Avril. Essays on the French Renaissance/Charles

by Hilaire Belloc

I put down Charles of Orleans here as the first representative of that long glory which it is the business of this little book to recall: but to give him such a place at the threshold requires some apology.

The origins of a literary epoch differ according as that epoch is primal or derivative. There are those edifices of letters which start up, not indeed out of nothing, but out of things wholly different. Produced by a shock or a revelation, as two gases lit will, in a sharp explosion, unite to form a liquid wholly unlike either, so after a great conquest, a battle, the sudden preaching of a creed, these primal literatures appear in an epic or a dithyrambic code of awful law. Their first effort is their mightiest. They come mature. They are allied to that element of the catastrophic which the modern world (taking its general philosophy from its social condition) denies, but which is yet at the limits of all things separate and themselves; accompanies every birth, and strikes agony into every transition of death.

Those other much commoner epochs in the history of letters, which may be called derivative, have this current and obvious quality, that their beginnings merge into the soil that bred them, also (very often) their decay will lapse imperceptibly into newer things. They are quite definite, but also definitely parented. We know their special stuff and harmony, but we can point out clearly enough the elements which formed that stuff, the tones which unite in that harmony. We can show with dates and citations the parts meeting and blending; our difficulty is not to determine the influences which have mixed to make the general school, but rather to fix the beginning and the end of its effect upon men.

In the first of these the leader, sometimes the unique example of the school, stands out great, but particular and clear, on a background vague or dark. He is as stupendous, yet as sharp and certain, as a mountain facing the morning, with only sky behind. In the second the originator, if there be one, is vague, tentative, perhaps unknown. More often many minor men together introduce a slow and general transition.

Now the French Renaissance has this peculiar mark, that it holds quite plainly by one side of it to the first by the other to the second of these spirits.

It was primal and catastrophic in that it made something completely new. A new architecture, new cities, a new poetry, almost a new language, a new kind of government--ultimately the modern world.

It was derivative in that the shock, the revelation, which produced it, was the return of something allied to the French blood, something rooted in the French memory. Rome surviving or risen had made that Italy, which was now beginning to trouble the Alps, and would surely creep in by every channel of influence, and at last pervade all Europe. Rome, also, in her full vigour, had once framed and ordered Gaul. The French of the Renaissance were woken suddenly, but as they started they recognized the face and the hand of the awakener.

On this account you will find one mind indeed at the very beginning of the change in letters, but not a dominating mind. There is but one man who is certainly an origin, but he is not a master. You see an unique and single personality, distinct but without force, founding no school--the grave, abiding, kind but covert face of Charles of Orleans. He, linked to the French Renaissance, is like the figure of a gentle friend playing in some garden with a child whose manners are new and pleasing to him, but of whose great destiny he makes no guess. That child was to be Du Bellay, Brantome, Montaigne a hundred-sided, huge Rabelais, Ronsard. Or perhaps this metaphor will put it better. To say that Charles of Orleans's equal and persistent music was like a string harped on distinctly in a chorus of flutes and hautboys, till one by one harps from here and there caught up the similar tang of chords and at last the whole body of sound was harping only.

His life was suited to such difference and such origination. Italy, still living, filled him. An Italian secretary wrote from his mouth the most sumptuous of his manuscripts. He banded on Italy as a goal and his Italian land as a legacy to the French crown--to his own son; till (years after his death) the soldiers roared through Briançon and broke the crusted snow of Mont Genèvre. An Italian mother, the most beautiful of the Viscontis, come out of Italy, rich in her land of Asti and her half million of pure gold, had borne him in her youth to the King of France's brother: a man luxurious, over fine, exact in taste, a lover of magnificence in stories and words, decadent in a dying time, very brave. Through that father the Valois blood, unjustly hated or still more unjustly despised according to the varied ignorance of modern times, ran in him nobly.

Take the Valois strain entire and you will find the pomp or rather the fantasy of their great palace of St. Paul; turrets and steep blue roofs of slate, carved woodwork, heavy curtains, and incense and shining bronze. The Valois were, indeed, the end of the middle ages. Some cruelty, a fury in battle, intelligence and madness alternately, and always a sort of keenness which becomes now revenge, now foresight, now intrigue, now strict and terrible government: at last a wild adventure out beyond the hills: Fornovo, Pavia.

Their story is like the manuscripts, which beyond all other things they loved and collected, and which they were the last to possess or to have made; for while it contains in vivid pictures the noblest and the basest subjects: (Joan of Arc and also her betrayal, their country dominant and almost engulfed, Marigano, and then again Pavia) it always glitters with hard enamelled colours against skies of gold, and is drawn and sharp and clean as a thing can be.

Such is the whole line, but look at this one Valois and you see all the qualities of his race toned by a permanent sadness down to a good and even temper, not hopeful but still delighting in beauty and possessed as no other Valois had been of charity. Less passionate and therefore much less eager and useful than most of his race, yet the taint of madness never showed in him, nor the corresponding evil of cruelty, nor the uncreative luxury of his immediate ancestry. All the Valois were poets in their kind; his life by its every accident caused him to write. At fifteen they wedded him to that lovely child whom Richard II had lifted in his arms at Windsor as he rode out in fatal pomp for Ireland. Three years later, when their marriage was real, she died in childbirth, and it is to her I think that he wrote in his prison the ballad which ends:

Dieu sur tout souverain seigneur
Ordonnez par grace et douceur
De l'ame d'elle tellement
Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement
En peine souci et douleur.

Already, in the quarrel that so nearly wrecked the crown, the anti-national factions had killed his father. He was planning vengeance, engraving little mottoes of hate upon his silver, when the wars came on them all. A boy of twenty-four, well-horsed, much more of a soldier than he later seemed, he charged, leading the centre of the three tall troops at Agincourt. In the evening of that disaster they pulled him out from under a great heap of the ten thousand dead and brought him prisoner into England, to Windsor then to Pomfret Castle. Chatterton, Cobworth, at last John Cornwall, of Fanhope, were his guardians. To some one of these--probably the last--he wrote the farewell:

Mon très bon hôte et ma très douce hôtesse.

For his life as a prisoner, though melancholy, was not undignified; he paid no allegiance, he met the men of his own rank, nor was he of a kind to whom poverty, the chief thorn of his misfortune, brought dishonour.

Henry V had left it strictly in his will that Orleans the general and the head of the French nationals should not return. For twenty-five years, therefore--all his manhood--he lived under this sky, rhyming and rhyming: in English a little, in French continually, and during that isolation there swept past him far off in his own land the defence, the renewal, the triumph of his own blood: his town relieved, his cousin crowned at Rheims. His river of Loire, and then the Eure, and then the Seine, and even the field where he had fallen were reconquered. Willoughby had lost Paris to Richemont four years before Charles of Orleans was freed on a ransom of half his mother's fortune. It was not until the November of 1440 that he saw his country-side again.

The verse formed in that long endurance (a style which he preserved to the end in the many poems after his release) may seem at a first reading merely mediæval. There is wholly lacking in it the riot of creation, nor can one see at first the Renaissance coming in with Charles of Orleans.

Indeed it was laid aside as mediæval, and was wholly forgotten for three hundred years. No one had even heard of him for all those centuries till Sallier, that learned priest, pacing, full of his Hebrew and Syriac, the rooms of the royal library which Louis XV had but lately given him to govern, found the manuscript of the poems and wrote an essay on them for the Academy.

The verse is full of allegory; it is repetitive; it might weary one with the savour of that unhappy fifteenth century when the human mind lay under oppression, and only the rich could speak their insignificant words; a foreigner especially might find it all dry bones, but his judgement would be wrong. Charles of Orleans has a note quite new and one that after him never failed, but grew in volume and in majesty until it filled the great chorus of the Pleiade--the Lyrical note of direct personal expression. Perhaps the wars produced it in him; the lilt of the marching songs was still spontaneous:

Gentil Duc de Lorraine, vous avez grand renom,
Et votre renommée passe au delà des monts
Et vous et vos gens d'arme, et tous vos compagnons
Au premier coup qu'ils frappent, abattent les Donjons.
Tirez, tirez bombardes, serpentines, Canons!

Whatever the cause, this spontaneity and freshness run through all the mass of short and similar work which he wrote down.

The spring and sureness, the poise of these light nothings make them a flight of birds.
See how direct is this:
Dieu! qu'il la fait bon regarder!
La gracieuse, bonne et belle.

or this:

Le lendemain du premier jour de Mai
Dedans mon lit ainsi que je dormoye
Au point du jour advint que je sonjeay.

Everywhere his words make tunes for themselves and everywhere he himself appears in his own verses, simple, charming, slight, but with memories of government and of arms.

This style well formed, half his verse written, he returned to his own place. He was in middle age--a man of fifty. He married soberly enough Mary of Cleves, ugly and young: he married her in order to cement the understanding with Burgundy. She did not love him with his shy florid face, long neck and features and mild eyes. His age for twenty-five years passed easily, he had reached his "castle of No Care." As late as 1462 his son (Louis XII) was born; his two daughters at long intervals before. His famous library moved with him as he went from town to town, and perpetually from himself and round him from his retinue ran the continual stream of verse which only ended with his death. His very doctor he compelled to rhyme.

All the singers of the time visited or remained with him--wild Villon for a moment, and after Villon a crowd of minor men. It was in such a company that he recited the last ironical but tender song wherein he talks of his lost youth and vigour and ends by bidding all present a salute in the name of his old age.

So he sat, half regal, holding a court of song in Blois and Tours, a forerunner in verse of what the new time was to build in stone along the Loire. And it was at Amboise that he died.

THE COMPLAINT

The 57th Ballade of those written during his imprisonment

There is some dispute in the matter, but I will believe, as I have said, that this dead Princess, for whose soul he prays, was certainly the wife of his boyhood, a child whom Richard II had wed just before that Lancastrian usurpation which is the irreparable disaster of English history. She was, I say, a child--a widow in name--when Charles of Orleans, himself in that small royal clique which was isolated and shrivelling, married her as a mere matter of state. It is probable that he grew to love her passionately, and perhaps still more her memory when she had died in child-bed during those first years, even before Agincourt, "en droicte fleur de jeunesse,"--for even here he is able to find an exact and sufficient line.

There is surely to be noted in this delicate ballad, something more native and truthful in its pathos than in the very many complaints he left by way partly of reminiscence, partly of poetic exercise. For, though he is restrained, as was the manner of his rank when they attempted letters, yet you will not read it often without getting in you a share of its melancholy.

That melancholy you can soon discover to be as permanent a quality in the verse as it was in the mind of the man who wrote it.

THE COMPLAINT

Las! Mort qui t'a fait si hardie,
De prendre la noble Princesse
Qui estoit mon confort, ma vie,
Mon bien, mon plaisir, ma richesse!
Puis que tu as prins ma maistresse,
Prens moy aussi son serviteur,
Car j'ayme mieulx prouchainement
Mourir que languir en tourment
En paine, soussi et doleur.
Las! de tous biens estoit garnie
Et en droite fleur de jeunesse!
Je pry à Dieu qu'il te maudie,
Faulse Mort, plaine de rudesse!
Se prise l'eusses en vieillesse,
Ce ne fust pas si grant rigueur;
Mais prise l'as hastivement
Et m'as laissié piteusement
En paine, soussi et doleur.
Las! je suis seul sans compaignie!
Adieu ma Dame, ma liesse!
Or est nostre amour departie,
Non pour tant, je vous fais promesse
Que de prieres, à largesse,
Morte vous serviray de cueur,
Sans oublier aucunement;
Et vous regretteray souvent
En paine, soussi et doleur.

ENVOI.

Dieu, sur tout souverain Seigneur,
Ordonnez, par grace et doulceur,
De l'ame d'elle, tellement
Qu'elle ne soit pas longuement
En paine, soussi et doleur.

THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING

The 41st and 43rd of the "Rondeaux."

These two Rondeaux, of which we may also presume, though very vaguely, that they were written in England (for they are in the manner of his earlier work), are by far the most famous of the many things he wrote; and justly, for they have all these qualities.

First, they are exact specimens of their style. The Roundel should interweave, repeat itself, and then recover its original strain, and these two exactly give such unified diversity.

Secondly: they were evidently written in a moment of that unknown power when words suggest something fuller than their own meaning, and in which simplicity itself broadens the mind of the reader. So that it is impossible to put one's finger upon this or that and say this adjective, that order of the words has given the touch of vividness.

Thirdly: they have in them still a living spirit of reality; read them to-day in Winter, and you feel the Spring. It is this quality perhaps which most men have seized in them, and which have deservedly made them immortal.

A further character which has added to their fame, is that, being perfect lyrics, they are also specimens of an old-fashioned manner and metre peculiar to the time. They are the resurrection not only of the Spring, but of a Spring of the fifteenth century. Nor is it too fantastic to say that one sees in them the last miniatures and the very dress of a time that was intensely beautiful, and in which Charles of Orleans alone did not feel death coming.

THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING.

Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus
Pour appareillier son logis,
Et ont fait tendre ses tappis,
De fleurs et verdure tissus.
En estandant tappis velus
De verte herbe par le pais,
Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus
Pour appareillier son logis.
Cueurs d'ennuy pieça morfondus,
Dieu merci, sont sains et jolis;
Alez vous en, prenez pais,
Yver vous ne demourrez plus;
Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus.
Le temps a laissié son manteau
De vent, de froidure et de pluye,
Et s'est vestu de brouderie,
De soleil luyant, cler et beau.
Il n'y a beste, ne oyseau,
Qu'en son jargon ne chant ou crie;
Le temps a laissié son manteau
De vent de froidure et de pluye.
Riviere, fontaine et ruisseau
Portent, en livrée jolie,
Gouttes d'argent d'orfavrerie,
Chascun s'abille de nouveau.
Le temps a laissié son manteau.

HIS LOVE AT MORNING

The 6th of the "Songs"

In this delightful little song the spontaneity and freshness which saved his work, its vigour and its clarity are best preserved.

It does indeed defy death and leaps four centuries: it is young and perpetual. It thrills with something the failing middle ages had forgotten: it reaches what they never reached, a climax, for one cannot put too vividly the flash of the penultimate line, "I am granted a vision when I think of her."

Yet it was written in later life, and who she was, or whether she lived at all, no one knows.

HIS LOVE AT MORNING

Dieu qu'il la fait bon regarder
La gracieuse bonne et belle!
Pour les grans biens qui sont en elle,
Chascun est prest de la louer
Qui se pourroit d'elle lasser!
Tousjours sa beaulté renouvelle.
Dieu, qu'il la fait bon regarder,
La gracieuse, bonne et belle!
Par deça, ne delà la mer,
Ne sçay Dame ne Damoiselle
Qui soit en tous biens parfais telle;
C'est un songe que d'y penser.
Dieu, qu'il la fait bon regarder!

THE FAREWELL

The 310th Roundel

Here is the last thing--we may presume--that Charles of Orleans ever wrote: "Salute me all the company, I pray."

In that "company" not only the Court at Amboise, but the men of the early wars, his companions, were round him, and the dead friends of his gentle memory.

He was broken with age; he was already feeling the weight of isolation from the Royal Family; he was beginning to suffer the insults of the king. But, beneath all this, his gaiety still ran like a river under ice, and in the ageing of a poet, humour and physical decline combined make a good, human thing.

There is an excellent irony in the refrain: "Salute me, all the company," whose double interpretation must not be missed, though it may seem far-fetched.

Till the last line it means, without any question, "Salute the company in my name," but I think there runs through it also, the hint of "Salute me for my years, all you present who are young," and that this certainly is the note in the last line of all. It must be remembered of the French, that they never expand or explain their ironical things, for in art it is their nature to detest excess.

This last thing of his, then, I say, is the most characteristic of him and of his Valois blood, and of the national spirit in general to which he belonged: for he, and it, and they, loved and love contrast, and the extra-meaning of words.

THE FAREWELL.

Saluez moy toute la compaignie
Où à present estes à chiere lie,
Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye
Avecques eulx, mais estre n'y porroye,
Pour Vieillesse qui m'a en sa baillie.
Au temps passé, Jeunesse si jolie
Me gouvernoit; las! or n'y suis je mye,
Et pour cela pour Dieu, que excusé soye;
Saluez moy toute la compaignie
Où à present estes à chiere lie,
Et leur dictes que voulentiers seroye.
Amoureux fus, or ne le suis je mye,
Et en Paris menoye bonne vie;
Adieu Bon temps ravoir ne vous saroye,
Bien sanglé fus d'une estroite courroye.
Que, par Aige, convient que la deslie.
Saluez moy toute la compaignie.