Chivalry (2 page)

Item, the re-teller of these stories desires hereby to tender
appropriate acknowledgment to Mr. R.E. Townsend for his assistance in
making an English version of the lyrics included hereinafter; and to
avoid discussion as to how freely, in these lyrics, Nicolas has
plagiarized from Raimbaut de Vaqueiras and other elder poets.
[1]

And—"sixth and lastly"—should confession be made that in the present
rendering a purely arbitrary title has been assigned this little book;
chiefly for commercial reasons, since the word "dizain" has been
adjudged both untranslatable and, in its pristine form, repellantly
outre
.

You are to give my titular makeshift, then, a wide interpretation; and
are always to remember that in the bleak, florid age these tales
commemorate this Chivalry was much the rarelier significant of any
personal trait than of a world-wide code in consonance with which all
estimable people lived and died. Its root was the assumption
(uncontested then) that a gentleman will always serve his God, his honor
and his lady without any reservation; nor did the many emanating by-laws
ever deal with special cases as concerns this triple, fixed, and
fundamental homage.

Such is the trinity served hereinafter. Now about lady-service, or
domnei
, I have written elsewhere. Elsewhere also I find it recorded
that "the cornerstone of Chivalry is the idea of vicarship: for the
chivalrous person is, in his own eyes at least, the child of God, and
goes about this world as his Father's representative in an alien
country."

I believe the definition holds: it certainly tends to explain the
otherwise puzzling pertinacity with which the characters in these tales
talk about God and act upon an assured knowledge as to Heaven's private
intentions and preferences. These people are the members of one family
engrossed, as all of us are apt to be when in the society of our kin, by
family matters and traditions and by-words. It is not merely that they
are all large children consciously dependent in all things upon a not
foolishly indulgent Father, Who keeps an interested eye upon the least
of their doings, and punishes at need,—not merely that they know
themselves to act under surveillance and to speak within ear-shot of a
divine eavesdropper. The point is, rather, that they know this
observation to be as tender, the punishment to be as unwilling, as that
which they themselves extend to their own children's pranks and
misdemeanors. The point is that to them Heaven is a place as actual and
tangible as we consider Alaska or Algiers to be, and that their living
is a conscious journeying toward this actual place. The point is that
the Father is a real father, and not a word spelt with capital letters
in the Church Service; not an abstraction, not a sort of a something
vaguely describable as "the Life Force," but a very famous kinsman, of
whom one is naively proud, and whom one is on the way to visit.... The
point, in brief, is that His honor and yours are inextricably blended,
and are both implicated in your behavior on the journey.

We nowadays can just cloudily imagine this viewing of life as a sort of
boarding-school from which one eventually goes home, with an official
report as to progress and deportment: and in retaliation for being
debarred from the comforts of this view, the psychoanalysts have no
doubt invented for it some opprobrious explanation. At all events, this
Chivalry was a pragmatic hypothesis: it "worked," and served society for
a long while, not faultlessly of course, but by creating, like all the
other codes of human conduct which men have yet tried, a tragi-comic
melee wherein contended "courtesy and humanity, friendliness, hardihood,
love and friendship, and murder, hate, and virtue, and sin."

For the rest, since good wine needs no bush, and an inferior beverage is
not likely to be bettered by arboreal adornment, I elect to piece out
my exordium (however lamely) with "The Printer's Preface." And it runs
in this fashion:

"Here begins the volume called and entitled the Dizain of Queens,
composed and extracted from divers chronicles and other sources of
information, by that extremely venerable person and worshipful man,
Messire Nicolas de Caen, priest and chaplain to the right noble,
glorious and mighty prince in his time, Philippe, Duke of Burgundy, of
Brabant, etc., in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord God a thousand
four hundred and seventy: and imprinted by me, Colard Mansion, at
Bruges, in the year of our said Lord God a thousand four hundred and
seventy-one; at the commandment of the right high, mighty and virtuous
Princess, my redoubted Lady, Isabella of Portugal, by the grace of God
Duchess of Burgundy and Lotharingia, of Brabant and Limbourg, of
Luxembourg and of Gueldres, Countess of Flanders, of Artois, and of
Burgundy, Palatine of Hainault, of Holland, of Zealand and of Namur,
Marquesse of the Holy Empire, and Lady of Frisia, of Salins and of
Mechlin; whom I beseech Almighty God less to increase than to continue
in her virtuous disposition in this world, and after our poor fleet
existence to receive eternally. Amen."

"
Afin que les entreprises honorables et les nobles aventures et
faicts d'armes soyent noblement enregistres et conserves, je vais
traiter et raconter et inventer ung galimatias
."

THE DIZAIN OF QUEENS OF THAT NOBLE MAKER IN THE FRENCH TONGUE, MESSIRE
NICOLAS DE CAEN, DEDICATED TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS ISABELLA OF PORTUGAL,
OF THE HOUSE OF THE INDOMITABLE ALFONSO HENRIQUES, AND DUCHESS DOWAGER
OF BURGUNDY. HERE BEGINS IN AUSPICIOUS WISE THE PROLOGUE.

A Sa Dame

Inasmuch as it was by your command, illustrious and exalted lady, that I
have gathered together these stories to form the present little book,
you should the less readily suppose I have presumed to dedicate to your
Serenity this trivial offering because of my esteeming it to be not
undeserving of your acceptance. The truth is otherwise: your postulant
approaches not spurred toward you by vainglory, but rather by equity,
and equity's plain need to acknowledge that he who seeks to write of
noble ladies must necessarily implore at outset the patronage of her who
is the light and mainstay of our age. I humbly bring my book to you as
Phidyle approached another and less sacred shrine,
farre pio et
saliente mica
, and lay before you this my valueless mean tribute not as
appropriate to you but as the best I have to offer.

It is a little book wherein I treat of divers queens and of their
love-business; and with necessitated candor I concede my chosen field to
have been harvested, and scrupulously gleaned, by many writers of
innumerable conditions. Since Dares Phrygius wrote of Queen Heleine, and
Virgil (that shrewd necromancer) of Queen Dido, a preponderating mass of
clerks, in casting about for high and serious matter, have chosen, as
though it were by common instinct, to dilate upon the amours of royal
women. Even in romance we scribblers must contrive it so that the fair
Nicolete shall be discovered in the end to be no less than the King's
daughter of Carthage, and that Sir Dooen of Mayence shall never sink in
his love affairs beneath the degree of a Saracen princess; and we are
backed in this old procedure not only by the authority of Aristotle but,
oddly enough, by that of reason.

Kings have their policies and wars wherewith to drug each human
appetite. But their consorts are denied these makeshifts; and love may
rationally be defined as the pivot of each normal woman's life, and in
consequence as the arbiter of that ensuing life which is eternal.
Because—as anciently Propertius demanded, though not, to speak the
truth, of any woman—

Quo fugis? ah demens! nulla est fuga, tu licet usque
Ad Tanaim fugias, usque sequetur amor.

And a dairymaid, let us say, may love whom she will, and nobody else be
a penny the worse for her mistaking of the preferable nail whereon to
hang her affections; whereas with a queen this choice is more
portentous. She plays the game of life upon a loftier table, ruthlessly
illuminated, she stakes by her least movement a tall pile of counters,
some of which are, of necessity, the lives and happiness of persons whom
she knows not, unless it be by vague report. Grandeur sells itself at
this hard price, and at no other. A queen must always play, in fine, as
the vicar of destiny, free to choose but very certainly compelled in the
ensuing action to justify that choice: as is strikingly manifested by
the authentic histories of Brunhalt, and of Guenevere, and of swart
Cleopatra, and of many others that were born to the barbaric queenhoods
of extinct and dusty times.

All royal persons are (I take it) the immediate and the responsible
stewards of Heaven; and since the nature of each man is like a troubled
stream, now muddied and now clear, their prayer must ever be,
Defenda
me, Dios, de me
! Yes, of exalted people, and even of their near
associates, life, because it aims more high than the aforementioned
Aristotle, demands upon occasion a more great catharsis, which would
purge any audience of unmanliness, through pity and through terror,
because, by a quaint paradox, the players have been purged of humanity.
For a moment Destiny has thrust her scepter into the hands of a human
being and Chance has exalted a human being to decide the issue of many
human lives. These two—with what immortal chucklings one may facilely
imagine—have left the weakling thus enthroned, free to direct the heavy
outcome, free to choose, and free to evoke much happiness or age-long
weeping, but with no intermediate course unbarred.
Now prove thyself
!
saith Destiny; and Chance appends:
Now prove thyself to be at bottom a
god or else a beast, and now eternally abide that choice. And now
(O
crowning irony!)
we may not tell thee clearly by which choice thou
mayst prove either
.

In this little book about the women who intermarried, not very enviably,
with an unhuman race (a race predestinate to the red ending which I have
chronicled elsewhere, in
The Red Cuckold
), it is of ten such moments
that I treat.

You alone, I think, of all persons living, have learned, as you have
settled by so many instances, to rise above mortality in such a testing,
and unfailingly to merit by your conduct the plaudits and the adoration
of our otherwise dissentient world. You have often spoken in the stead
of Destiny, with nations to abide your verdict; and in so doing have
both graced and hallowed your high vicarship. If I forbear to speak of
this at greater length, it is because I dare not couple your well-known
perfection with any imperfect encomium. Upon no plea, however, can any
one forbear to acknowledge that he who seeks to write of noble ladies
must necessarily implore at outset the patronage of her who is the light
and mainstay of our age.

Therefore to you, madame—most excellent and noble lady, to whom I love
to owe both loyalty and love—I dedicate this little book.

"Armatz de fust e de fer e d'acier, Mos ostal seran bosc, fregz,
e semdier, E mas cansos sestinas e descortz, E mantenrai los frevols
contra 'ls fortz."

THE FIRST NOVEL.—ALIANORA OF PROVENCE, COMING IN DISGUISE AND IN
ADVERSITY TO A CERTAIN CLERK, IS BY HIM CONDUCTED ACROSS A HOSTILE
COUNTRY; AND IN THAT TROUBLED JOURNEY ARE MADE MANIFEST TO EACH THE
SNARES WHICH HAD BEGUILED THEM AFORETIME.

In this place we have to do with the opening tale of the Dizain of
Queens. I abridge, as afterward, at discretion; and an initial account
of the Barons' War, among other superfluities, I amputate as more
remarkable for veracity than interest. The result, we will agree at
outset, is that to the Norman cleric appertains whatever these tales may
have of merit, whereas what you find distasteful in them you must impute
to my delinquencies in skill rather than in volition.

Within the half hour after de Giars' death (here one overtakes Nicolas
mid-course in narrative) Dame Alianora thus stood alone in the corridor
of a strange house. Beyond the arras the steward and his lord were at
irritable converse.

First, "If the woman be hungry," spoke a high and peevish voice, "feed
her. If she need money, give it to her. But do not annoy me."

"This woman demands to see the master of the house," the steward then
retorted.

"O incredible Boeotian, inform her that the master of the house has no
time to waste upon vagabonds who select the middle of the night as an
eligible time to pop out of nowhere. Why did you not do so in the
beginning, you dolt?" The speaker got for answer only a deferential
cough, and very shortly continued: "This is remarkably vexatious.
Vox
et praeterea nihil
—which signifies, Yeck, that to converse with women
is always delightful. Admit her." This was done, and Dame Alianora came
into an apartment littered with papers, where a neat and shriveled
gentleman of fifty-odd sat at a desk and scowled.

He presently said, "You may go, Yeck." He had risen, the magisterial
attitude with which he had awaited her entrance cast aside. "Oh, God!"
he said; "you, madame!" His thin hands, scholarly hands, were plucking
at the air.

Dame Alianora had paused, greatly astonished, and there was an interval
before she said, "I do not recognize you, messire."

"And yet, madame, I recall very clearly that some thirty years ago the
King-Count Raymond Berenger, then reigning in Provence, had about his
court four daughters, each one of whom was afterward wedded to a king.
First, Meregrett, the eldest, now regnant in France; then Alianora, the
second and most beautiful of these daughters, whom troubadours hymned as
the Unattainable Princess. She was married a long while ago, madame, to
the King of England, Lord Henry, third of that name to reign in these
islands."