Читать книгу Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France - Tracy Adams - Страница 12

2

THE BEGINNINGS OF THE FEUD AND CHRISTINE’S POLITICAL POETRY, 1393–1401

The dukes’ rivalry is mentioned explicitly for the first time in 1401. Pintoin describes the dukes as barely able to conceal their animosity for each other. Their competition was aggravated by courtiers, he continues, who themselves were locked into “the constant excessively jealous and stubborn struggle for superiority . . . ceaselessly attempted through spouting flattery to ignite into a giant fire the sparks of hatred hiding under the embers of dissimulation, with the object of provoking the dukes to shows of public enmities.”¹ The word “enmities” (inimicicias) is a legal term denoting a state of hatred between two parties.² To have reached such a state, the rivalry may have existed for some time. Historians disagree on when the conflict between uncle and nephew began: some, like Jarry, date it to the first years of the 1390s, and others trace it to 1398 or even 1401, when the dukes nearly came to arms in Paris.³ I make the case in this chapter that although the feud—that is, the public exchange of insults leading to violence—may have begun only in 1400 or so, the bad blood began immediately after Charles VI’s illness, when Philip of Burgundy seized control of the government for the second time.

Philip put an enduring positive slant on his two seizures of power. Through public discourse and open letters, he presented himself as a reformer, while discrediting Louis (later, Jean of Burgundy would include the queen in the attacks) as a spendthrift and imposer of massive taxes.⁴ In the first section below, I attempt to correct for the Burgundian bias in retracing the opening years of the feud.

The Early Days

To create a larger context for this discussion of the first years of the feud, I begin by examining some of the troubles that appeared around the time of Charles V’s death. Charles V left the Valois kingship a significantly more prestigious institution than the one he had inherited. Still, at the moment of his death, a number of problems, old and new, were emerging. The Western Schism, dividing Christendom between Roman and Avignon popes, had been accepted and possibly encouraged by Charles V.⁵ Pope Gregory XI, the seventh and last of the nonschismatic Avignon popes, died in 1378 in Rome, where he had returned shortly before his death. Pope Urban VI was elected in Rome as his successor. Several months later, however, a group of French cardinals declared the election void, claiming coercion. Returning to Avignon, they elected Clement VII, beginning the Great Schism.

In addition, despite the relative peace of the end of Charles V’s sixteen-year reign, when Charles died in 1380, revolts against heavy taxation began to agitate the kingdom, continuing several years into Philip’s regency. Uprisings in the Languedoc, starting in 1379, against the taxes for war with the English had been followed by slightly less violent rebellion in Auvergne. Like many of his ancestors, the dying Charles V repented of having taxed his subjects and abolished the fouage, source of 30 to 40 percent of the kingdom’s tax revenues.⁶ An anonymous chronicler comments that the king’s many activities had “greatly burdened the people.”⁷ Although Charles V soothed his own conscience and temporarily cheered his subjects, his decision created a dramatic shortfall for his successors.⁸ This worsened when, under pressure from the Parisians, twelve-year-old King Charles VI promised to eliminate all taxes.⁹ In a panic, the royal uncles convened the Estates General to request funds under a different guise.¹⁰ On February 17, 1381, the Estates General decided on a new fouage. However, by early 1382, when it became clear that the revenues collected for the fouage were inadequate, the uncles attempted to go around the Estates General to impose a sales tax.¹¹ Insurgency followed in Paris, the north, and into Flanders.¹² In the end, the uncles crushed the Parisian rebels and suppressed the other revolts, defeating the Flemish in the Battle of Roosebeke on November 27, 1382.

Also pertinent to the coming conflict between Philip and Louis of Orleans, Philip had a history of causing discord. At the young king’s coronation, a fight nearly broke out between him and Louis of Anjou over who should sit beside the king. Philip’s audacia prevailed over respect for age (“verecundiam etatis”).¹³ Jean of Berry offers further evidence of Philip’s propensity for conflict in a letter to the Count of Armagnac of February 18, 1381, explaining his delay in Paris: “As you will have heard, there is much dissension between my brothers of Anjou and Burgundy, which only I can appease.”¹⁴ This conflict was resolved by Louis of Anjou’s departure in the winter of 1382 to conquer the kingdom of Naples, although he created a new problem in attempting to raise a hundred thousand francs in taxes to finance the expedition.¹⁵ Louis had been adopted as heir by Jeanne, queen of Naples, but, his succession contested by Charles Durazzo, he was obliged to lead an army to defend the queen, who was assassinated in any case before he even reached Naples. The Duke of Anjou died on September 20, 1384, having failed utterly in his attempt to claim the throne of Naples.¹⁶ Back in Paris, although the dukes of Burgundy and Berry seemed in general a compatible duo, their relationship, too, showed signs of strife. In 1382 the king of Castile received a report that King Charles VI had been ready to travel to the Languedoc but had waited because of “discord” between the dukes of Burgundy and Berry. Louis of Anjou, already on the way to Italy, was recalled to Paris. Jean of Berry’s rule over the Languedoc created further tensions between him and Philip.¹⁷

Still, Philip and Jean of Berry went on to govern until November 1388, when the twenty-year-old Charles VI decided that he would rule on his own from that point on.¹⁸ Announced during the French army’s return home from a military expedition to subdue William of Guelders, an old enemy of Philip’s and rival for the duchy of Brabant, the assertion of power seems to have been long in the making. In June 1387, Olivier de Clisson, greatly loved by Charles VI, had been taken prisoner by the Duke of Brittany, ally of the royal uncles. The uncles’ implication in the incident so enraged the king that he turned against them.¹⁹ Charles VI’s independence was declared in Rheims by the cardinal of Laon, a former marmouset, during a meeting of the Royal Council.²⁰ Once in power, Charles VI recalled the marmousets to positions of financial influence. These new advisors tried to implement numerous reforms, although many contemporaries did not appreciate their efforts, especially the university, whose traditional privileges the marmousets often ignored, and those who continued to bear the burden of taxes.²¹ Philip bitterly resented the marmousets for their potential to restrict his access to royal funds. As for Jean of Berry, between September 1388 and February 1389, the marmousets scrutinized his administration of the Languedoc. They removed him from his post, suspended his officers, and burned his secretary at the stake for heresy and sodomy.²²

Charles VI presented his emancipation from his uncles as a new beginning for the kingdom, with the queen and his brother as support. A truce with the English signed at Leulinghem on June 20, 1389, was celebrated with the queen’s coronation in August.²³ The first queen of France to be crowned in a ceremony separate from the king’s, Isabeau was honored with an entry and coronation, replete with Virgin imagery, emphasizing her capacity to unify. Accompanying Isabeau was Valentina Visconti, Louis’s new wife, who had arrived in Paris just five days earlier.²⁴ The date of the entry, the octave Sunday of the Assumption of the Blessed Virgin, created the first of many parallels between Isabeau and Mary.²⁵ As her cortège meandered from Saint Denis and into Paris and finally to Notre Dame for the coronation, the queen was regaled with reenactments from the life of the Virgin.²⁶ At the Porte Saint Denis, the intersection of the present-day rue Saint Denis and boulevard Saint Denis, she was crowned by two angels proclaiming her the queen of paradise, a theatricalization of the sacred nature of her coronation. Above the gate the Virgin with child was visible, a reference to the queen’s own pregnancy, then in its sixth month. Other pageants along the way represented the kingdom “transformed into paradise by the peace and harmony that the queen’s advent had brought to France.”²⁷

The king also enhanced the role of his brother. Just after the coronation, as noted above, the Duke of Berry was removed from his lieutenancy of the Languedoc, and on September 2 the king, accompanied by Louis, set off on a five-month journey to inspect the territory. During his travels he helped to achieve one of the “happiest results of the royal voyage,” peace between the houses of Armagnac and Foix, whose rivalry had weighed heavily on the Languedoc.²⁸ On a lighter note, the trip was the occasion of the poetic debate that resulted in the Cent ballades of Jean le Seneschal, a first association of Louis with courtly poetry.²⁹ In this collection, Louis is credited with a poem extolling loyauté in love, while the Duke of Berry’s poem expresses relief that he has managed to avoid love and promotes artful lying—saying one thing while doing another. Before the trip, the king had already made Louis his closest advisor, inviting him to sit on the Royal Council, and he would later award his brother personal governance over his appanage, the duchy of Orleans.³⁰ Charles VI further facilitated Louis’s rise through marriage to Valentina Visconti. Besides reinforcing Louis’s financial situation, the marriage brought him the county of Asti, which soon resurrected the possibility of a kingdom in Italy, a possibility that had evaporated with the death of Louis of Anjou.³¹ In the case of Louis of Orleans, the kingdom, which would be called Adria, was to be created of papal fiefs in central Italy.³²

These efforts to realize the kingdom of Adria are the first sign of an attempt to amass territories for Louis commensurate with those of Philip of Burgundy. As we saw in chapter 1, Charles V had awarded his three brothers large appanages in order to maintain their loyalties. This leaving him with little for his second son, however, he had negotiated a marriage in 1374 between Louis and the king of Hungary’s daughter, Catherine, who would bring the counties of Provence, Forcalquier, and Piedmont, and, more significant, the kingdoms of Sicily and Naples, as well as La Pouille, Salerne, and Monte San Angelo, over which Louis and Catherine and their heirs would rule.³³ The thrones of Sicily and Naples being contested, however, the deal was dropped.

Still, the Schism had created further possibilities for a French entry into Italy.³⁴ In 1379, Clement VII, attempting to entice the French into the peninsula, had infeudated Louis of Anjou with papal lands situated on the Adriatic, north of Rome, and, soon afterward, as we have seen, the duke was named heir to the throne of Naples, adopted by the childless Jeanne, queen of Naples, in defiance of the Roman pope Urban VI.³⁵ The idea was that Louis of Anjou would rout Pope Urban VI and leave the Avignon pope Clement VII as the single pope. Although the duke failed, the dream of an Italian kingdom continued. The Schism had freed the Visconti, Valentina’s father, Giangaleazzo, and his uncle Bernabo, rulers over much of Lombardy, from papal interference, because the claimants to the Apostolic See were too preoccupied with each other to pay attention to anyone else. When Giangaleazzo, just after succeeding his father as lord of Pavia, heard of the Schism, he celebrated by calling for a three-day feast.³⁶ To take full advantage of the situation, however, he had to rid himself of his uncle Bernabo, which he did in 1385. The murder of Bernabo earned Giangaleazzo the enmity of Queen Isabeau and her branch of the House of Wittelsbach, for Isabeau’s mother, Taddea Visconti, had been Bernabo’s daughter. The queen and the duchess were daughters of first cousins; their parents, Isabeau’s mother, married to Stephen III Duke of Bavaria, and Valentina’s father, Giangaleazzo, shared a grandfather. Hence Giangaleazzo’s eagerness to place his daughter Valentina at the French court as a counterbalance. The French court split over the murder, some, centered around the house of Orleans, supporting Giangaleazzo, and others supporting Giangaleazzo’s rival for control of Tuscany, the Seigneurie of Florence, centered around the queen.

The winter of 1391 saw Charles VI planning an expedition to Rome to help the Avignon pope Clement VII and Naples press the claim to the throne of the young Louis II of Anjou, already crowned king of Jerusalem and Sicily by Clement VII. Froissart writes that it was the king’s intention to head for Lombardy, accompanied by armies led by Louis of Orleans, the dukes of Berry and Burgundy, the Duke of Bourbon, connétable Olivier de Clisson, the sire of Coucy, and the Count of Saint Pol.³⁷ The king sent Louis and Philip ahead to seek an alliance with Giangaleazzo. They arrived in Pavia in March. But although Louis reached an agreement, when he returned to Paris he found the situation altered. The English—prodded by Boniface IX, successor of the Roman pope Urban VI, who did not want the French in Italy—suddenly began to pursue peace. An accord with the English was more advantageous to Charles VI than immediate expansion into Italy. And yet plans for an alliance with Giangaleazzo were renewed eighteen months later, when Charles VI requested that he refrain from joining the anti-Clementist league that Boniface IX was starting among the Italian states.³⁸ Giangaleazzo’s ambassadors explained that their lord could not overtly recognize Clement VII for fear that his subjects would be attacked, unless France sent an army adequate to fend off potential enemies. Thus the idea of the kingdom of Adria resurfaced. In December 1392, Giangaleazzo’s ambassadors arrived in France with a proposition for returning Clement VII to Rome.³⁹ Louis would reign over Adria, because not only was he “best qualified for the task, but most suitable as a close relation of the ruler of Milan. Independent of France but supported by the might of a French army, independent of Milan but duly submissive to Giangaleazzo’s parental guidance, Louis would help the Count to annihilate his enemies.”⁴⁰ The advantage to Milan was that, “hemmed in by Venice to the east and Florence to the south, Giangaleazzo looked strategically to the papal state, which was particularly vulnerable given the spectacular failure of the Avignon papacy to convince Italians that it was a viable political entity rather than a staging area for a shifting cast of warmongering legates.”⁴¹ Charles VI put Louis in charge of the project, the success of which would provide Giangaleazzo with a port in a friendly city.

Further proof of trust and affection toward Louis can be seen in Charles VI’s commissions to the Parisian goldsmith Hermann Ruissel in the years before the onset of his madness. In seventeen of his thirty-two total commissions from Ruissel, the king included a request for his brother for the same item.⁴² Had the double requests begun only after the king’s insanity, it would be difficult to attribute the impetus with certainty to the king, but the fact that such commissions were already common indicates that Charles VI instigated the gift giving himself.

The Calamity

All was disrupted in August 1392 by Charles VI’s insanity, an affliction from which the king would suffer for the rest of his life. The initial episode occurred en route to Brittany, toward which he was leading an army to avenge Clisson, at that point the victim of a failed murder attempt at the hands of Pierre de Craon, exiled from court a year earlier by Louis of Orleans.⁴³ Craon had fled to Brittany, where he was protected by the duchy’s leader, Jean. After the initial incident, Louis and the uncles gathered in Creil with the raving Charles VI, who recovered his senses within a few days, raising hope that the incident would be isolated.⁴⁴ Still, Philip seized the opportunity to reestablish himself as the head of the government with the assistance of the Duke of Berry, wreaking vengeance on the marmousets, who again fled for their lives, as we have seen, and attempting to distance Louis from power.⁴⁵

Louis could no longer be pushed aside. Although it is true, as Michael Nordberg writes, that Philip did not interfere with Louis’s plans for Italy, even working with him, accusations surfaced in 1393 that Louis was bewitching the unfortunate king, which suggests trouble.⁴⁶ Given the suddenness and severity of the episodes, suspicions of sorcery were inevitable. Although Pintoin reports explanations ranging from an excess of black bile brought on by anger to divine displeasure over French sinfulness, most of the nobility and the masses believed the king to be the victim of a spell.⁴⁷

As we saw in chapter 1, in January 1393, the king promulgated an ordinance naming Louis regent in the case of his death. Although he would plunge into another seven-month stretch of madness later that year, the king had made a relatively full recovery, suggesting that the ordinance reflects his own will.⁴⁸ It is not clear when the king ceased to be functional; surely, after a certain point he was never capable of reasoning, although ordinances continued to be promulgated in his name. The regency ordinance in any case reflects Charles VI’s fear that he would die early, but it also indicates his desire to clarify the regency situation.⁴⁹ Around the same time, Pintoin describes an official attempt to cure the king through witchcraft in 1393: anguished counselors brought a charlatan magician named Arnaud Guillaume to court. Arnaud assured the queen and the nobility of the kingdom that the king was being bewitched by “certain” actors. Earlier in the passage, Pintoin indicates that Louis’s wife was a prime suspect. According to Pintoin, the king preferred Valentina to everyone, even the queen. Valentina went to see him daily, Pintoin remarks.⁵⁰ Froissart, who in contrast to Pintoin is not sympathetic toward Valentina, assumes that she was bewitching the king with spells because she coveted the throne for her husband.⁵¹

Although Froissart and Pintoin depict Valentina as the target, I would suggest that these chronicles in fact preserve traces of Philip’s accusations of Louis, with Valentina functioning as a double for Louis. It was a common practice to attack a powerful lord through his wife, one that reappears in chronicles over the years.⁵² As we will see in more detail in chapter 6, Jean Petit’s justification, in 1408, of Louis’s assassination on the order of Jean of Burgundy accuses Louis and Giangaleazzo Visconti of conspiring to kill the king. Petit also accuses Louis of trying to poison the dauphin, an attempted crime attributed to Valentina by other sources.⁵³ This interchangeability of husband and wife suggests that although both were accused by the Burgundians, Louis was the real target.

The next incident of witchcraft recorded by chroniclers also includes Valentina, and it occurs just as French relations with Valentina’s father, Giangaleazzo Visconti, break down completely, and the French enter into an alliance with his rival, Florence. The chronicles record Valentina’s fleeing from court under the pressure of vicious slander. Pintoin writes that in addition to the king, many others throughout the kingdom began to suffer from the same disease, blaming magical spells. At court, too, both men and women circulated gossip about the Duchess of Orleans. Finally, the Duke of Orleans was persuaded to send his wife from court to avoid scandal, ushering Valentina from Paris in a magnificent cortège to another of their properties.⁵⁴ With Louis trying to create a kingdom in Italy with the help of Giangaleazzo, attacking Valentina would have been a means of getting at both men. Froissart reports that Giangaleazzo, apprised of his daughter’s danger, sent messengers to the king and his Royal Council to plead on her behalf. However, the king answered very curtly, Froissart reports.⁵⁵ He had withdrawn his favor from the Visconti.

The next episode of witchcraft Pintoin recounts depicts the conflict between the dukes in 1398. Pintoin explains that Louis of Sancerre, then connétable of France, sent two Augustinians to cure the king with magic. Most interesting about this episode is that Pintoin explains that the pair frequented the Duke of Burgundy, whom they informed that the king was certainly the victim of some outside black magic. But, unable to restore the king’s health, they fingered the Duke of Orleans. This accusation provoked a brutal reaction: degradation from their offices and decapitation. While Pintoin does not say so explicitly, he makes it clear that the Augustinians were in the pay of Philip of Burgundy.⁵⁶ The chronicle of Juvénal des Ursins gives a somewhat different story, describing the arrest of the Augustinians as one more blow in a cycle of attack and counterattack between the uncle and nephew, and adding that the attacks were motivated by the jealousy between the two dukes.⁵⁷

A solemn determinatio published by the university on September 19, 1398, condemning twenty-eight articles related to magic, seems related to the dukes’ war of words.⁵⁸ All magic is blameworthy, according to the determinatio, even when practiced with good intentions. But as much as it tries to halt the use of magic to cure the king, the document seeks to dampen the ducal dispute by stressing the gravity of the charges of witchcraft. Some sermons of Jean Gerson, chancellor of the Faculty of Theology at the University of Paris, are further evidence of the anxiety that the ducal rivalry was causing during the 1390s. In his sermons, Gerson tries to control the dispute by asking his listeners to be less sensitive to the culture of médisance (slander) that marked the court. Secret slander and deceitful flattery posed a genuine danger, he warns in several sermons preached before the Duke of Burgundy, whose chaplain he became in April 1393. In a sermon on the feast of Saint Anthony in 1393, Gerson laments defamation, attempting to arouse shame in those guilty of it and righteous anger in the innocent. The only solution, Gerson advises, is for a prince to disregard everything that he hears from a person who speaks ill of others (“mesdit d’aultrui”); anything worthy of being said should be spoken aloud in public. A person who listens only to those who flatter his wisdom and virtue, without heeding the counsel of others, is headed for trouble.⁵⁹ And it is very dangerous for a prince to create a situation wherein others cannot speak their minds openly for fear of him. In one of his “Poenitemini” sermons, also preached before Philip of Burgundy on the feast of Saint Anthony in 1396, Gerson explores the meaning of charity in the context of the active life.⁶⁰ Surely, he says, charity arises from love of the common good of the body politic, which means the harmonious functioning of the three estates. But these days, he warns, greed and self-love, the enemies of charity, are destroying the body politic.⁶¹ Such self-love makes a seigneur proud, envious, and hateful toward all others of his estate. At court, counselors motivated by self-love care nothing about the common good; they produce only flattery and false adulation, lies and other vices with which they can deceive seigneurs and take what is theirs.

Some of Gerson’s sermons also suggest a growing perception of the queen as peacemaker. In “Ave Maria gracia plena,” preached at court on the feast of the Annunciation, March 25, 1397, he works to arouse love for women by addressing the Virgin in terms that evoke the queen: as the mother of God, Mary “has authority and natural dominion over the lord of the whole world and by the strongest right over all that is subject to such a lord.” The hierarchy is natural, and thus “Notre Dame is called our advocate, our mediator, our queen.” Gerson complains of deplorable treatment of women in general, insisting that “the nature of the noble and royal heart” is to be compassionate toward the afflicted. The greatest “courtoisie” is to give, and there is no greater “vilenie” than to steal and plunder. He concludes the sermon by calling on the Virgin for salvation, by the “natural love” that must exist between brothers and sisters of the same blood and flesh.⁶²

Gerson loathed political dispute. In October 1396, undone by the stress of navigating his way between the two dukes, he accepted the deanship of the chapter of Saint Donatian in Bruges, set up by Philip, and spent little time at court thereafter. Appointed chancellor of the University of Paris in 1395, when his mentor Pierre d’Ailly abandoned the position to become bishop of Puy, he also let that go in 1400, although he soon returned.⁶³ In 1399 or 1400 he composed a letter complaining of having to please two rival masters whose names he need not mention.⁶⁴ Why should he live in the midst of envious crowds who misinterpret his words?

Gerson’s lament about courtly backbiting is mirrored in Christine’s courtly verse. Lori Walters has strengthened the case for a close literary relationship between Gerson and Christine by showing that Christine’s “seulette” persona, that is, the name by which she refers to herself in numerous works, is borrowed from Gerson’s use of the term in his own work.⁶⁵ It is not surprising, then, that Christine takes up Gerson’s discussion of the terrible treatment of women. But if Gerson does not explicitly point the finger, it is important to note that Christine often praises Louis for speaking well of women, something she never associates with Philip. In the Fais et bonnes meurs she writes that Louis was renowned for refusing to listen to injurious language, taking “care not to hear anyone speak dishonorably of women, nor slander against anyone, and did not easily believe the bad of others that was reported to him, following the example of the wise, and speaking these noteworthy words: ‘When someone tells me something bad about someone, I consider whether the person saying it has a grudge against the person he is speaking against or whether he speaks from envy.’”⁶⁶

Louis of Orleans is depicted in Christine scholarship as greedy and lustful. I revisit the charge of greed in detail in chapter 3, showing that it stems from Burgundian propaganda. As for lust, the charge seems to derive from a much later myth of a love affair between Louis and the queen, now thoroughly debunked.⁶⁷ What remains, then, of the charge? It is useful to return to the sources. First, Louis’s mistresses and illegitimate son are only typical among his peers, including Jean of Burgundy.⁶⁸ Furthermore, Pintoin provides a contemporary impression of the duke’s sexual behavior, writing that, like all young men, Louis may have been somewhat inclined to vice when he was young, but that as a mature man he carefully avoided such self-indulgence.⁶⁹ Given Pintoin’s generally critical opinion of the duke, the notion that Louis had a reputation as a great philanderer is difficult to justify.

On his presumed bad reputation more generally, even Louis’s contemporary detractors describe him as an attractive man of great intelligence and eloquence. Pintoin reports that Philip of Burgundy admitted that his nephew was “commendable for his affability and singular eloquence.”⁷⁰ The monk further notes that Louis was the most fluent man of his day and that he had personally watched the duke out-orate even great orators, bested only by university doctors; in his manner he was extremely appealing, always genially responsive. A record of the arguments of the dukes of Bourbon, Orleans, Burgundy, and Berry regarding the Schism confirms Pintoin’s opinion. The Duke of Orleans, sworn in, places the Schism in its larger context, then captures his listeners’ benevolence by explaining that he agrees with his opponents in principle, that the “voie de cession,” that is, the resignation of both popes so that a new one can be elected, is the only solution to the Schism. He is eloquent and self-effacing, excusing himself for lacking the “prudence, sense and learning” required to speak well on the subject, but promises that he will speak his conscience, without bias or hatred.⁷¹ He then goes on to enumerate why he believes that withdrawing obedience from the Avignon pope will not result in the resignation of the two popes. His self-representation accords with Christine’s effusively positive view of the duke’s good nature and manners in the Fais et bonnes meurs, noted in chapter 1.

Historians take for granted that Louis was unpopular with the Parisians. But Paris was not monolithic. Werner Paravicini explains that the city was too large and the Burgundians’ power too fragmented to make Paris exclusively theirs, noting that Louis of Orleans, residing in the city permanently, had firm roots there.⁷² Arnaud Alexandre, too, remarks on the effect of the constant presence of the Duke of Orleans. Louis was visible in Paris, receiving in 1397 (in addition to the Hotel de Boheme near the Louvre, which he had been awarded in 1388) a residence right next to the Hotel Saint Pol, and fashioning himself as an extension of royal power.⁷³ For Alexandre, Louis was too secure to need to create an Orleanist section of Paris similar to the Burgundian section.

Having begun in chapter 1 to question the common assumption that Christine supported Philip as regent, in the rest of this chapter I start to build the case that she supported Louis’s regency.

The Political Poet: Christine’s Courtly Lyrics

Christine’s courtly verse, like Gerson’s sermons, describes the strife-ridden court of the 1390s: even when the subject is romantic love, all texts are “in the last analysis political.”⁷⁴ More specifically, Christine composes in a “cultural context where the discourse of love and friendship had long functioned to mediate political concerns,” as Elizabeth Elliott has noted about Machaut, where the “amatory” served as a “surrogate for the political.”⁷⁵ Christine’s love poetry, with its narrator deprived of her leader or head (“chief”), jealous courtiers who delight in destroying reputations, married women waiting hopelessly for attention from busy lovers, men who feign love to seduce, jealous husbands, lovers unable to gauge the depth of a partner’s commitment, and promotion of Boethian resignation, transcodes the power dynamics that structured the courtly community for which she wrote, a leaderless community in which factions jockeyed for power. This love poetry, therefore, is an important source for gauging her attitude toward the feud. I argue that through it she attempts to shape opinion in favor of Louis of Orleans. But, equally important, the love poetry exposes the ideological contradictions of Christine’s community, in the form of what Fredric Jameson calls the “political unconscious.” In the conclusion to this chapter, I examine the contradiction between French support for the king and the need for a functioning government that is inherent in Christine’s proffered solution of Boethian resignation.

In this analysis, I follow the order of writings proposed by the poet herself in the Livre de Christine, today MS Chantilly, Bibliothèque du Château, 492–93, composed for the queen and completed on June 23, 1402.⁷⁶ This manuscript records the poet’s trajectory from lyric verse to her first assays at “serious” writing, the Epistre d’Othea a Hector and her contributions to the literary debate over the merits of the Roman de la rose. The present chapter covers the cycles and the rhymed love narratives, in their manuscript order. But before tracing how Christine’s lyric verse engages with contemporary politics, I consider the debate culture of early fifteenth-century Paris within which Christine composed these works.

Poetic Debate

The elite of Paris around the turn of the fifteenth century enjoyed literary debate. Two major types of debate, associated with separate spaces, can be discerned. The first space is the court, royal and princely. In 1358, Charles V, distressed by the murder of several of his counselors in his rooms in the Palais de la Cité, part of the complex on the Ile de la Cité that today houses the Sainte-Chapelle and the Palais de Justice, sought a new residence safe from urban turbulence. He chose a group of buildings between the Seine and the modern rue Saint Antoine, north to south, and the rue Saint Paul and the rue de Petit-Musc, east to west. Connecting the buildings with a series of corridors and courtyards, he created an enormous complex, which he protected by extending a wall originally constructed by Philip Augustus along the Seine.⁷⁷ Known as the Hotel Saint Pol, the complex dominated the right side of the Seine, forming the center of court society, along with other great hotels, like Louis of Orleans’s Hotel de Boheme, on the site of the current Bourse.⁷⁸ Poetic competition, through formal and informal contests, was part of courtly cultural life. But this poetic activity was not uniquely oral: studies of the manuscript as a performative space suggest that much of what exists today only on the page was theatrical, part of a “hybrid” culture “in which various oral performances . . . co-existed with exuberantly literate productions.”⁷⁹ Within such an environment, poets worked “competitively (but in collusion with one another) to acquire forms of symbolic capital” through the composition of interactive poetic anthologies, as Emma Cayley writes.⁸⁰ Christine’s sometime evocation of “Prince” in the envois of her lyrics, recalling the arbitrating prince of the puy (although it probably refers literally to the princes at court), attests to her consciousness of poetry as a form of competition, regardless of whether hers was “performed” before an audience.⁸¹

The other circle was associated with the Royal Chancery, which had remained on the Ile de la Cité when Charles V moved to the Hotel Saint Pol. Several literary quarrels were waged during the last years of the fourteenth century and the first years of the fifteenth by secretaries or notaries in chanceries, men committed to diffusing humanistic learning. Through her father or husband, Christine would have known of the debate between Petrarch, scornful of French Latin literary practice, and Jean de Hesdin, defender of the French. Angered and demoralized by Petrarch’s attack on their outdated Latin in 1367, French orators had responded by developing their style to accord with Italian humanistic practice.⁸² The silver lining in the cloud of the Schism was the French papacy’s contribution to the spread of Italian humanism in Parisian chanceries through networks of men associated with Avignon: Jean Muret, Nicolas de Clamanges, Laurent de Premierfait, and Galeatto Pietramala.⁸³ By 1394, a letter by Clamanges, then secretary at the University of Paris, to the Avignon cardinals, warning them not to elect another pope to replace the recently deceased Clement VI, was praised for its Latin by Pietramala, an Italian cardinal at Avignon, who was astonished that a Frenchman could write so impressively. Pietramala’s letter provoked further debate in 1395–96. Joining Pietramala was Laurent de Premierfait; the opponents were led by Clamanges and Jean de Montreuil, objecting that there was nothing surprising about a Frenchman’s lovely Latin.⁸⁴ Ezio Ornato has described a friendly debate between Jean de Montreuil and Gontier Col as motivated primarily by the desire for stylistic practice. Jean composed several letters refuting Gontier’s contention that as a married man he had less time to devote to humanistic studies than his single friends. In the voice of Gontier’s wife, Marguerite, Jean teased Gontier by claiming that the real reason for his lack of production was his love of taverns, games, and women.⁸⁵ Grover Furr sees in this debate a continuation of the defense of the intrinsic value of classical learning that characterized much epistolary exchange among these humanists: they shared a common interest “in the spread of a classical Latin style and its acceptability and admiration for it, as thoroughly bound up with the advancement of their careers.”⁸⁶ When Ambrogio Migli intervened in the quarrel between Jean and Gontier, however, the tone turned hostile. Ornato professes confusion at this turn; Furr sees the apparent anger of the participants as motivated by Migli’s transgression of what judges of the debates, as opposed to participants, were permitted. The quarrel over the Roman de la rose, in which Christine was involved, is another example of a literary debate, as we will see.

The debates that took place within the circles of the court and chancery were different in theme, style, and purpose, yet both “fed on earlier intellectual, legal, and literary structures,” and both participated in an “economy of exchange,” as Cayley notes, drawing on the terminology of Bourdieu.⁸⁷ In addition to this intellectual commonality, interaction between the two fields sometimes took place through individuals who functioned in both. At least since the time of Guillaume de Machaut, the roles of secretary, court functionary, and poet could overlap. Eustache Deschamps and Guillaume de Tignonville were poet-administrators associated with both the royal court and that of Louis of Orleans. Various interactions among figures like Gontier Col, Jean Lebègue, Jacques de Nouvion, Ambrogio Migli, Jean de Montreuil, and Nicolas de Clamanges, some of them diplomats, some court functionaries, some theologians, but all involved with the chancery at some point, indicate fluid networks. Carla Bozzolo and Monique Ornato have described how the cour amoureuse, or Love Court, of Charles VI, which I discuss later in this chapter, brought together members of the different circles. The officers of the cour amoureuse were members of the nobility. However, the ministers of the court represented a socially mixed group: great lords rubbed shoulders with royal secretaries, assigned the job of organizing poetic competitions.⁸⁸

Of course, those who participated in both circles were male, or at least this was the case until Christine worked her way in. It is surprising but not unimaginable that Christine would have found entry into the circle of courtly debate, arousing wonder and admiration, because the crowds that gathered at the Hotel Saint Pol and the Hotel de Boheme contained men and women. At the same time, it is quite amazing that she enjoyed some access, however marginal, to the chancery circle, slipping into a field theoretically closed to women by taking part in a quarrel over the merits of the Roman de la rose with Jean de Montreuil and the Col brothers, all associated with the chanceries. This skillful move opened up opportunities for exhibiting her erudition to a different public than would have been possible otherwise. As I noted above, recent scholars have emphasized that the court and chancery represented two different fields within which cultural capital circulated and prestige was gained. Developing a reputation in these two fields allowed Christine to increase her influence in the groups whose support was important to Louis of Orleans.

The Cent balades

The Livre de Christine begins with a cycle, the Cent balades (not to be confused with Jean le Seneschal’s Cent ballades). Through this meditation on the duties of subjects in a kingdom whose king is afflicted by inexplicable bouts of madness (see poem 95, on page 95, for the lamentation of the king’s disorder), Christine works to arouse a loving sense of obligation toward authority and anger at those who disrupt social hierarchies through jealous quarreling.⁸⁹

But the first thing to stress about the Cent balades is that the cycle is a protreptic, a consolation, encouraging identification with the narrator as she undergoes consolation, so that the same effect will occur in the reader. After a long iteration of traumas relieved by some moments of joy in verse, the cycle culminates in poem 97, where the narrator evokes Boethius. Available in various French versions from the late thirteenth century onward, Boethius’s Consolation of Philosophy was widely read.⁹⁰ However, Sarah Kay suggests that the prose sections of this prosimetrum, propounding the austere vision of Lady Philosophy, offered little comfort to later medieval readers. Rather, they found comfort in the work’s verse sections, which resisted Lady Philosophy’s command to rise above earthly pleasures by offering glimpses of the “particular” in a “world dominated by contingency rather than necessity, where the possibility is held open that things could have happened otherwise.” The verse, in other words, both “sustains the need for consolation and remedies it.”⁹¹

By the time the narrator reiterates in poem 97 that “sense and discretion, / intelligence and consideration” protect against Fortune, noting that “Aristotle much approves memory” (97, 21–23), consolation will have taken place in the sensitive reader. These qualities, to which Christine will return in slightly differing variations throughout her career, seem to refer to the parts of the soul or brain popular made popular by theologians like William of Conches, the powers of intelligence, discernment, and memory, which Julia Sims Holderness argues Christine encountered in William’s gloss of Boethius.⁹² On how the consolation takes place in the cycle more specifically, Holderness sees an Augustinian influence in Christine’s emphasis on memory, explaining that the readers are consoled as they progressively work through the material in the theater of their own memories.⁹³ Also important, Lori Walters suggests that in this cycle Christine reads Boethius through Aristotle (or, more specifically, I would add, through Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics).⁹⁴ Poem 98 begins with a reference to the Metaphysics (“All men desire knowledge”), which itself begins with a discussion of memory as the seat of experience, in that it is through memories that one establishes the basis for “experience.” Experience is practical, but it gives rise to art, that is, theory induced by the experience. Walters explains that poem 98 justifies Christine’s use of memories of love in the cycle: the readers derive universal ideas about the dangers of Fortune from the individual details of the poetry. Poem 99, with its Christian perspective, then gathers the previous two poems beneath its umbrella, foreshadowing the climax of the Advision, as we will see.

The hundred poems of the Cent balades can be visualized as a series of concentric rings. The outermost contains the first and last poems. In the first, the narrator explains that although she did not wish to compose this cycle, when asked to do so by “some people” she agreed to do their will (1, 1). In the last, she announces that she has fulfilled her promise and gives her name in an anagram. Moving inward, the next ring includes poems on the loss of the narrator’s head or boss (“chief”), the malevolence of Fortune, and the degradation of chivalry. Numerous relationships can be seen, for example, between poem 5, lamenting the death of “the head or leader of all my good and of my sustenance” (chief de tous mes biens et de ma nourriture) (5, 6), and poem 95, on the madness of Charles VI. The object of the narrator’s sorrow in poem 5 is vague (husband? king?), effecting a symbiosis of personal and communal sorrow occasioned by the king’s situation. These poems in turn embrace a core of two series of love poems. The first, running from 21 to 49, recounts a passionate love affair from the perspective of a woman. The second, running from 66 to 88, brings her lover into a dialogue with her. This structure invites reflection on the loss of leadership as manifested at the individual, communal, and universal levels.

Exploring the connections among the cycle’s poems in more detail, we see that in the opening balade, the narrator shows herself to be a model subject, submitting her will (“voulenté”) to those more highly placed than she in the social hierarchy. In so doing, Christine establishes one pole of the binary that will structure not only this cycle but her love writings in general: the emotion common to those who humbly accept their position, loving those whom they are bound to love, as opposed to the self-serving simulation of love. Asked to write some lovely words, “beaulz diz,” she emphasizes that she is acting to please others rather than herself. She further shows her virtue in her fidelity to a man whom readers take to be her husband—“he who had all of my good” (2, 20)—although she never specifies this. Love is both an act of will, the fulfilment of an obligation to a higher power, and a naturally occurring, or innate, emotion. Presupposing humility and loyalty, it binds spouses and lovers, the people and the king. This emotion is missing from the current noble ethos, as Christine laments throughout the cycle. Also established in this first poem is Christine’s pose as a “stranger to love,” her distance from love in the present (although she has loved in the past), which guarantees her sympathy while assuring the reader of her ability to judge from an objective position beyond the prison house of love. The significance of this stance is revealed near the end of the cycle.

Christine engages with difficulties particular to late fourteenth-century France in the second ring of poems, which deplore the widespread neglect of the reciprocity upon which the healthy body politic is based. Absent its center, the court cannot properly reward the deserving. The second poem of the cycle attributes contemporary moral decline to this failure. In Rome, people were honored for their prowess; at Charles VI’s court, the system of reward is out of kilter, with too much emphasis placed on “grant heritage.” The third poem reinforces passionate love as a figure for genuine emotion with its description of the tragic drowning of Leander during one of his nightly visits to Hero. This great love, like the devotion of the cycle’s narrator, serves as a standard against which to measure the false and dangerous versions of love that the poet sees at court. The emotion is one to celebrate, even though it is inevitably touched by loss. The fourth poem turns once again to court life, lamenting the devastating envy that reigns there. As envy led the Greeks to destroy Troy through treachery, so it will ruin the French kingdom.

Set against the backdrop of the ducal rivalry, the poems of the second ring reflect concrete experiences of daily court life: envy, rumor, treachery, and attempts to exclude the relatively low born from reward. The third ring, the love poems at the center of the cycle, serves as the affective substratum or microcosmic version of Christine’s analysis of the court. Offering a vision of what is wrong with the realm, the cycle construes relationships, including love relationships, as hierarchical carriers of reciprocal obligations. Amour is the lady’s superior, and thus her submission is positive. And yet it brings her pain because she cannot ascertain whether her love is fully reciprocated. Although Amour demands submission, he is fatally incapable of giving lovers the assurances they deserve. The distress of the lovers of the Cent balades reflects that of the good people of the realm, obediently loving their ruler, Charles VI, who, like Amour, is unable to appease his people’s anguish. Poem 95, lamenting the madness of Charles VI, reads France’s sorry state as the result of “our sins.” Christine’s response is to urge restoration of the values of the classical past: poems 93–97, surrounding the Charles poem, exhort the powerful to be less covetous of worldly goods and to demonstrate loyalty, and they mourn Charles’s deception by disloyal, duplicitous courtiers, who upset hierarchies for their own gain.

Despite the distress to which it gives voice, the cycle as a whole is a consolation. Christine’s suffering narrator goes through several emotional phases, rehearsing and mastering woe under Fortune’s regime but always exemplifying the virtue necessary to achieve consolation. When Poem 97 explicitly brings Boethius into the discussion of Fortune, the problems of the kingdom are turned over to Philosophy through the figure of the narrator, who is consoled, along with the court, analogically. For many of the characters of the poems, their troubled private history is the work of Fortune and the unethical courtiers who torment them. But in evoking Boethius, and in the Christian-themed poem 99 especially, Christine suggests that history, both personal and communal, is governed by Providence. Certain apparently futile acts, like loving naturally, have the power to redeem, even though the ultimate significance of what happens on earth is incomprehensible to humans. From her narrative position as a former lover, Christine fully sympathizes with the terrifying uncertainty of her characters. At the same time, however, she is removed, having found consolation.

The message that submission to higher authority is good, even if painful, resounds throughout the cycle, and in delivering this message to a court public involved in a contentious discussion of hierarchy, Christine offers a form of political commentary, all the more pointed given the debate culture animating the royal court. The Cent balades are followed in the Livre de Christine by several groups of lyric poems in a variety of forms that offer further evidence of Christine’s engagement with contemporary issues. For example, Christine dedicates many poems written as New Year’s gifts, étrennes, to members of the court, among them Charles d’Albret (208–11, 225–26), Isabeau of Bavaria (227–28), Louis of Orleans (228–29), Anne de Montpensier (229–30), and the Seneschal of Hainaut (245–46).⁹⁵ She writes three poems praising the seven-on-seven-man combat between Louis’s officers and English officers.⁹⁶ The political poems and the love poems throughout occupy the same manuscript space, inviting us to let the two cycles gloss each other. Many of the themes of the different cycles will be taken up later and developed in her political allegories: the ship of Fortune sailing without a captain on the open seas, the lying that characterizes court life.

Le livre du debat de deux amans

A series of narrative poems follows the poetic cycles in the Livre de Christine, further developing the theme of obligation created by love and encouraging adherence to the principle of hierarchy. The first, the Debat de deux amans, invoking Louis of Orleans in the first lines and requesting that he decide the debate, asks whether love awakens a desire that, even when unreciprocated, calls forth the lover’s best qualities and should thus be embraced, or whether it only arouses the lover’s cupidity and should therefore be quashed. As we have seen, Louis was associated with love verse as a spokesman for fidelity in Jean le Seneschal’s Cent ballades, and Christine draws on this association here. Requests for judgment seem to have been calculated to confer or acknowledge status; we see similar requests for verdicts on chivalric enterprises, as when Jean de Werchin, in the context of the war with the English, asked Louis to judge a joust between Jean and anyone who wanted to challenge him.⁹⁷ To emphasize Louis’s qualities as judge, in the first lines of this debate poem Christine highlights his relationship with his father, the “sage roi Charles V”: Louis is a “Prince royal, renommé de sagece” (84, line 1).⁹⁸

The poem’s setting is a harmonious group, firmly united (86, line 108) and assembled for a festival. The proponent of love in this work is a handsome squire; not only is he beautiful, but his grace is such that he seems to possess a greater store of complete joy than anyone else in the place (88, lines 165–69). As we have seen, Louis’s attractive appearance and affability are well attested, as is his defense of faithful love even in the face of envious slanderers in Jean le Seneschal’s Cent ballades. His detractor is a knight detached from the crowd who assumes the classical gesture of melancholy, resting his head on his left hand. He is not joyous or disorderly, although he isn’t ugly or old (89, lines 215–18). The narrator Christine, here in her “former lover” persona, is the only one who notices the knight’s pain. She watches him follow a certain young lady with his eyes, trembling. He then asks Christine why she isn’t dancing. When the squire appears, laughing, to speak of this and that, the talk turns to whether love brings joy to true lovers (93, lines 359–61). The question is so interesting that they decide to take it outdoors where they can debate it joyfully (93, lines 379–81).

The knight begins, disparaging love as a desire that can never be satisfied (95, line 439); on the contrary, he says, it overwhelms reason (95, lines 447–51). This terrible longing brings no good, even when the lover is loved in return, for when that happens, gossips ruin everything, causing rumors and fights (“murmures et guerres”) (97, line 550). The envious steal the lover’s sweet goods. Love leads only to jealousy, and it fills a man’s heart with the rage to do evil and destroy (98, lines 589–90).

The squire, however, is no victim of love. Rather, he accepts the emotion and becomes a better person for it. Those who die from love should blame their own crazy manner (“fole maniere”) (118, line 1378). As for the jealousy that so torments the knight, bad husbands are jealous, not true lovers (116, lines 1294–96). According to the squire, jealousy arises not from love but from cowardice (117, line 1341). When a coward encounters attractive and happy young men, he is troubled because he believes himself to be the ugliest of all (117, lines 1342–50). The squire presents examples to support his case of which Christine is sure to approve: Guesclin (123, lines 1573–74, 1579–80), Boucicaut (123, lines 1586–87), Othon de Grandson, and Hutin de Vermeilles (124, lines 1615–22).

The debate reveals that the knight is a mean and jealous man, both covetous and violent. The squire, by contrast, is wise, eloquent, and loving. A woman brought along to observe the debate speaks out against the knight, doubting that the pain of love of which he complains is really so terrible (106, line 957) and recalling the Roman de la rose: she dismisses love, like Reason (the name of the character) in that work, as something that “is worth little and passes quickly” (108, line 967). The knight is indulging in “fole amour” (118, line 1378). The squire, too, deplores this emotion, but he handles love as something that induces virtue.

It has been written of this poem that it concludes that “love is definitely not the ennobling force that callow youth and most preceding poetry would hold it to be,” and that this is “no surprise for Christine’s readers, who can discern this attitude in many of her poetic works.”⁹⁹ But why? The knight is the intruder, his speech a dissonant note in the discourse. Love in this poem, as in Christine’s others, is a force to which the lover must conform and that entails obligations. Those who expect compensation and refuse to suffer for it, like the knight, are undone by the emotion, while those who act in accordance with what hierarchy demands, like the squire, increase their own virtue. The debate seems to have been envisioned as a hybrid manuscript-performative event of the sort noted above, for Christine sends the same poem to Charles d’Albret along with a New Year’s poem, explaining that although the textual lovers had asked that Louis of Orleans judge their case, they also sought the opinion of d’Albret, if he would agree to read or listen to their story (21, lines 231–32).

Epistre au dieu d’amours

Presenting a set of arguments that presuppose an already existing debate over male versus female deception, the narrative poem Epistre au dieu d’amours is sometimes considered the first recorded remnant of the querelle des femmes. In this brief discussion, I situate this quarrel in the context of court politics. But first I consider how the poem reflects on the disorder at the royal court caused by Charles VI’s madness through the figure of Cupid, the helpless god of love. This befuddled Cupid draws on the familiar trope that equates political disorder with the inability to maintain order in one’s love life. He claims to be all-powerful and yet has no control over the love relationships of his courtiers. Surely, the one thing that Cupid should be able to do is make his subjects fall in love when and with whom he pleases. But this Cupid admits that he exercises no such control.