to but two writers,
Froissart, of whom we have already said something, and Christine de
Pisan, both of whom were writing between 1380 and 1400. Christine, the
first professional authoress in France of whose life we have record, is
well worthy of study both as an authoress and as a woman.
The fourteenth century was the heyday of the astrologer as it was of the
witch, and the wise Charles V., "le Salomon de la France," was not alone
in his superstition when he placed his reliance upon the predictions of
the learned doctor, Thomas of Pisa, whom he had summoned from Italy to
be court astrologer. We are told that the nobles and great ones of the
earth at that time "dared do nothing new without the commands of
astrology; they dared neither build castles, nor churches, nor begin
war, nor even so much as put on a new robe, undertake a journey, nor go
out of their houses without the consent of the stars." Whether or not
this be somewhat of an exaggeration, there is no question that Thomas de
Pisan occupied, at the court of Charles V., a position not only
lucrative but dignified. Established in the Louvre itself, the Italian
scholar sent for his wife and daughter to make their home in France. The
daughter, then (1368) but five years of age, was already a precocious
little lady, and was presented to the king when she arrived in France.
Charles was pleased with the graces of the child, and made her his
especial protegee, promising that she should have as good an education
and place at his court as any _demoiselle_ of noble birth. Charles was
himself a scholar and capable of appreciating the nobility of
intelligence; and in this case he had not judged amiss.
It is from the works of Christine herself--_La Vision de Christine_, in
prose, _La Mutation de Fortune_, and _Le Chemin de Long Estude_,--in
verse that we learn most of her story, which was happy and uneventful up
to her fourteenth year. At this time she had already acquired, under her
father's careful tuition, a remarkable familiarity with the classic
authors of Rome, and could turn off as neat Latin verses as any boy in
the schools, and could also write French verse. It was most fortunate
for her that her father, "not thinking girls any more unfit for learning
than boys," allowed her to "glean some straws of learning." Before she
was fifteen Christine was married to a notary, Etienne Castel, a Picard
gentleman of good birth and excellent character, whom she loved
tenderly.
The prosperity of her family was first threatened in 1380, when her good
patron King Charles died. Then her father, who had lavishly expended a
large part of the handsome stipend he received as astrologer, found
himself suddenly reduced almost to poverty, and he did not long survive
his royal patron. The earnings of her husband not being sufficient to
maintain the family, Christine cast about for a means to put to use the
education she had received, and had already begun, by some small works,
her career as an authoress, when the sudden death of her husband,
carried off by the plague in 1389, left her alone and without resources,
and under the necessity of providing some sort of support for her mother
and her three children.
She never ceased to mourn for her husband, and the pages of her works
are filled with poems which, like the little _ballade_ that heads this
chapter, hold tender allusion to her loss. Though to modern ears the
perpetual repetition of this strain of mourning grows monotonous, some
of the sweetest of her poems are those inspired by this sentiment,
expressed with a directness and a simplicity that must appeal to any
lover of truth and poetry. "He loved me," she sings, "and 'twas right
that he should, for I had come to him as a girl-bride; we two had made
such wise provision in all our love that our two hearts were moved in
all things, whether of joy or of sorrow, by a common wish, more united
in love than the hearts of brother and sister."
She too might have wished to die, she says, in order to follow the loved
one, but that there were the children and the mother whom she alone
could care for. The energy of her character at last saved the fortunes
of her family. Her first task, the saving of some last remnants of the
property of her father and her husband, was rendered more difficult by
the almost interminable delays of the courts and the dishonesty of
advocates and opponents who had more influence with the "blind goddess"
than the daughter of the old astrologer. She herself gives an
interesting picture of her difficulties, all bravely met for the sake of
her children, and in time overcome. Not the least of her worries was the
determination to conceal from her friends the desperate state of her
fortunes; she was too proud to appear poor: "There is no sorrow equal to
this, and no one who has not experienced it can know what it means....
Under a furred mantle and a cloak of scarlet, well saved, but not often
renewed, there was many a shiver, and in a bed properly appointed with
all things of comfort, many a sleepless night. But our meal was always a
simple one, as befits a widow."
But from the more sordid cares, the covering of her poverty under
threadbare finery that did not keep out the cold, and the vulgar
loungers who would ogle her and leer at her as she went about the
courts, there was a refuge in the pursuits which were to earn her bread.
At first Christine sang of her lost husband, and the grace and
earnestness of these poems pleased the fashionable public of the day.
Her style was the result of long and careful preparation, and her mind
almost unconsciously reflected the things which she had read and admired
in classic literature; and thus she transmitted to her readers much
information, not in itself new or original, but strange to them, and
therefore interesting. Some of the great personages of the court still
remembered the little Italian protegee of Charles V., and asked her to
write for them poems of love, in less lugubrious vein. We have seen that
the troubadours thought it almost a truism: "Without love, no poesy,"
for love was their only theme; but here we find a woman who frankly
admits that she has loved and loves no more, and who yet undertakes to
write love poems for a price, and does write some exquisite ones. Poetry
made to order can never seem spontaneous after we know that the poet has
found inspiration not at the shrine of Phoebus but at that of Plutus;
but many of the poetic masterpieces have been composed under stress of
dire poverty, of which we are fortunately not always aware when reading
them. And so, among the six or seven score little _ballades_ and _jeux_
which in Christine's works are marked _a vendre_--for sale--there are
many that we could read with more sincere pleasure if we did not doubt
the genuineness of the sentiment expressed. These little poems, many of
them really graceful and charming playthings of a moment, lose so much
in translation that I shall not attempt to render into English their
ephemeral charm. The French of five hundred years ago is not "Frenshe of
Paris" to most of us: rather is it of the school of "Stratford atte
Bow," or of some other school we have never attended, and therefore I
have chosen to give, with some changes in orthography, one of the
simplest of Christine's _jeux a vendre_. It is a lover's song in praise
of his lady beautiful and good:
"Je vous vens la rose de mai?
Oncques en ma vie n'aimai
Autant dame ne damoiselle
Que je fais vous, gente femelle,
Si me retenez a ami,
Car tout avez le coeur de mi (moi).
..........................................
Je vous vens l'oiselet en gage?
Si vous etes faulx, c'est dommage,
Car vous etes et belle et doulx,
Si n'ayez telle tache en vous,
Et digne serez d'etre aimee,
Belle et bonne et bien renommee."
In other poems written for her courtly admirers Christine does not
hesitate to voice sentiments quite out of keeping with the manners of
her patrons. It is thus that she says: "If true honor is to be
reapportioned, many do I know who will have but a little share in it,
despite their thinking that they have all that wealth, beauty, noble
birth, and fine clothes can give, and that therefore they are very
princes. But however noble he be in outward show, no man is noble who
lends himself to evil deeds or evil words. Thus some there are in whose
boasting there is not one word of truth, who will tell you that the
fairest ladies in the land have honored them with love. Good Lord! what
gentility! How ill it becomes a noble man to lie and tell false tales of
women! Such fellows are but villains, pure and simple; and should there
be a redistribution of honors, theirs should be cut down."
Not infrequently, alas, the pride of learning mars her verse; it is
overloaded with pedantic allusions, stiff with learning, and too
manifestly the product of a learned head rather than of an overflowing
heart. Where these faults appear less, or not at all, is in the poems
inspired by genuine feeling for her loved ones; there the real heart of
the woman, bravely struggling to bear up and smile before the world, is
laid bare to us in sudden glimpses of unpremeditated poetry. It is an
old theme, but one of pathos ever fresh, that we find in the following
lines:
"Je chante par couverture (_i. e._, contenance),
Mais mieux pleurassent mes oeil (yeux),
Ne nul ne sait le travail
Que mon pauvre coeur endure.
Pour ce (je) muce (cache) ma douleur
Qu'en nul je ne vois pitie.
Plus on a cause de pleur (pleurer),
Moins on trouve d'amitie.
Pour ce plainte ne murmure
Ne fais de mon piteux deuil.
Aincois (plutot) (je) ris quand pleurer veuil (veux),
Et sans rime et sans mesure
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
_eloge_, 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'Orleans, 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'Epitre d'Othea a 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
_Societe des anciens textes francais_ 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 _Epitre 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 Baviere. 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 Cite 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.
The second of the prose works in behalf of women is the _Livre des Trois
Vertus_, or _Tresor de la Cite des Dames_, a book of sage counsel to
women of all classes and full of information most valuable for the
historian of manners. It is from this book that one receives the best
impression of the fine moral character and catholicity of view of this
woman living a life of hardship and struggle in the dark days of the mad
king. She is no prude, but simple and charitable in her conception of
the problems of life. Though herself a literary woman, she does not
place too great stress upon learning for her sex: "This woman in love
with scholarship intends, to be sure, that woman should acquire
learning; but it must be for the purpose of developing her intelligence,
of raising her heart to higher things, not of widening her field of
ambitions, dethroning man and reigning in his stead."
The prodigious activity of this authoress can best be appreciated by
reference to her own statement that, by the year 1405, she had "produced
fifteen works of importance, without counting other special little
_ditties_, which together fill about seventy sheets of large size." The
chief part of her work was already done; for the disturbed condition of
the kingdom after the murder of Louis d'Orleans (1407) interrupted her
labors. She had thoroughly naturalized herself in her adopted country,
and this fervent patriot, who grieved that she was helpless to save
France, must have suffered intensely during the dark years that
followed. In 1410, she wrote a _Lamentation_ upon the horrors of civil
war, and two years later, after the overthrow of the communist
government of Paris, the Cabochiens, she wrote a _Livre de la Paix_,
full of harsh but just criticisms upon those butchers and bakers who
would reform the whole world if first allowed to destroy it. Then came
the greater sorrows of Agincourt and the English conquest. Christine
fled from Paris, no longer the home of those princes who had favored
her, and found refuge in a convent, probably the convent at Poissy to
which her daughter had already retired. It was the breaking up of her
little family, her two sons going back to Italy to seek a more favorable
field for their peaceful talents, and the mother remaining in seclusion
for eleven years.
It was probably not long before her death, of which we do not know the
precise date, that the good lady heard in her cloister the glad news of
the coming of the Maid of Orleans and of the consecration of the king at
Rheims. All her love for her dear land of France welled up in her heart,
and in gladness and wonder she sang the _Dittie de Jeanne d'Arc_, the
praise of this "girl of sixteen years... before whom enemies fly, not
one dare stand.... Oh! what honor to our sex! our sex, that God loves,
it would seem." We cannot better conclude this account of a pure and
noble woman--of one who loved her husband, her children and her country,
and who, above all, preserved respect for herself and for her womanhood
in an evil age--than in the words of her triumphant song of joy which
proclaims that France is saved, and that it is a woman who saves France:
"Chose est bien digne de memoire
Que Dieu par une vierge tendre
Sur France si grand' grace estendre.
Tu Johanne, de bonne heure nee,
Benoist (Beni) soit (le) Ciel qui te crea,
Par miracle fut (elle) envoyee
Au roi pour sa provision;
Son fait n'est pas illusion,
Car bien a ete eprouvee....
Par conseil en conclusion
A l'effet la chose est prouvee,
Et sa belle vie, par (ma) foi,
Par quoi (laquelle) on ajoute plus (de) foi
A son fait, quoi qu'elle fasse,
Toujours en Dieu devant la face....
Hee! quel honneur au feminin
Sexe! que Dieu l'aime, il appert!"