by John Fowles
I felt Henri Fournier's appeal from the beginning. That wasn't the case with another part of the student syllabus. Old French, with its latinities, its baffling orthographies, its wealth of dialect forms, may be fascinating to the linguist; but to someone who wants to read meaning and story, its difficulty is just plain irritating. Nevertheless, I was to discover later that one field of Old French literature refused to subside into the oblivion I wished on the whole period once I had taken Finals. This field--'forest' would be more appropriate--was that of the Celtic romance.
The extraordinary change in European culture that took place under the influence of the British--in the original Celtic sense of that word--imagination has never, I suspect, been fully traced or acknowledged. The mania for chivalry, courtly love, mystic and crusading Christianity, the Camelot syndrome, all these we are aware of--a good deal too aware, perhaps, in the case of some recent travesties of that last centre of the lore. But I believe that we also owe--emotionally and imaginatively, at least--the very essence of what we have meant ever since by the fictional, the novel and all its children, to this strange northern invasion of the early medieval mind. One may smile condescendingly at the naIveties and primitive technique of stories such as Eliduc; but I do not think any writer of fiction can do so with decency--and for a very simple reason. He is watching his own birth.
Biographically, next to nothing is known of Marie de France. Even the name is only a deduction, made long after her death, from a line in one of her fables--Marie ai nun, Si SUS de France. My name is Marie and I come from... but it isn't even certain that she intended what we today think of as France. The region round Paris, the lie de France, is more probable. There are faint linguistic and other grounds for supposing she may have come from the part of Normandy called the Vexin, which borders on the Paris basin.
At some time she went to England, perhaps in or with the court of Eleanor of Aquitaine. The king to whom she dedicates her Lais, or love-stories, may have been Eleanor's husband, Henry II, Becket's cross; and there is even a plausible possibility that Marie was Henry's illegitimate sister. His father, Geoffrey Plantagenet, had a natural daughter of that name, who became the abbess of Shaftesbury Abbey about 1180. Not all medieval abbesses led solemn and devout lives; and in any case the romances were almost certainly composed in the previous decade. The fact that the other two works by Marie that have survived are religious and certainly date from after ix 8o reinforces the identification. If 'Marie de France' was indeed the Marie from the wrong side of the Angevin blanket who became abbess of Shaftesbury, she must have been born before 1150, and we know that the abbess survived until about 1216.
It is very difficult to imagine the Lais being written by other than a finely educated (therefore, in that age, finely born) young woman; that she was romantic and high-spirited is easily deduced; and that her work was a tremendous and rapid literary success a wealth of contemporary manuscripts and translations bear witness.., and one might even proceed to see her as an early victim of male chauvinism, sent to Shaftesbury to mend her wicked ways. There is certainly evidence that her stories were not approved by the Church. Very soon after the Lais came into the world, a gentleman named Denis Piramus--a monk in fact, but evidently a born reviewer by nature--wrote a sourly sarcastic account of her popularity. He knew why the stories gave their aristocratic audiences such dubious pleasure: they were hearing what they wanted to happen to themselves.
Overtly Marie set out in the Lais to save some Celtic tales from oblivion: stories from the diffuse folk-corpus scholars call the matire de Bretagne, and of which the Arthurian cycle and the story of Tristan and Yseult are now the best remembered. Whether she first heard them from French or English sources is unknown, since her own description of their provenance, bretun, was then used racially of the Brythonic Celts and not geographically--it included the Welsh and the Cornish as well as the Bretons proper. There are records of how far the Celtic minstrels wandered long before Marie's time, and she could have heard their performances at any major court.
But far more important than this quasi-archaeological service was the transmutation that took place when Marie grafted her own knowledge of the world on the old material. Effectively she introduced a totally new element into European literature. It was composed not least of sexual honesty and a very feminine awareness of how people really behaved--and how behaviour and moral problems can be expressed through things like dialogue and action. She did for her posterity something of what Jane Austen did for hers--that is, she set a new standard for accuracy over human emotions and their absurdities. One may bring the two even closer, since the common ground of all Marie's stories (what she herself would have termed desmesure, or passionate excess) is remarkably akin to the later novelist's view of sense and sensibility. Another similarity is much harder for us to detect today, and that is of humour. Because her stories are so distant from us, we tend to forget that much of their matter was equally distant from her own twelfth century; and we grossly underestimate both her and her contemporary audience's sophistication if we imagine them listening with totally straight faces and credulity. That was no more expected than that we should take our own thrillers, Wild Westerns and sci-fi epics without a pinch of salt.
Marie's irony is all the harder to detect now for another historical reason. Her Lais were not meant to be read in silence--or in prose. In the original they are in rhyming octosyllabic couplets, and they were to be performed, sung and mimed, probably to a loose melody, or to a variety of them, and perhaps in places spoken almost conversationally against chords and arpeggios. The instrument would have been the harp, no doubt in its Breton form, the rote. The Romantics turned minstrelsy into an irredeemably silly word; but what little evidence we have suggests a very great art, one we have now lost beyond recall. In the case of writers like Marie de France, to see only the printed text is rather like having to judge a film by the script alone. The long evolution of fiction has been very much bound up with finding means to express the writer's 'voice'--his humours, his private opinions, his nature--by means of word manipulation and print alone; but before Gutenberg we are lost. I will mention one small instance in the story you are about to read. Twice Marie is very formal about the way her hero visits the wayward princess he is in love with; he does not crash into her rooms, he has himself properly announced. One may take it as a piece of padding, a conventional show of courtly etiquette. But I think it much more probable that it was a dry aside and directed at her first listeners--indeed, if what we know of Henry II is true, and Marie was related to him, r could hazard a guess at whom the little gibe was directed.
I have attempted to convey at least a trace of this living, oral quality in my translation, which is based on the British Museum H text (Harley 978), in Alfred Ewert's edition.*
* I must thank Dr Nicholas Mann, of Pembroke College, Oxford, for help over some particularly difficult lines.
It only remains for me to remind readers of the three real-life systems against which the story is anachronistically told. The first is the feudal system, which laid a vital importance on promises sworn between vassal and lord. It was not only that the power structure depended on a man being as good as his word; all civilized life depended on it. Today we can go to law over a broken contract; in those days you could only take to arms. The second context is the Christian, which is responsible for the ending of Eliduc, but not much else. Marie is patently more interested in the human heart than the immortal soul. The third system was that of courtly love, where the same stress on keeping faith was applied to sexual relations. It is hardly a fashionable idea in the twentieth century; but amour courtois was a desperately needed attempt to bring more civilization (more female intelligence) into a brutal society, and all civilization is based on agreed codes and symbols of mutual trust. An age in which the desmesure of Watergate--in my view far more a cultural than a political tragedy--can happen should not find this too difficult to understand.
De an mat anclen lai bretu
n
Le cunte e tate la reisun Vus dirai
I am going to give you the full story of a very old Celtic tale, at least as I've been able to understand the truth of it.
In Brittany there was once a knight called Eliduc. He was a model of his type, one of the bravest men in the country, and he had a wife of excellent and influential family, as finely bred as she was faithful to him. They lived happily for several years, since it was a marriage of trust and love. But then a war broke out and he went away to join the fighting. There he fell in love with a girl, a ravishingly pretty princess called Guilliadun. The Celtic name of the wife who stayed at home was GuildelŸec, and so the story is called GuildelŸec and Guilliadun after their names. Its original title was Eliduc, but it was changed because it's really about the two women. Now I'll tell you exactly how it all happened.
Eliduc's overlord was the King of Brittany, who was very fond of the knight and looked after his interests. Eliduc served him faithfully--whenever the king had to go abroad, Eliduc was left in charge of his territories, and kept them safe by his military skills. lie got many favours in return. He was allowed to hunt in the royal forests. No gamekeeper, even the most resolute, dared stand in his way or complain about him. But other people's envy of his good luck did its usual work. He was slandered and traduced, and brought into bad relations with the king. Finally he was dismissed from the court without any reason. Left in the dark, Eliduc repeatedly asked to be allowed to defend himself before the king--the slanders were lies, he had served the king well, and happily so. But no answer came from the court. Convinced he would never get a hearing, Eliduc decided to go into exile. So he went home and called together all his friends. He told them how things lay with the king, of the anger towards him. Eliduc had done the best he could and there was no justice in the royal resentment. When the ploughman gets the rough edge of his master's tongue, the peasants have a proverb: Never trust a great man's love. If someone in Eliduc's position is sensible, he puts more trust in the love of his neighbours. So now he says* he's sick of Brittany, he'll cross the sea to England and amuse himself there for a while. He'll leave his wife at home; have his servants take care of her, along with his friends.
Once it was made, he kept to this decision. He fitted himself and the ten horsemen he took with him--out handsomely for the journey. His friends were very sad to see him go, and as for his wife... she accompanied him for the first part of the journey, in tears that she was losing him. But he swore solemnly that he would stay true to her. Then he says goodbye and rides straight on to the sea. There he takes ship, crosses successfully and arrives at the port of Totnes.
There were several kings in that part of England, and they were at war. Towards Exeter in this country there lived a very powerful old man. He had no male heir, simply an unmarried daughter. This explained the present war: because he had refused her hand to an equal from another dynasty, the other king was putting all his land to the sack. He had trapped the old king in one of his fortified cities. f No one there had the courage to go out and join combat, general or single, with the invader. Eliduc heard about all this and decided that since there was war he would stay in those parts instead of going on. He wanted to help the besieged king, who was getting into worse and worse trouble and faced with ruin and disaster. He would hire himself out as a mercenary.*
* The shifts to the narrative present (like those into dialogue) are all in the original. t The text says 'in a castle', but it seems clear that Exeter, then a walled city, is meant. Marie would have known of its importance in West Saxon times and of William the Conqueror's siege of 1068. The Saxons took East Devon and Exeter from the Celts in the latter half of the seventh century, so Marie's original source for Eliduc must antedate that time. Totnes, incidentally, is a frequently mentioned port in the matire de Bretagne.
He sent messengers to the king, explaining in a letter that he had left his own country and had come to help him; but he was at the king's disposal and if he didn't want Eliduc's services, then Eliduc asked only for safe conduct through his lands, so that he could go and offer his fighting abilities somewhere else. When the king saw the messengers, he was delighted and welcomed them warmly. He summoned the castle commander and ordered that an escort be provided immediately for Eliduc and that he should be brought to him. Then the king had lodgings arranged. All that was necessary for a month's stay was also provided.
The escort were armed and horsed and sent to fetch Eliduc. He was received with great honour, having made the journey without trouble. His lodging was with a rich townsman, a decent and well-mannered man who gave up his tapestry-hung best room to the knight. Eliduc had a good meal prepared and invited to it all the other anxious knights who were quartered in the city. He forbade his own men, even the most grabbing, to accept any gift or wages for the first forty days.
On his third day at Exeter the cry ran through the city that the enemy had arrived and were all over the surrounding countryside--and already preparing an attack on the city gates. Eliduc heard the uproar from the panicking townspeople and immediately donned armour. His companions did the same. There were fourteen other knights capable of fighting in the town, the rest being wounded, or captured. Seeing Eliduc mount his horse, they go to their lodgings and put on their own armour as well. They won't wait to be called, they'll go out of the gates with him.
* en souuee. c renjaneir. The knight soudoyer has to be understood (at least in romance) in a far more honourable, and honour-driven, sense than in the contemporary or even the Renaissance use of 'mercenary'. Perhaps the Japanese samurai is the best equivalent.
'We'll ride with you, sir,' they now say. 'And whatever you do, we'll do the same.'
Eliduc answers. 'My thanks. Is there anyone here who knows an ambush place? A defile? Somewhere where we might catch them hopping? If we wait here, we'll get a good fight. But we have no advantage. Has anyone a better plan?'
'There's a narrow cart-road, sir. Beside that wood by the flaxfield over there. When they've got enough loot, they'll return by it. They ride back carelessly from such work, as a rule. Like that they're asking for a quick death.'
It could be over in a flash; and much damage done.
'My friends,' said Eliduc, 'one thing for certain. Nothing venture, even when things look hopeless, then nothing gain either in war or reputation. You're all the king's men, you owe him complete loyalty. So follow me. Wherever I go, and do as I do. I promise you there won't be setbacks if I can help it. We may not get any loot. But we'll never be forgotten if we beat the enemy today.'
His confidence spread to the other knights and they led him to the wood. There they hid by the road and waited for the enemy to return from their raid. Eliduc had planned everything, showed them how they should charge at the gallop and what to cry. When the enemy reached the narrow place, Eliduc shouted the battle-challenge, then cried to his friends to fight well. They struck hard, and gave no quarter. Taken by surprise, the enemy were soon broken and put to flight. The engagement was brief. They captured the officer in command and many other knights, whom they entrust to their squires. Eliduc's side had had twenty-five men, and they took thirty of the enemy. They also took a great deal of armour, and a quantity of other valuable things. Now they return triumphantly to the city, full of this splendid victory. The king was there on a tower, desperately anxious for his men. He complained bitterly, having convinced himself that Eliduc was a traitor and had lost him all his knights.
They come in a crowd, some laden, others bound--many more on the return than at the going out, which was why the king was misled and stayed in doubt and suspense. He orders the city gates closed and the people up on the walls, bows and other weapons at the ready. But they have no need of them. Eliduc's party had sent a squire galloping on ahead to explain what had happened. The man told the king about the Breton mercenary, how he had driven the enemy away, how well he had conducted himself. There was never a better handler of arms on horseback. He had personally captured the enemy comman
der and. taken twenty-nine prisoners, besides wounding and killing many others.
When the king hears the good news, he's beside himself with joy. He came down from the tower and went to meet Eliduc; then thanked him for all he had done and gave him all the prisoners for ransoming. Eliduc shared out the armour among the other knights, keeping no more for his own men than three horses that had been allocated to them. He distributed everything else, even his own rightful part as well, among the prisoners and the other people.
After this exploit the king made Eliduc his favourite. He retained him and his companions for a whole year and Eliduc gave his oath of faithful service. He then became the protector of the king's lands.
The king's young daughter heard all about Eliduc and his splendid actions--how good-looking he was, such a proud knight, how civilized and open-handed. She sent one of her personal pages to request, to beg Eliduc to come and amuse her. They must talk, get to know each other, and she would be very hurt if he didn't come. Eliduc replies: of course he'll come, he looks forward very much to meeting her. He got on his horse; and taking a servant with him, he goes to chat with the girl. When he's at the door of her room, he sends the page ahead. He doesn't barge in, but waits a little, till the page comes back. Then with gentle expression, sincere face and perfect good manners he addressed the young lady formally and thanked her for having invited him to visit her. Guilliadun was very pretty, and she took him by the hand* and led him to a couch, where they sat and talked of this and that. She kept stealing looks at him... his face, his body, his every expression... and said to herself how attractive he was, how close to her ideal man. Love fires his arrow, she falls headlong in love. She goes pale, she sighs, but she can't declare herself, in case he despises her for it.