Author: Will Durant
Category: Nonfiction
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Drama marked time. Mysteries, moralities, “miracles,” interludes, and farces occupied the stages temporarily erected in the towns. Themes were increasingly secular, and the humor was often scandalous; but religious subjects still predominated, and the people never tired of spectacles representing the Passion of Christ. The most famous theater guild of the time—the Parisian Confrairie de la Passion de Nôtre Seigneur—specialized in acting the story of Christ’s brief stay in Jerusalem. One such Passion Play, by Arnoul Greban, ran to 35,000 lines.
Poetry, too, had its guilds. Toulouse set up in 1323 a Consistori de la gaya sciensa, or Academy of the Gay Science; under its auspices public competitions in poetry sought to revive the art and spirit of the troubadours. Similar literary societies were formed at Amiens, Douai, and Valenciennes, preparing for the French Academy of Richelieu. Kings and great lords had poets as well as minstrels and buffoons attached to their households. The “good René,” Duke of Anjou and Lorraine, and titular King of Naples, supported a bevy of poets and artists at his courts in Nancy, Tarascón, and Aix-en-Provence, and so rivaled the best of his rhymers that he received the title of “Last of the Troubadours.” Charles V took care of Eustache Deschamps, who sang the beauty of women, married, denounced matrimony in a 12,000-line Le Miroir de mariage, and bemoaned the misery and wickedness of his time:
Age de plomb, temps pervers, ciel d’airain,
Terre sans fruit, et stérile et prehaigne,
Peuple maudit, de toute douleur plein,
Il est bien droit que de vous tous me plaigne;
Car je ne vois rien au monde qui vienne
Fors tristement et à confusion,
Et qui tout maux en ses faits ne comprenne,
Hui est le temps de tribulation .*54
Christine de Pisanu reared in Paris as the daughter of Charles V’s Italian physician, was left with three children and three relatives to support when her husband died; she did it miraculously by writing exquisite poetry and patriotic history, she deserves a passing obeisance as the first woman in Western Europe to live by her pen. Alain Chartier was more fortunate; his love poems—like La belle dame sans merci, which melodiously chided women for hoarding their charms—so captivated the aristocracy that a future queen of France, Margaret of Scotland, was said to have kissed the lips of the poet as he slept on a bench. Étienne Pasquier, a century later, told the legend charmingly:
When many were astonished at this—for to speak the truth Nature had placed a beautiful spirit in a most ungraceful body—the lady told them they must not be surprised at this mystery, for it was not the man whom she desired to kiss but the lips whence had issued such golden words.55
The finest French poet of the age did not have to write poetry, for he was the nephew of Charles VI and the father of Louis XII. But Charles, Duke of Orléans, was taken prisoner at Agincourt, and spent twenty-five years (1415–40) in genteel captivity in England. There, heavy of heart, he consoled himself by writing tender verses about the beauty of women and the tragedy of France. For a time all France sang his song of spring:
Le temps a laissié son manteau,
De vent, de froidure, et de pluye,
Et s’est vêtu de brouderie
Du soleil luyant, cler et beau.
Il n’y a beste, ne oyseau
Qu’en son jargon ne chante ou crie:
Le temps a laissié son manteau.*56
Even in England there were pretty girls, and Charles forgot his griefs when modest loveliness passed by:
Dieu! qu’il fait bon la regarder,
La gracieuse, bonne et belle!
Pour les grands biens qui sont en elle
Chacun est près de la louer.
Qui se pourrait d’elle lasser?
Tout jour sa beauté renouvelle.
Dieu! qu’il fait bon la regarder,
La gracieuse, bonne, et belle!*58
Allowed at last to return to France, he made his castle at Blois a happy center of literature and art, where Villon was received despite his poverty and his crimes. When old age came, and Charles could no longer join in the revels of his young friends, he made his excuses to them in graceful lines that might have served as his epitaph:
Saluez moi toute la compaignie
Ou a present estes a chtère lye,
Et leurs dites que voulentiers seroye
Avecques eulx, mais estre n’y pourroye,
Pour Viellesse qui m’a eu sa baillie.
Au temps passé Jennesse sy jolie
Me gouvernoit; las! or ny suy ge mye.
Amoureus fus, or ne le suy ge mye,
Et en Paris menoye bonne vie.
Adieu, bon temps, ravoir ne vous saroye!...
Saluez moi toute la compaignie.†59
VIII. ART
The artists of France were in this epoch superior to her poets, but they too suffered from her bitter impoverishment. No lavish patronage supported them, of city, Church, or king. The communes, which had expressed the pride of their guilds through majestic temples to an unquestioned faith, had been weakened or destroyed by the extension of royal authority, and the enlargement of the economy from a local to a national frame. The French Church could no longer finance or inspire such stupendous structures as had risen in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries from the soil of France. Faith as well as wealth had declined; the hope that in those centuries had undertaken at once the Crusades and the cathedrals—the enterprise and its prayer—had lost its generative ecstasy. It was more than the fourteenth century could do to finish, in architecture, what a more sanguine era had begun. Even so, Jean Ravi completed Notre Dame in Paris (1351), Rouen added a “Lady Chapel” (1302) to a cathedral already dedicated to Our Lady, and Poitiers gave her cathedral its proud west front (1379).
The Rayonnant style of Gothic design was now (1275 f.) gradually yielding to a Geometrical Gothic that stressed Euclidean figures instead of radiating lines. In this manner Bordeaux built her cathedral (1320–25), Caen raised a handsome spire (shattered in the second World War) on the church of St. Pierre (1308), Auxerre gave her cathedral a new nave (1335), Coutances (1371–86) and Amiens (1375) added lovely chapels to their historic shrines, and Rouen enhanced her architectural glory with the noble church of St. Ouen (1318–1545).
In the final quarter of the fourteenth century, when France thought herself victorious, her architects displayed a new Gothic, joyous in spirit, exuberant in carved detail, fancifully intricate in tracery, reveling recklessly in ornament. The ogive, or pointed arch of a continued curve, became now an ogee, or tapered arch of a reversed curve, like the tongue of flame that gave the style its Flamboyant name. Capitals fell into disuse; columns were fluted or spiraled; choir stalls were profusely carved, and were closed with iron screens of delicate lacery; pendentives became stalactites; vaults were a wilderness of intertwined, disappearing, reappearing ribs; the mullions of the windows shunned the old solid geometrical forms, and flowed in charming frailty and incalculable willfulness; spires seemed built of decoration; structure vanished behind ornament. The new style made its debut in the chapel of St. Jean-Baptiste (1375) in the cathedral of Amiens; by 1425 it had captured France; in 1436 it began one of its fragile miracles, the church of St. Maclou at Rouen. Perhaps the revival of French courage and arms by Joan of Arc and Charles VII, the growth of mercantile wealth as instanced by Jacques Cœur, and the inclination of the rising bourgeoisie to luxurious ornament helped the Flamboyant style to its triumph in the first half of the fifteenth century. In that feminine form Gothic survived till French kings and nobles brought back from their wars in Italy the classical architectural ideas of the Renaissance.
The growth of civil architecture revealed the rising secularism of the time. Kings and dukes thought there were churches enough, and built themselves palaces to impress the people and house their mistresses; rich burghers spent fortunes on their homes; municipalities announced their wealth through splendid hotels-de-ville, or city halls. Some hospitals, like Beaune’s, were desig
ned with a fresh and airy beauty that must have lulled the ill to health. At Avignon the popes and cardinals gathered and nourished a diversity of artists; but the builders, painters, and sculptors of France were now usually grouped about a noble or a king. Charles V built the chateau of Vincennes (1364–73) and the Bastille (1369), and commissioned the versatile André Beauneveû to carve figures of Philip VI, John II, and Charles himself for the imposing array of royal tombs that crowd the ambulatory and crypt of St. Denis (1364). Louis of Orléans raised the chateau of Pierrefonds, and John, Duke of Berry, though hard on his peasants, was one of the great art patrons of history.
For him Beauneveû illustrated a Psalter in 1402. It was but one in a series of illuminated manuscripts that stand near the top in what might be called the chamber music of the graphic arts. For the same discriminating lord, Jacquemart de Hesdin painted Les petites heures, Les belles heures, and Les grandes heures, all illustrating books of “hours” for the canonical daily prayers. Again for Duke John the brothers Pol, Jehannequin, and Herman Malouel of Limburg produced Les tres riches heures (1416)—sixty-five delicately beautiful miniatures picturing the life and scenery of France: nobles hunting, peasants working, a countryside purified with snow. These Very Rich Hours, now hidden even from tourist eyes in the Condé Museum at Chantilly, and the miniatures made for Le bon roi, René of Anjou, were almost the last triumphs of illumination; for in the fifteenth century that art was challenged both by wood-block engraving and by the development of thriving schools of mural and easel painting at Fontainebleau, Amiens, Bourges, Tours, Moulins, Avignon, and Dijon, not to speak of the masters who worked for the dukes of Burgundy. Beauneveû and the Van Eycks brought Flemish styles of painting to France; and through Simone Martini and other Italians at Avignon, and the Angevin rule in Naples (1268–1435), Italian art influenced the French long before French arms invaded Italy. By 1450 French painting stood on its own feet, and marked its coming of age with the anonymous Pietà of Villeneuve, now in the Louvre.
Jean Fouquet is the first clear personality in French painting. Born at Tours (1416), he studied for seven years in Italy (1440–47), and returned to France with that predilection for classical architectural backgrounds which in the seventeenth century would become a mania with Nicolas Poussin and Claude Lorrain. Nevertheless he painted several portraits that are powerful revelations of character: Archbishop Juvénal des Ursins, Chancellor of France—stout and stern and resolute, and not too pious for statesmanship; Etienne Chevalier, treasurer of the realm—a melancholy man troubled by the impossibility of raising money as fast as a government can spend it; Charles VII himself, after Agnès Sorel had made a man of him; and Agnès in the rosy flesh, transformed by Fouquet into a cold and stately Virgin with downcast eyes and uplifted breast. For Chevalier, Jean illuminated a Book of Hours, brightening the tedium of ritual prayer with almost fragrant scenes from the valley of the Loire. An enameled medallion in the Louvre preserves Fouquet as he saw himself—no princely Raphael riding high, but a simple artisan of the brush, dressed for work, eager and diffident, worried and resolved, bearing the mark of a century of poverty on his brow. However, he passed without mishap from one reign to another, and rose at last to be peintre du roi for the incalculable Louis XI. After many years of labor comes success, and soon thereafter death.
IX. JOAN OF ARC: 1412–31
In 1422 the repudiated son of Charles VI had himself proclaimed king as Charles VII. In her desolation France looked to him for help, and fell into deeper despair. This timid, listless, heedless youth of twenty hardly credited his own proclamation, and probably shared the doubts of Frenchmen as to the legitimacy of his birth. Fouquet’s portrait of him shows a sad and homely face, pockets under the eyes, and an overreaching nose. He was fearfully religious, heard three Masses daily, and allowed no canonical hour to pass without reciting its appointed prayers. In the intervals he attended to a long succession of mistresses, and begot twelve children upon his virtuous wife. He pawned his jewels, and most of the clothes from his back, to finance resistance to England, but he had no stomach for war, and left the struggle to his ministers and his generals. Neither were they enthusiastic or alert; they quarreled jealously among themselves—all but the faithful Jean Dunois, the natural son of Louis, Duke of Orléans. When the English moved south to lay siege to that city (1428), no concerted action was taken to resist them, and disorder was the order of the day. Orléans lay at a bend in the Loire; if it fell, all the south, now hesitantly loyal to Charles VII, would join the north to make France an English colony. North and south alike watched the siege, and prayed for a miracle.
Even the distant village of Domremy, half asleep by the Meuse on the eastern border of France, followed the struggle with patriotic and religious passion. The peasants there were fully medieval in faith and sentiment; they lived from nature but in the supernatural; they were sure that spirits dwelled in the surrounding air, and many women vowed that they had seen and talked with them. Men as well as women there, as generally throughout rural France, thought of the English as devils who hid their tails in their coattails. Someday, said a prophecy current in the village, God would send a pucelle, a virgin maid, to save France from these demons, and end the long Satanic reign of war.60 The wife of the mayor of Domremy whispered these hopes to her goddaughter Joan.
Joan’s father, Jacques d’Arc, was a prosperous farmer, and probably gave no mind to such tales. Joan was noted among these pious people for her piety; she was fond of going to church, confessed regularly and fervently, and busied herself with parochial charities. In her little garden the fowls and the birds ate from her hand. One day, when she had been fasting, she thought she saw a strange light over her head, and that she heard a voice saying, “Jeanne, be a good obedient child. Go often to church.”61 She was then (1424) in her thirteenth year; perhaps some physiological changes mystified her at this most impressionable time. During the next five years her “voices”—as she called the apparitions—spoke many counsels to her, until at last it seemed to her that the Archangel Michael himself commanded her: “Go to the succor of the King of France, and thou shalt restore his kingdom.... Go to M. Baudricourt, captain at Vaucouleurs, and he will conduct thee to the King.” And at another time the voice said: “Daughter of God, thou shalt lead the Dauphin to Reims that he may there receive worthily his anointing” and coronation. For until Charles should be anointed by the Church, France would doubt his divine right to rule; but if the holy oil should be poured upon his head France would unite behind him and be saved.
After a long and troubled hesitation Joan revealed her visions to her parents. Her father was shocked at the thought of an innocent girl undertaking so fantastic a mission; rather than permit it, he said, he would drown her with his own hands.62 To further restrain her he persuaded a young villager to announce that she had promised him her hand in marriage. She denied it; and to preserve the virginity that she had pledged to her saints, as well as to obey their command, she fled to an uncle, and prevailed upon him to take her to Vaucouleurs (1429). There Captain Baudricourt advised the uncle to give the seventeen-year-old girl a good spanking, and to restore her to her parents; but when Joan forced her way into his presence, and firmly declared that she had been sent by God to help King Charles save Orléans, the bluff commandant melted, and, even while thinking her charmed by devils, sent to Chinon to ask the King’s pleasure. Royal permission came; Baudricourt gave the Maid a sword, the people of Vaucouleurs bought her a horse, and six soldiers agreed to guide her on the long and perilous journey across France to Chinon. Perhaps to discourage male advances, to facilitate riding, and to win acceptance by generals and troops, she donned a masculine and military garb—jerkin, doublet, hose, gaiters, spurs—and cut her hair like a boy’s. She rode serene and confident through towns that vacillated between fearing her as a witch and worshiping her as a saint.
After traveling 450 miles in eleven days she came to the King and his council. Though his poor raiment gave no sign of royalty
, Joan (we are told—for how could legend keep its hands from her history?) singled him out at once, and greeted him courteously: “God send you long life, gentle Dauphin.... My name is Jeanne la Pucelle. The King of Heaven speaks to you through me, and says that you shall be anointed and crowned at Reims, and be lieutenant of the King of Heaven, who is King of France.” A priest who now became the Maid’s chaplain said later that in private she assured the King of his legitimate birth. Some have thought that from her first meeting with Charles she accepted the clergy as the rightful interpreters of her voices, and followed their lead in her counsel to the King; through her the bishops might displace the generals in forming the royal policies.63 Still doubtful, Charles sent her to Poitiers to be examined by pundits there. They found no evil in her. They commissioned some women to inquire into her virginity, and on that delicate point too they were satisfied. For, like the Maid, they held that a special privilege belonged to virgins as the instruments and messengers of God.
Dunois, in Orléans, had assured the garrison that God would soon send someone to their aid. Hearing of Joan, he half believed his hopes, and pleaded with the court to send her to him at once. They consented, gave her a black horse, clothed her in white armor, put in her hand a white banner embroidered with the fleur-de-lis of France, and dispatched her to Dunois with a numerous escort bearing provisions for the besieged. It was not hard to find entry to the city (April 29, 1429); the English had not surrounded it entirely, but had divided their two or three thousand men (less than the Orléans garrison) among a dozen forts at strategic points in the environs. The people of Orléans hailed Joan as the Virgin incarnate, followed her trustfully even into dangerous places, accompanied her to church, prayed when she prayed, wept when she wept. At her command the soldiers gave up their mistresses, and struggled to express themselves without profanity; one of their leaders, La Hire, found this impossible, and received from Joan a dispensation to swear by his baton. It was this Gascon condottiere who uttered the famous prayer: “Sire God, I beg Thee to do for La Hire what he would do for Thee wert Thou a captain and La Hire were God.” 64