Betrayal and Resemption in Marie de France''s

Marie condones the wife’s rebellion against her husband and her love affair with her neighbor because love’s joy triumphs over duty’s misery.. Although the husband shatters the idyll bet

Stuart McClintock

Marie de France’s Laustic is one of several lais that treats adultery In two of her lais that handle this subject, Bisclavret and Eliduc, she condemns

the characters More often she looks favorably

upon it, such as in Guigemar, Yonec, Chevrefoil and this lai, in which love trumps an unhappy or

arranged marriage to an old or jealous husband In

Laustic, she depicts three noble characters, the mal mariée, the brutish husband, and the young

bachelor lover who all betray the ideals of their class out of lust and jealousy The lovers’ affair is

discovered because of their démesure, and they

are tragically separated forever without ever consummating their love However, they ultimately redeem themselves for their imperfect behavior through a noble act that transforms erotic to spiritual love

Marie makes the reader aware of the three characters’ fall from grace by first setting them up

as models of their class She begins the lai with a

broad view of the characters that highlights their noble attributes established through public perception of their behavior and character She then narrows the narrative and shows them in their private world where they all behave differently from the ideal established in the introduction As the narrative narrows, Marie allows only the reader to witness their actions in private that tarnish their nobility The bachelor

pursues his neighbor’s wife with little explanation

of cause; she accepts his love because it is convenient and because he is more exciting than her husband The husband is jealous and proves to

be a brute by slaughtering the bird that both symbolizes and facilitates the love of his wife and

her lover As in other of Marie’s lais, this marriage

is not a source of joy, mutual respect, or trust The husband and wife deceive each other, and they treat each other badly The marriage for the wife confined in her chateau is a prison Marie condones the wife’s rebellion against her husband and her love affair with her neighbor because love’s joy triumphs over duty’s misery Although the husband shatters the idyll between the wife and her lover so that they can never see each other again, they create a memorial of their love in the form of a dead bird wrapped in samite for which the bachelor makes a magnificent case The memorial also creates a new kind of spiritual love that will endure and that ennobles them They regain the stature that they had lost because their behavior embodies the true definition of courtly love rather than the one based on the decorum that defined noble behavior at the beginning of the

lai.

Marie makes the wife the central character of

the lai She is the source of both men’s desire

throughout the tale and is the pivotal figure around whom all action revolves At the beginning of the tale, the husband is defined only in terms of the wife’s qualities Further, she is clever Her cunning initially enables the lovers to conceal their love from her husband Moreover, Glyn Burgess and Keith Busby note that the wife makes key decisions and takes the initiative at crucial moments in the

2

lai.1 When her husband asks why she is always absent from their bed, she quickly devises the excuse for going to the window to meet her lover secretly Later, it is she who reestablishes communication with her lover after they had been separated by wrapping up the dead bird and sending it to him with an explanation sewn into the samite wrap With this gift, she initiates the creation of the memorial to their love The author sympathizes with the wife’s plight as a victim of her husband’s violence and looks favorably on her choice of love over duty to her husband In the end, Marie is the omniscient narrator but also the judge who decides in favor of the lady and her lover

_

1 Marie de France, The Lais of Marie de France, trans with an

introduction by Glyn Burgess and Keith Busby (London: Penguin Books, 1999) 10

3

The writer known since 1581 as Marie de France2 transformed a series of twelve Breton folk

songs called lais into some of the most marvelous

French courtly literature of the Middle Ages Although details of her identity are unknown, she

is universally considered to be the first female French poet.3 Marie does emphasize her French origins in her writing In line four of the Epilogue of

her Fables, she states, “My name is Marie, and I

come From France” (“Marie ai num, si sui de France”),4 which may indicate that she worked in England, perhaps in the Anglo-Norman court of Henry II and Eleanor of Aquitaine in the second half of the twelfth century.5 The oldest copies of

the lais are in the vast thirteenth-century Harley

Manuscript in the British Library that contains all

twelve lais and a fifty-six line prologue; three manuscripts with fewer lais are in the Bibliothèque

Nationale in Paris, and another is in the British Library.6

2 Burgess and Busby write on page one of their introduction

to The Lais of Marie de France that Claude Fauchet first used this name in his Recueil de l’origine de la langue et la poésie françoise (Paris, 1581, Book II, item 84).

3 For discussion of Marie’s identity, see Burgess and Busby’s

introduction to The Lais of Marie de France or R Howard Bloch’s The Anonymous Marie de France (Chicago: University

of Chicago Press, 2003)

4 Burgess and Busby 15.

5 Eleanor’s support of the arts and her introduction of the lyric poetry of the troubadours from her southwestern French homeland to both northern France (through her first marriage

to Louis VII) and England were driving forces in the

development of the roman courtois from the epic chansons

de geste.

4

The subject matter of the lais comes from la

Matière de Bretagne (the Matter of Britain), one of

the five sources of stories in French courtly

literature, along with la Matière de France and la

Matière d’antiquité about Thebes, Troy, and Rome.

La Matière de Bretagne most notably includes the

Arthurian legends Marie does treat an Arthurian

subject in Lanval, but the other lais treat Breton

subjects unrelated to this cycle

Marie transformed the lais into French verse

using the traditional octosyllabic rhyming couplets

of medieval romance Although Marie’s lais have

similar themes and conventions as romances, they

are considerably shorter Her two longest lais,

Guigemar and Eliduc, that open and close the

series in the Harley Manuscript, are much shorter than the romances of Marie’s near contemporary, Chrétien de Troyes Nonetheless, the lengths of her

lais vary Burgess and Busby categorizes them as

short (fewer than 400 lines), mid length (between 400-700 lines), or long (more than 700 lines).7 Six fall into the first category, four into the second, and two into the last The average length is 477

lines At 160 lines, Laustic is one of the shortest of the twelve lais Only the episodic Chevrefoil is shorter at 118 Laustic’s brevity necessarily limits

detailed description and means that the reader is missing information that could help interpretation For example, the reasons for the bachelor’s pursuit

of the wife are not fully developed We do not know the background of the marriage whose

6 The Old French version used in this essay is from the Harley

Manuscript found in The Lais of Marie de France on pages 156-160 The English prose translation of this lai is by Glyn

Burgess and Keith Busby in the same work on pages 94-96.

5

problems are only apparent when the wife takes a lover Nevertheless, Marie is still able to develop in just 160 lines a tale with complex characters and plot that takes place over a period of several

months The lai is dense, every word contributing

meaning and nuance to the tale of deception, jealousy, violence, shattered love, and ultimately, spiritual love She is able to create such a

complete tale with so few lines because the lai has

only three characters and is set in just two noble houses Magic or the supernatural is often central

to courtly romance and to other lais, but Laustic

stands out for its realism There are no fairies like

in Lanval, no magic potions as in Les Deux Amanz,

no shapeshifting animals or humans as in Yonec or

Bisclavret Further, God, who often figures in

courtly literature on the side of the good nobles, is

absent in this lai By eliminating God and the

supernatural and by focusing on a love triangle, she creates a purely secular and domestic tale Without the conflict between love and martial duty

so often central in Chrétien’s romances, she further highlights the domestic

The nightingale was already a popular symbol

in both classical literature and in the French troubadour love lyric by the time Marie was writing

in the mid-twelfth century In her treatment of the nightingale in medieval romance, Wendy Pfeffer states that the use of this bird was particularly popular in the twelfth century.8 As in a troubadour

aubade, Marie’s nightingale is nocturnal and

vanishes at dawn in the same way the lovers meet

8 Wendy Pfeffer, The Change of Philomel: The Nightingale in Medieval Literature American University Studies III:

Comparative Literature, Volume 14 (New York: Peter Lang Publishing, 1985).

6

at night and must separate at sunrise The nightingale can specifically symbolize physical

love, which it does indirectly in this lai Although

they never actually make love, the wife does experience physical rapture at hearing her lover’s voice, which she compares to a nightingale’s song The bird also symbolizes their love Its joyful song comes to life because of summer’s bounty just as the couple’s love intensifies for the same reason The bird’s exuberance in summer reflects their own uncontrolled joy, which leads to their downfall The bird’s death means the end of their idyll The killing of the nightingale also stands for the husband’s wish to kill the lover and/or his wife The lovers’ creation that houses the dead bird both memorializes their affair and puts it back together

in a new, more spiritual way

_

In the first six lines, Marie introduces herself as

the lai’s author, identifies the source of the tale,

and then proceeds to highlight the literary and cultural transformations through which she puts it

By focusing on herself as both narrator and translator, she draws attention to role of the

author as she does throughout the lais, most

significantly in the fifty-six line prologue She

becomes part of the lai with the phrase “Une

aventure vus dirai” [v.1] She informs the reader that she is relating a tale from Brittany known as

Laustic and proceeds to give its French translation

as rossignol to show the conversion of the tale

from its original Breton to her own French She

then, for the only time in her lais, provides the

English translation of the Breton title as

nightingale In that brief introduction, she

7

emphasizes the international audience that her writing addresses She is writing a Breton tale in French with an English reference that might prove that the author was writing in the francophone Anglo-Norman court Further, the translation of this Breton tale into French is all the more compelling because its themes of foiled happiness, of failed noble ideals, and of redemption from flawed behavior were also recurring themes in the contemporary noble literature of France and

Britain Marie’s work defines translatio, in which

both words and culture are transformed and adapted for another culture ready to accept them

In lines seven to twenty-two, Marie introduces

the only three characters in the lai They include a

knight and his wife and a young knight who is a bachelor They live in adjoining chateaus

separated by a wall as in Ovid’s Pyramus and

Thisbe.9 The author only relays what is said and thought about these characters Later the reader can draw his or her own conclusions about them based on their actions To the outside world, the characters shine and are the quintessential representatives of their class The behavior of the two males so embodies noble ideals that they have brought renown to their entire town: “Pur la bunté des deus baruns / Fu de la vile bons li nuns” [v.11-12] Although Marie never names the village, she lends it and the entire tale verisimilitude by saying that it is near the actual port of Saint Malo

in Brittany She then proceeds to detail each of the three characters The first description is of the married knight Curiously, Marie says nothing

classical texts in Marie’s time, and she is probably referencing it here and will do so again later.

8

about his character She only writes that he had

“taken a…wife” (“Li uns aveit femme espusee” [v.13]), whom Marie then describes formulaically

as behaving according to the mandates of her class Marie writes that she is “Sage, curteise e acemee/ a merveille se teneit chiere / Sulunc l’usage e la manere” [v 14-16] Marie only describes the husband through his wife What are

we to make of her silence? Only in retrospect can the reader surmise that Marie’s silence could hint

at the husband’s lack of admirable traits However,

at this point in the lai, she uses metonymy to lead

the reader to transfer the courtly qualities of the wife to the husband In stark contrast to the husband’s nameless qualities, Marie reserves one

of her only detailed descriptions in the lai for the

bachelor, although it is, again, stock He conforms perfectly to the definition of chivalry in courtly literature She first focuses on the most important

of a knight’s requisite skills He is courageous and talented in the use of arms She writes that he was

“Bien coneü entre ses pers / De prüesce, de grant valur” [v 18-19] He also excels in his courtly manners: “E volunters feseit honur / Mut turnëot e despendeit / E bien donot ceo qu’il aveit” [v 20-22] Her description progresses logically from his martial to his social character, and, finally, in the next section, to his erotic behavior

From lines twenty-three to fifty-six, Marie sets

the aventure in motion She describes the lovers’

courtship and the development of the affair that they keep hidden through their discreet behavior

At this point, the lai moves from the characters’

lives in public to their lives in their own private world, into which Marie has a privileged view as omniscient narrator Mary’s narrative technique

9

shifts from reports about the nobles to descriptions and transcriptions of what they actually do and say The reader must now judge the characters based on their actions behind closed doors All three nobles are different from the public perception of them The courtly ideals that they exemplify to those in the outside world who see them as models of noble qualities give way to demonstrations of uncontrolled passion, lies, jealousy, and violence In the privacy of their own homes, they all betray the code of noble behavior

in some way and are tarnished

Whether intended or not, Marie begins her description of the love affair with some irony In line twenty-two, she finishes her glowing description of the bachelor as the ideal knight and continues in the next lines to describe his relentless pursuit of his neighbor’s wife Instead of

“giving generously whatever he had” as Burgess and Busby translate “E bien donot ceo qu’il aveit”

from line twenty-two, the bachelor now takes

whatever he wants Conforming to patterns of courtly literature, the nobleman pursues the noblewoman Curiously, however, Marie does not clearly specify the reasons for the knight’s attraction to the woman, as she does in her other

lais treating adultery She only states that he fell in

love with her and successfully pursues her by relying on persistence, prayer, and his admirable qualities: “La femme sun veisin ama; / Tant la requist, tant la preia / E tant par ot en lui grant bien” [23-25] Marie does specify why the wife surrenders to the bachelor’s request for her love She has heard good things about him; plus he lives next door Those qualities so thoroughly detailed

by Marie just a few lines previously that describe

10