CHAPTER XI

CHRISTINE DE PISAN

This complaint of one who has lost her lover, or been betrayed and forsaken by him, might well have been the lament of France, betrayed by Isabeau de Bavière and left naked to her enemies. But the author of the lament, though one ready enough to find matter for her pen in the condition of her adopted country, had no thought of France in this case; for the little ballade was composed by Christine de Pisan with no other reference than to her own life.

The age of the mad king and the bad queen would not have been, one would think, favorable to the advancement of literature; and yet some of the best literature of medieval France was composed while Isabeau de Bavière was still alive. We shall allude at this time to but two writers, Froissart, of whom we have already said something, and Christine de Pisan, both of whom were writing between 1380 and 1400. Christine, the first professional authoress in France of whose life we have record, is well worthy of study both as an authoress and as a woman.

The fourteenth century was the heyday of the astrologer as it was of the witch, and the wise Charles V., "le Salomon de la France," was not alone in his superstition when he placed his reliance upon the predictions of the learned doctor, Thomas of Pisa, whom he had summoned from Italy to be court astrologer. We are told that the nobles and great ones of the earth at that time "dared do nothing new without the commands of astrology; they dared neither build castles, nor churches, nor begin war, nor even so much as put on a new robe, undertake a journey, nor go out of their houses without the consent of the stars." Whether or not this be somewhat of an exaggeration, there is no question that Thomas de Pisan occupied, at the court of Charles V., a position not only lucrative but dignified. Established in the Louvre itself, the Italian scholar sent for his wife and daughter to make their home in France. The daughter, then (1368) but five years of age, was already a precocious little lady, and was presented to the king when she arrived in France. Charles was pleased with the graces of the child, and made her his especial protegée, promising that she should have as good an education and place at his court as any demoiselle of noble birth. Charles was himself a scholar and capable of appreciating the nobility of intelligence; and in this case he had not judged amiss.

It is from the works of Christine herself--La Vision de Christine, in prose, La Mutation de Fortune, and Le Chemin de Long Estude,--in verse that we learn most of her story, which was happy and uneventful up to her fourteenth year. At this time she had already acquired, under her father's careful tuition, a remarkable familiarity with the classic authors of Rome, and could turn off as neat Latin verses as any boy in the schools, and could also write French verse. It was most fortunate for her that her father, "not thinking girls any more unfit for learning than boys," allowed her to "glean some straws of learning." Before she was fifteen Christine was married to a notary, Etienne Castel, a Picard gentleman of good birth and excellent character, whom she loved tenderly.

The prosperity of her family was first threatened in 1380, when her good patron King Charles died. Then her father, who had lavishly expended a large part of the handsome stipend he received as astrologer, found himself suddenly reduced almost to poverty, and he did not long survive his royal patron. The earnings of her husband not being sufficient to maintain the family, Christine cast about for a means to put to use the education she had received, and had already begun, by some small works, her career as an authoress, when the sudden death of her husband, carried off by the plague in 1389, left her alone and without resources, and under the necessity of providing some sort of support for her mother and her three children.

She never ceased to mourn for her husband, and the pages of her works are filled with poems which, like the little ballade that heads this chapter, hold tender allusion to her loss. Though to modern ears the perpetual repetition of this strain of mourning grows monotonous, some of the sweetest of her poems are those inspired by this sentiment, expressed with a directness and a simplicity that must appeal to any lover of truth and poetry. "He loved me," she sings, "and 'twas right that he should, for I had come to him as a girl-bride; we two had made such wise provision in all our love that our two hearts were moved in all things, whether of joy or of sorrow, by a common wish, more united in love than the hearts of brother and sister."

She too might have wished to die, she says, in order to follow the loved one, but that there were the children and the mother whom she alone could care for. The energy of her character at last saved the fortunes of her family. Her first task, the saving of some last remnants of the property of her father and her husband, was rendered more difficult by the almost interminable delays of the courts and the dishonesty of advocates and opponents who had more influence with the "blind goddess" than the daughter of the old astrologer. She herself gives an interesting picture of her difficulties, all bravely met for the sake of her children, and in time overcome. Not the least of her worries was the determination to conceal from her friends the desperate state of her fortunes; she was too proud to appear poor: "There is no sorrow equal to this, and no one who has not experienced it can know what it means.... Under a furred mantle and a cloak of scarlet, well saved, but not often renewed, there was many a shiver, and in a bed properly appointed with all things of comfort, many a sleepless night. But our meal was always a simple one, as befits a widow."

But from the more sordid cares, the covering of her poverty under threadbare finery that did not keep out the cold, and the vulgar loungers who would ogle her and leer at her as she went about the courts, there was a refuge in the pursuits which were to earn her bread. At first Christine sang of her lost husband, and the grace and earnestness of these poems pleased the fashionable public of the day. Her style was the result of long and careful preparation, and her mind almost unconsciously reflected the things which she had read and admired in classic literature; and thus she transmitted to her readers much information, not in itself new or original, but strange to them, and therefore interesting. Some of the great personages of the court still remembered the little Italian protegée of Charles V., and asked her to write for them poems of love, in less lugubrious vein. We have seen that the troubadours thought it almost a truism: "Without love, no poesy," for love was their only theme; but here we find a woman who frankly admits that she has loved and loves no more, and who yet undertakes to write love poems for a price, and does write some exquisite ones. Poetry made to order can never seem spontaneous after we know that the poet has found inspiration not at the shrine of Phoebus but at that of Plutus; but many of the poetic masterpieces have been composed under stress of dire poverty, of which we are fortunately not always aware when reading them. And so, among the six or seven score little ballades and jeux which in Christine's works are marked à vendre--for sale--there are many that we could read with more sincere pleasure if we did not doubt the genuineness of the sentiment expressed. These little poems, many of them really graceful and charming playthings of a moment, lose so much in translation that I shall not attempt to render into English their ephemeral charm. The French of five hundred years ago is not "Frenshe of Paris" to most of us: rather is it of the school of "Stratford atte Bow," or of some other school we have never attended, and therefore I have chosen to give, with some changes in orthography, one of the simplest of Christine's jeux à vendre. It is a lover's song in praise of his lady beautiful and good:

In other poems written for her courtly admirers Christine does not hesitate to voice sentiments quite out of keeping with the manners of her patrons. It is thus that she says: "If true honor is to be reapportioned, many do I know who will have but a little share in it, despite their thinking that they have all that wealth, beauty, noble birth, and fine clothes can give, and that therefore they are very princes. But however noble he be in outward show, no man is noble who lends himself to evil deeds or evil words. Thus some there are in whose boasting there is not one word of truth, who will tell you that the fairest ladies in the land have honored them with love. Good Lord! what gentility! How ill it becomes a noble man to lie and tell false tales of women! Such fellows are but villains, pure and simple; and should there be a redistribution of honors, theirs should be cut down."

Not infrequently, alas, the pride of learning mars her verse; it is overloaded with pedantic allusions, stiff with learning, and too manifestly the product of a learned head rather than of an overflowing heart. Where these faults appear less, or not at all, is in the poems inspired by genuine feeling for her loved ones; there the real heart of the woman, bravely struggling to bear up and smile before the world, is laid bare to us in sudden glimpses of unpremeditated poetry. It is an old theme, but one of pathos ever fresh, that we find in the following lines:

It is, you see, the old motif, in melodramatic pathos that of the harlequin Dorkins, who must play his part in the pantomime even though his child lie dying, in tragedy that of Lady Macbeth, who must play the queen by day and suffer the torments of the murderess at night. It is not the novelty but the universality and truth of the idea or sentiment that makes Christine's verses rank as poetry.

But love songs alone could not support a family of five; the Church, so often the refuge of forlorn women, might have offered Christine a refuge, but not support for those dependent on her, since she had not sufficient influence to assure herself of any office of dignity and emolument in the convents of the proud and wealthy. Her pen must be her resource; and thus Christine de Pisan became not merely an authoress, but the first authoress to support herself by her pen. For some of her shorter poems she received not inconsiderable sums; but longer works, works of more permanent value must be undertaken, and Christine valiantly set to work.

Her first task was to secure a patron, for only some great lord could afford to pay sums sufficient to enable her to live: there was no eager public of thousands, educated by the printing press to expect, to welcome, to demand fresh intellectual food. One of her patrons was the great Duke of Burgundy, Philippe le Hardi, to whom she dedicated a very long and partly autobiographical poem called La Mutation de Fortune. She tells her story with rather too much display of the fact that she knows all the famous apologues and anecdotes that might apply to her case; still, it is an earnest and in some ways interesting account of how she had been compelled to take up a profession not then regarded as befitting a woman how,--as she says, she had turned herself "from woman to man." She read this work to Philippe de Bourgogne in that same palace where she had once been a familiar inmate, where she had played as a child, where she had learned to know the famous men through whose aid Charles V. had well-nigh regenerated France. It is not surprising that Philippe de Bourgogne should think of her as specially fitted to undertake a task requiring intimate knowledge of that king and his time. The duke, sending for her one day as she sat in the midst of a pile of books, pen in hand, asked her to undertake the writing of a life of his great brother.

With ready devotion she set about writing the life of Charles V., of the king who, "when I was a child, gave me my bread." In due time her book, Le Livre des faits et bonnes moeurs du roi Charles V., was completed; but he for whom she had written it had died in 1404, before half was done. The loss of her generous friend and protector was a serious blow to the poetess. Her mother had also died; while Christine must plod wearily on, though "her heart was filled with joy when she remembered that the day was not very far off when she herself would go to join the loved ones."

The history of Charles V. is a work of which one hardly knows what to say. As history, it is manifestly a failure, for Christine had either no wish or no opportunity to present facts in a narrative at once accurate, detailed, and clear; her work lacks both the accuracy and the breadth of view of genuine history; it is rather, as one critic remarks, an éloge, a eulogy upon Charles V.--which, indeed, had been what Philippe desired. The book is in prose, and though the style lacks the clearness and vividness to which we are accustomed in such men of genius as Villehardouin, Joinville, and her own contemporary, Froissart, we must remember that these men had reached the high-water mark of French style, not to be equalled, in sober truth, till the Renaissance, the "New Birth," had regenerated the fallen life and literature of Europe. As prose of the early fifteenth century, Christine's work is better than any other then written, except that of Froissart; and not a little of his charm comes less from the style than from the matters of which he chose to write. There is in Christine's book little of the gorgeousness of chivalry: was not the king in whose praise she wrote a king who won his battles at the council table, while Du Guesclin, upon the field of battle, gave the hard knocks which his sovereign, weak and sickly, could neither give nor take? Where Christine does succeed is in her portraits of the king and his courtiers, whose characters she knew perfectly and whose good and bad traits she does not scruple to depict with such even justice as she may. To quote the words of one of her most recent critics, who does not fail to call attention to the awkward Latinisms of her diction and the lopsided Ciceronian periods in her attempts at elevation or eloquence: "No one has made us feel more distinctly the winning grace of the Duke d'Orléans, brother of Charles VI., nor has any one better depicted the physical aspect of Charles V.; clearly do we see the long face, the broad forehead, the prominent eyes, and the thin lips; the beard is very thick, the cheekbones high and prominent, the skin brown and pale, the whole countenance thin to emaciation; it is the face of an ascetic, tempered by the gentleness of the expression and something staid and thoughtful in the whole look. Nor is there mere banality and commonplace in the moral portrait of the king; if she praises his chevalerie (chivalry), she does not conceal the fact that, weak and sickly, his hand never drew the sword from the day of his accession to the day of his death."

The mere list of Christine's works would fill much space, and in the end we should not be much edified thereby; for she was a voluminous writer, really a hack writer, and therefore turned out a huge pile of ill-considered stuff, in prose and in verse, which she well knew would win no fame for her it were sufficient could it but win bread for her children! Much of this work is mere paraphrase of Latin authors of great repute and much read in the Middle Ages, though now all but forgotten: the moral Seneca, the martial Vegetius and Frontinus, Valerius Maximus, and honest Plutarch (whom critics praise, and only unfortunate boys read). It is from these and the like of these that she gleaned much of such works as L'Epître d'Othéa à Hector, on the training of a prince; Le Chemin de Long Estude, a long moral poem (1402); Le Livre de Prudence; Le Livre des Faits d'armes et de chevalerie; Le Livre de Police (political economy). With such compilations, doubtless both useful and interesting when there were fewer books of general information, encyclopedias and the like, Christine filled many a manuscript, and much of her work still remains in manuscript, though the Société des anciens textes français is slowly reprinting her works, which will fill four large volumes with verse alone and overflow into several more with prose.

With the great mass of the work left by Christine de Pisan we shall not even attempt to deal; but the presentation of one of her favorite enthusiasms will prove, we hope, of some interest. Though forced to earn her own bread and so to compete with men, Christine never forgot that she was a woman; neither in conduct nor in her writings did she ever so behave or so write as to forfeit that dearest of her privileges as a woman, the respect of men. Not only did she respect herself, but she was determined that men should respect her, and moreover that they should not with impunity malign woman. We have shown in a previous chapter how outrageous was the literary attitude toward the fair sex, whom the satirists, big and little, were never tired of belaboring as the authors of all the evil in the world. Marriage and love are, of course, fertile subjects of satiric humor, as when the groom is told, in the sermon joyeux on the Maux de mariage (Misfortunes of Marriage), that, from the very wedding day: "all his money will take wings and fly away, but his wife will stay," and stay, and stay, until he is dead and buried, and then, as the church bell tolls his knell his dear wife will be thinking of how she can manage to marry his servant. "Verily," says another, speaking of the pilgrimage of marriage, "'tis a road to which there is no end till the weaker of the two be dead." It was this attitude against which Christine entered a vigorous protest, and she got into a little war of words with two of her contemporaries.

In several of the minor poems noted above there are allusions to the wrong of boastfulness, mendacity, and evil speaking about women; but in the Épître au Dieu d'Amour (properly the Epistle of, not to, the God of Love), she brings upon the scene Love himself, who complains of and ridicules tale-telling and blabbing gallants, always ready to recount imaginary conquests of any woman whose name is mentioned. What honor is there, she asks, in deceiving a woman? This was in May, 1399, and it was not many years before she began to assault the chief citadel of the scorners of womanhood, the great Roman de la Rose. Her Dit de la Rose is dated on a day of all others most propitious to lovers, Saint Valentine's day, in the year 1402. Her poem contains the graceful conception of an order of chivalry whose symbol shall be the rose (so long fraught with evil associations through the influence of ungenerous clerks), and the chief of the vows exacted of the good knights shall be, never to be licentious, in word or in deed, with regard to women. The gauntlet thus thrown down before the admirers of the satirist one might almost say misogynist Jean de Meung, was not long in finding those willing to take it up. Two secretaries of Charles VI., Jean de Montreuil and Gonthier Col, assumed the defence of the Roman de la Rose, and various letters, sometimes couched in terms of good-humored raillery, sometimes sly and cutting, were exchanged between them and Christine. Which side, considered merely as debaters, really had the better of the literary duel we need not care; for the common-sense and the moral point of view was certainly not that which justified general condemnation of woman as an inferior and wicked creature, and also justified the degradation of the noblest emotions to mere sensuality. Christine, however, thought that she had made out such a good case for maligned femininity that she collected her letters and the answers, and dedicated the whole correspondence to Isabeau de Bavière. It would be a pleasant relief to the gaudy colors in the picture of that unworthy queen if we could feel that she appreciated the delicate compliment thus paid her, or in any way encouraged the worthy defender of her sex.

This collection of prose and verse was not the only plea Christine made for women. She composed two other works, in prose, whose dominant notion is the rehabilitation of honest womanhood. The first of these, called La Cité des Dames, is one of those compilations descending in the main from Boccaccio's Latin work, De Claris Mulieribus, "Concerning Famous Women," of which Chaucer's Legend of Good Women and Tennyson's Dream of Fair Women are the greatest examples: the present work itself, indeed, is a record of this nature. But that which Chaucer and Tennyson treat poetically, imaginatively, with all the art of minds supremely artistic, Christine treats in a rather matter-of-fact way; that is, she is concerned to tell such anecdotes of famous women as will support her thesis of the essential nobility of the feminine character. In this way she has accumulated a considerable amount of evidence showing the patience, the devotion, the fidelity, the heroism of which women are capable under all circumstances of life. The heroines of antiquity are not alone in eliciting Christine's praises; for she devotes some attention to the patterns of virtue in her own day, to princesses, and to simple bourgeoises, and to one Anastasia, who is of peculiar interest to us because she was a fine illuminator, and may have been the artist who executed the beautiful illuminations in the manuscripts of Christine's own works.

The second of the prose works in behalf of women is the Livre des Trois Vertus, or Trésor de la Cité des Dames, a book of sage counsel to women of all classes and full of information most valuable for the historian of manners. It is from this book that one receives the best impression of the fine moral character and catholicity of view of this woman living a life of hardship and struggle in the dark days of the mad king. She is no prude, but simple and charitable in her conception of the problems of life. Though herself a literary woman, she does not place too great stress upon learning for her sex: "This woman in love with scholarship intends, to be sure, that woman should acquire learning; but it must be for the purpose of developing her intelligence, of raising her heart to higher things, not of widening her field of ambitions, dethroning man and reigning in his stead."

The prodigious activity of this authoress can best be appreciated by reference to her own statement that, by the year 1405, she had "produced fifteen works of importance, without counting other special little dittiés, which together fill about seventy sheets of large size." The chief part of her work was already done; for the disturbed condition of the kingdom after the murder of Louis d'Orléans (1407) interrupted her labors. She had thoroughly naturalized herself in her adopted country, and this fervent patriot, who grieved that she was helpless to save France, must have suffered intensely during the dark years that followed. In 1410, she wrote a Lamentation upon the horrors of civil war, and two years later, after the overthrow of the communist government of Paris, the Cabochiens, she wrote a Livre de la Paix, full of harsh but just criticisms upon those butchers and bakers who would reform the whole world if first allowed to destroy it. Then came the greater sorrows of Agincourt and the English conquest. Christine fled from Paris, no longer the home of those princes who had favored her, and found refuge in a convent, probably the convent at Poissy to which her daughter had already retired. It was the breaking up of her little family, her two sons going back to Italy to seek a more favorable field for their peaceful talents, and the mother remaining in seclusion for eleven years.

It was probably not long before her death, of which we do not know the precise date, that the good lady heard in her cloister the glad news of the coming of the Maid of Orléans and of the consecration of the king at Rheims. All her love for her dear land of France welled up in her heart, and in gladness and wonder she sang the Dittié de Jeanne d'Arc, the praise of this "girl of sixteen years... before whom enemies fly, not one dare stand.... Oh! what honor to our sex! our sex, that God loves, it would seem." We cannot better conclude this account of a pure and noble woman--of one who loved her husband, her children and her country, and who, above all, preserved respect for herself and for her womanhood in an evil age--than in the words of her triumphant song of joy which proclaims that France is saved, and that it is a woman who saves France: