It was shown in the last chapter that fiction, and even prose fiction, of very varied character began to develop itself in French during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.  By the fifteenth the development was very much greater, and the “disrhyming” of romances, the beginnings of which were very early, came to be a regular, not an occasional, process; while, by its latter part, verse had become not the usual, but the exceptional vehicle of romance, and prose romances of enormous length were popular.  But earlier there had still been some obstacles in the way of the prose novel proper.  It was the period of the rise and reign of Allegory, and France, preceptress of almost all Europe in most literary kinds, proved herself such in this with the unparalleled example of the Roman de la Rose.  But the Roman de la Rose was itself in verse ­the earlier part of it at least in real poetry ­and most of its innumerable imitations were in verse likewise.  Moreover, though France again had been the first to receive and to turn to use the riches of Eastern apologue, the most famous example of which is The Seven Wise Masters, these rather serious matters do not seem to have especially commended themselves to the French people.  The place of composition of the most famous of all, the Gesta Romanorum, has been fairly settled to be England, though the original language of composition is not likely to have been other than Latin.  At any rate, the style of serious allegory, in prose which should also be literature, never really caught hold of the French taste.

Comic tale-telling, on the other hand, was germane to the very soul of the race, and had shown itself in chanson and roman episodes at a very early date.  But it had been so abundantly, and in so popular a manner, associated with verse as a vehicle in those pieces, in the great beast-epic of Renart, and above all in the fabliaux and in the earliest farces, that the connection was hard to separate.  None of the stories discussed in the last chapter has, it may be noticed, the least comic touch or turn.

As we go on we must disengage ourselves more and more (though with occasional returns to it) from attention to verse; and the two great compositions in that form, the Romance of the Rose and the Story of the Fox, especially the former, hardly require much writing about to any educated person.  They are indeed most strongly contrasted examples of two modes of tale-telling, both in a manner allegoric, but in other respects utterly different.  The mere story of the Rose, apart from the dreamy or satiric digressions and developments of its two parts and the elaborate descriptions of the first, can be told in a page or two.  An abstract of the various Renart books, to give any idea of their real character, would, on the other hand, have to be nearly as long as the less spun-out versions themselves.  But the verse fabliaux can hardly be passed over so lightly.  Many of them formed the actual bases of the prose nouvelles that succeeded them; not a few have found repeated presentation in literature; and, above all, they deserve the immense praise of having deliberately introduced ordinary life, and not conventionalised manners, into literary treatment.  We have taken some pains to point out touches of that life which are observable in Saint’s Life and Romance, in chanson and early prose tale.  But here the case is altered.  Almost everything is real; a good deal is what is called, in one of the senses of a rather misused word, downright “realism.”

Few people who have ever heard of the fabliaux can need to be told that this realism in their case implies extreme freedom of treatment, extending very commonly to the undoubtedly coarse and not seldom to the merely dirty.  There are some ­most of them well known by modern imitations such as Leigh Hunt’s “Palfrey” ­which are quite guiltless in this respect; but the great majority deal with the usual comic farrago of satire on women, husbands, monks, and other stock subjects of raillery, all of which at the time invited “sculduddery.”  To translate some of the more amusing, one would require not merely Chaucerian licence of treatment but Chaucerian peculiarities of dialect in order to avoid mere vulgarity.  Even Prior, who is our only modern English fabliau-writer of real literary merit ­the work of people like Hanbury Williams and Hall Stevenson being mostly mere pornography ­could hardly have managed such a piece as “Le Sot Chevalier” ­a riotously “improper” but excessively funny example ­without running the risk of losing that recommendation of being “a lady’s book” with which Johnson rather capriciously tempered his more general undervaluation.  Sometimes, on the other hand, the joke is trivial enough, as in the English-French word-play of anel for agnel (or _-neau_), which substitutes “donkey” for “lamb”; or, in the other, on the comparison of a proper name, “Estula,” with its component syllables “es tu la?” But the important point on the whole is that, proper or improper, romantic or trivial, they all exhibit a constant improvement in the mere art of telling; in discarding of the stock phrases, the long-winded speeches, and the general paraphernalia of verse; in sticking and leading up smartly to the point; in coining sharp, lively phrase; in the co-ordination of incident and the excision of superfluities.  Often they passed without difficulty into direct dramatic presentation in short farces.  But on the whole their obvious destiny was to be “unrhymed” and to make their appearance in the famous form of the nouvelle or novella, in regard to which it is hard to say whether Italy was most indebted to France for substance, or France to Italy for form.

It was not, however, merely the intense conservatism of the Middle Ages as to literary form which kept back the prose nouvelle to such an extent that, as we have seen, only a few examples survive from the two whole centuries between 1200 and 1400, while not one of these is of the kind most characteristic ever since, or at least until quite recent days, of French tale-telling.  The French octosyllabic couplet, in which the fabliaux were without exception or with hardly an exception composed, can, in a long story, become very tiresome because of its want of weight and grasp, and the temptations it offers to a weak rhymester to stuff it with endless tags.  But for a short tale in deft hands it can apply its lightness in the best fashion, and put its points with no lack of sting.  The fabliau-writer or reciter was not required ­one imagines that he would have found scant audiences if he had tried it ­to spin a long yarn; he had got to come to his jokes and his business pretty rapidly; and, as La Fontaine has shown to thousands who have never known ­perhaps have never heard of ­his early masters, he had an instrument which would answer to his desires perfectly if only he knew how to finger it.

At the same time, both the lover of poetry and the lover of tale must acknowledge that, though alliance between them is not in the least an unholy one, and has produced great and charming children, the best of the poetry is always a sort of extra bonus or solace to the tale, and the tale not unfrequently seems as if it could get on better without the poetry.  The one can only aspire somewhat irrelevantly; the other can never attain quite its full development.  So it was no ill day when the prose nouvelle came to its own in France.

The first remarkable collection was the famous Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles, traditionally attributed to Louis XI. when Dauphin and an exile in Brabant, with the assistance of friends and courtiers, but more recently selected by critics that way minded as part of the baggage they have “commandeered” for Antoine de la Salle.  The question of authorship is of scarcely the slightest importance to us; though the point last mentioned is worth mentioning, because we shall have to notice the favoured candidate in this history again.  There are certainly some of the hundred that he might have written.

In the careless way in which literary history used to be dealt with, the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles were held to be mere imitation of the Decameron and other Italian things.  It is, of course, much more than probable that the Italian novella had not a little to do with the precipitation of the French nouvelle from its state of solution in the fabliau.  But the person or persons who, in imitating the Decameron, produced the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles had a great deal more to do ­and did a great deal less ­than this mere imitation of their original.  As for a group of included tales, the already-mentioned Seven Wise Masters was known in France much before Boccaccio’s time.  The title was indeed admittedly Italian, but such an obvious one as to require no positive borrowing, and there is in the French book no story-framework like that of the plague and the country-house visit; no cheerful personalities like Fiammetta or Dioneo make not merely the intervals but the stories themselves alive with a special interest.  Above all, there is nothing like the extraordinary mixture of unity and variety ­a pure gift of genius ­which succeeds in making the Decameron a real book as well as a bundle of narratives.  Nor is there anything like the literary brilliancy of the actual style and handling.

Nevertheless, Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles is a book of great interest and value, despite serious defects due to its time generally and to its place in the history of fiction in particular.  Its obscenity, on which even Sir Walter Scott, the least censorious or prudish-prurient of men, and with Southey, the great witness against false squeamishness, has been severe, is unfortunately undeniable.  But it is to be doubted whether Sir Walter knew much of the fabliaux; if he had he would have seen first, that this sort of thing had become an almost indispensable fashion in the short story, and secondly, that there is here considerable improvement on the fabliaux themselves, there being much less mere schoolboy crudity of dirty detail and phrase, though the situations may remain the same.  It suffers occasionally from the heavy and rhetorical style which beset all European literature (except Italian, which itself did not wholly escape) in the fifteenth century.  But still one can see in it that improvement of narrative method and diction which has been referred to:  and occasionally, amid the crowd of tricky wives, tricked husbands, too obliging and too hardly treated chambermaids, ribald priests and monks, and the like, one comes across quite different things and persons, which are, as the phrase goes, almost startlingly modern, with a mixture of the unmodern heightening the appeal.  One of the most striking of these ­not very likely to be detected or suspected by a careless reader under its sub-title of “La Demoiselle Cavaliere,” and by no means fully summarised in the quaint short argument which is in all cases subjoined ­may be briefly analysed.

In one of the great baronial households of Brabant there lived, after the usual condition of gentle servitude, a youth named Gerard, who fell in love, after quite honourable and seemly fashion, with Katherine, the daughter of the house ­a fact which, naturally, they thought known only to themselves, when, as naturally, everybody in the Court had become aware of it.  “For the better prevention of scandal,” an immediate marriage being apparently out of the question because of Gerard’s inferiority in rank to his mistress, it is decided by the intervention of friends that Gerard shall take his leave of the Brabantine “family.”  There is a parting of the most laudable kind, in which Katherine bestows on her lover a ring, and a pledge that she will never marry any one else, and he responds suitably.  Then he sets out, and on arriving at Bar has no difficulty in establishing himself in another great household.  Katherine meanwhile is beset with suitors of the best rank and fortune; but will have nothing to say to any of them, till one day comes the formidable moment when a mediaeval father determines that his daughter shall marry a certain person, will she nill she.  But if mediaeval fatherhood was arbitrary, mediaeval religion was supreme, and a demand to go on pilgrimage before an important change of life could hardly be refused.  In fact, the parents, taking the proposal as a mere preliminary of obedience, consent joyfully, and offer a splendid suite of knights and damsels, “Nous lui baillerons ung tel gentilhomme et une telle demoiselle, Ysabeau et Marguerite et Jehanneton.”  But “no,” says Mistress Katherine sagely.  The road to St. Nicolas of Warengeville is not too safe for people travelling with a costly outfit and a train of women.  Let her, dressed as a man, and a bastard uncle of hers (who is evidently the “Will Wimble” of the house) go quietly on little horses, and it will save time, trouble, money, and danger.  This the innocent parents consider to show “great sense and good will,” and the pair start in German dress ­Katherine as master, the uncle as man, ­comfortably, too, as one may imagine (for uncles and nieces generally get on well together, and the bend sinister need do no harm).  They accomplish their pilgrimage (a touch worth noticing in Katherine’s character), and then only does she reveal her plan to her companion.  She tells him, not without a little bribery, that she wants to go and see Gerard en Barrois, and to stay there for a short time; but he is to have no doubt of her keeping her honour safe.  He consents, partly with an eye to the future main chance (for she is her father’s sole heir), and partly because elle est si bonne qu’il n’y fault guère guet sur elle.  Katherine, taking the name of Conrad, finds the place, presents herself to the maitre d’ostel, an ancient squire, as desirous of entertainment or retainment, and is very handsomely received.  After dinner and due service done to the master, the old squire having heard that Katherine ­Conrad ­is of Brabant, naturally introduces her countryman Gerard to her.  He does not in the least recognise her, and what strikes her as stranger, neither during their own dinner nor after says a word about Brabant itself.  Conrad is regularly admitted to Monseigneur’s service, and, as a countryman, is to share Gerard’s room.  They are perfectly good friends, go to see their horses together, etc., but still the formerly passionate lover says not a word of Brabant or his Brabanconian love, and poor Katherine concludes that she has been “put with forgotten sins” ­not a bad phrase, though it might be misconstrued.  Being, however, as has been already seen, both a plucky girl and a clever one, she determines to carry her part through.  At last, when they go to their respective couches in the same chamber, she herself faces the subject, and asks him if he knows any persons in Brabant.  “Oh yes.”  “Does he know” her own father, his former master?  “Yes.”  “They say,” said she, “that there are pretty girls there:  did you not know any?” “Precious few,” quoth he, “and I cared nothing about them.  Do let me go to sleep!  I am dead tired.”  “What!” said she, “can you sleep when there is talk of pretty girls? You are not much of a lover.”  But he slept “like a pig.”

Nevertheless, Katherine does not give up hope, though the next day things are much the same, Gerard talking of nothing but hounds and hawks, Conrad of pretty girls.  At last the visitor declares that he [she] does not care for the Barrois, and will go back to Brabant.  “Why?” says Gerard, “what better hunting, etc., can you get there than here?” “It has nothing,” says Conrad, “like the women of Brabant,” adding, in reply to a jest of his, an ambiguous declaration that she is actually in love.  “Then why did you leave her?” says Gerard ­about the first sensible word he has uttered.  She makes a fiery answer as to Love sometimes banishing from his servants all sense and reason.  But for the time the subject again drops.  It is, however, reopened at night, and some small pity comes on one for the recreant Gerard, inasmuch as she keeps him awake by wailing about her love.  At last she “draws” the sluggard to some extent.  “Has not he been in love, and does not he know all about it?  But he was never such a fool as Conrad, and he is sure that Conrad’s lady is not such either.”  Another try, and she gets the acknowledgment of treason out of him.  He tells her (what she knows too well) how he loved a noble damsel in Brabant and had to leave her, and it really annoyed him for a few days (it is good to imagine Katherine’s face, even in the dark, at this), though of course he never lost his appetite or committed any folly of that sort.  But he knew his Ovid (he tells her), and as soon as he came to Bar he made love to a pretty girl there who was quite amiable to him, and now he never thinks of the other.  There is more talk, and Katherine insists that he shall introduce her to his new lady, that she may try this remedy of counter-love.  He consents with perfect nonchalance, and is at last allowed to go to sleep.  No details are given of the conversation with the rival, except the bitterness of Katherine’s heart at the fact, and at seeing the ring she had given to Gerard on his hand.  This she actually has the pluck to play with, and, securing it, to slip on her own.  But the man being obviously past praying or caring for, she arranges with her uncle to depart early in the morning, writes a letter telling Gerard of the whole thing and renouncing him, passes the night silently, leaves the letter, rises quietly and early, and departs, yet “weeping tenderly,” not for the man, but for her own lost love.  The pair reach home safely, and says the tale-teller, with an agreeable dryness often found here, “There were some who asked them the adventures of their journey, but whatever they answered they did not boast of the chief one.”  The conclusion is so spirited and at the very end so scenic and even modern (or, much better, universal), that it must be given in direct translation, with a few chevilles (or pieces of padding) left out.

As for Gerard, when he woke and found his companion gone, he thought it must be late, jumped up in haste, and seized his jerkin:  but, as he thrust his hand in one of the sleeves, there dropped out a letter which surprised him, for he certainly did not remember having put any there.  He picked it up and saw it subscribed “To the disloyal Gerard.”  If he was startled before he was more so now:  but he opened it at last, and saw the signature “Katherine, surnamed Conrad.”  Even yet he knew not what to think of it:  but as he read the blood rose to his face and his heart fluttered, and his whole manner was changed.  Still, he read it through, and learnt how his disloyalty had come to the knowledge of her who had wished him so well; and that not at second hand, but from himself to herself; what trouble she had taken to find him; and how (which stung him most) he had slept three nights in her company after all. [After thinking some time he decides to follow her, and arrives in Brabant on the very day of her marriage:  for she has, in the circumstances, kept her word to her parents.] Then he tried to go up to her and salute her, and make some wretched excuse for his fault.  But he was not allowed, for she turned her shoulder on him, and he could never manage to speak to her all through the day.  He even stepped forward once to lead her out to dance, but she refused him flatly before all the company, many of whom heard her.  And immediately afterwards another gentleman came, who bade the minstrels strike up, and she stepped down from her dais in full view of Gerard and went to dance with him.  And so did the disloyal lover lose his lady.

Now whether this, as the book asserts and as is not at all improbable, is a true story or not, cannot matter to any sensible person one farthing.  What does matter is that it is a by no means badly told story, that it resorts to no illegitimate sources or seasonings of interest, and that it offers opportunities for amplification and “diversity of administration” to almost any extent.  One can fancy it told, at much greater length and with more or less adjustment to different times, by great novelists of the most widely varying classes ­by Scott and by Dumas, by Charles Reade and by George Meredith, to mention no living writer, as might easily be done.  Both hero and heroine have more character between them than you could extract out of fifty of the usual nouvelles, and each lends him or herself to endless further development.  Not a few of the separate scenes ­the good parents fussing over their daughter’s intended cavalcade and her thrifty and ingenious objections; the journey of the uncle and niece (any of the first three of the great novelists mentioned above would have made chapters of this); the dramatic and risky passages at the castle en Barrois; the contrast of Katherine’s passion and Gerard’s sluggishness; and the fashion in which this latter at once brings on the lout’s defeat and saves the lady from danger at his hands ­all this is novel-matter of almost the first class as regards incident, with no lack of character-openings to boot.  Nor could anybody want a better “curtain” than the falling back of the scorned and baffled false lover, the concert of the minstrels, and Katherine’s stately stepping down the dais to complete the insult by dancing with another.

One more general point may be noticed in connection with the superiority of this story, and that is the accession of interest, at first sight trivial but really important, which comes from the naming of the personages.  Both in the earlier fabliaux and in these Nouvelles themselves, by far the larger number of the actors are simply called by class-names ­a “knight,” a “damsel,” a “merchant and his wife,” a “priest,” a “varlet.”  It may seem childish to allow the mere addition of a couple of names like Gerard and Katherine to make this difference of interest, but the fact is that there is a good deal of childishness in human nature, and especially in the enjoyment of story. Only by very slow degrees were writers of fiction to learn the great difference that small matters of this kind make, and how the mere “anecdote,” the dry argument or abstract of incident, can be amplified, varied, transformed from a remainder biscuit to an abundant and almost inexhaustible feast, by touches of individual character, setting of interiors, details of conversation, description, nomenclature, and what not.  Quite early, as we saw in the case of the St. Alexis, persons of narrative gift stumbled upon things of the kind; but it was only after long delays, and hints of many half-conscious kinds, that they became part of recognised craft.  Even with such a master of that craft as Boccaccio before them, not all the Italian novelists could catch the pattern; and the French, perhaps naturally enough, were slower still.

It must be remembered, in judging the fifteenth-century French tale, that just as it was to some extent hampered by the long continuing popularity of the verse fabliau on the one hand, so it was, as we may say, “bled” on the other by the growing popularity of the farce, which consists of exactly the same material as the fabliaux and the nouvelles themselves, with the additional liveliness of voice and action.  These later additions imposed not the smallest restraint on the license which had characterised and was to characterise the plain verse and prose forms, and no doubt the result was all the more welcome to the taste of the time.  But for that very reason the appetites and tastes, which could glut themselves with the full dramatic representation, might care less for the mere narrative, on the famous principle of segnius irritant.  Nor was the political state of France during the time very favourable to letters.  There are, however, two separate fifteenth-century stories which deserve notice.  One of them is the rather famous, though probably not widely read, Petit Jehan de Saintre of the already mentioned Antoine de la Salle, a certain work of his this time.  The other is the pleasant, though to Englishmen intentionally uncomplimentary, Jehan de Paris of an unknown writer.  La Salle’s book must belong to the later middle of the century, though, if he died in or about 1461, not to a very late middle. Jehan de Paris has been put by M. de Montaiglon nearer the close.

The history of “little John of Saintre and the Lady of the Beautiful Cousins" has not struck all judges, even all English judges, in the same way.  Some have thought it mawkish, rhetorical, clumsily imitative of the manners of dead chivalry, and the like.  Others, admitting it to be a late and “literary” presentation of the stately society it describes, rank it much higher as such.  Its author was a bitter enough satirist if he wrote, as he most probably did, the famous Quinze Joyes de Mariage, one of the most unmitigated pieces of unsweetened irony ­next to A Tale of a Tub and Jonathan Wild ­to be found in literature; but not couched in narrative form.  The same quality appears of course in the still more famous farce of Pathelin, which few good judges deny very stoutly to him, though there is little positive evidence.  In the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles again, as has been said, he certainly had a hand, and possibly a great hand, as well as perhaps elsewhere.  The satiric touch appears even in Petit Jehan itself; for, after all the gracious courtship of the earlier part, the dame des belles Cousines, during an absence of her lover on service, falls a by no means, as it would seem, very reluctant victim to the vulgar viciousness of a rich churchman, just like the innominatas of the nouvelles themselves.  But the earlier part is gracious ­a word specifically and intensively applicable to it.  It may be a little unreal; does not the secondary form and sense which has been fastened upon reality ­“realism” ­show that, in the opinion of many people at least, reality is not gracious?  The Foozles of this world who “despise all your kickshaws,” the Dry-as-dusts who point out ­not in the least seeing the real drift of their argument ­that the fifteenth century was, in the greater part of Europe if not the whole, at a new point of morals and manners, may urge these things.  But the best part of Petit Jehan remains a gracious sort of dream for gracious dreamers ­a picture of a kind of Utopia of Feminism, when Feminism did not mean votes or anything foolish, but only adoration of the adorable.

It would be impossible to find or even to imagine anything more different than the not much later Jehan de Paris, an evident folk-tale of uncertain origin, which very quickly became a popular chapbook and lasted long in that condition.  Although we Englishmen provide the fun, he is certainly no Englishman who resents the fact or fails to enjoy the result, not to mention that we “could tell them tales with other endings.”  It is, for instance, not quite historically demonstrable that in crossing a river many English horsemen would be likely to be drowned, while all the French cavaliers got safe through; nor that, in scouring a country, the Frenchmen would score all the game and all the best beasts and poultry, while the English bag would consist of starvelings and offal.  But no matter for that.  The actual tale tells (with the agreeable introductory “How,” which has not yet lost its zest for the right palates in chapter-headings) the story of a King and Queen of Spain who have, in recompense for help given them against turbulent barons, contracted their daughter to the King of France for his son; how they forgot this later, and betrothed her to the King of England, and how that King set out with his train, through France itself, to fetch his bride.  As soon as the Dauphin (now king, for his father is dead) hears of their coming, he disguises himself under the name of John of Paris, with a splendid train of followers, much more gorgeous than the English (the “foggy islander” of course cannot make this out), and sets of quiproquos follow, in each of which the Englishman is outdone and baffled generally, till at last “John of Paris” enters Burgos in state, reveals himself, and carries off the Englishman’s bride, with the natural effect of making him bien marry et courrouce, though no fight comes off.

The tale is smartly and succinctly told (there are not many more than a hundred of the small-sized and large-printed pages of the Collection Jannet-Picard), and there is a zest and verve about it which ought to please any mood that is for the time in harmony with the much talked of Comic Spirit.  But it certainly does not lose attraction, and it as certainly does not fail to lend some, when it is considered side by side with the other “John,” especially if both are again compared with the certainly not earlier and probably later “Prose Romances” in English, to which that rather ambitious title was given by Mr. Thoms.  There is nothing in these in the very remotest degree resembling Jehan de Saintre:  you must get on to the Arcadia or at least to Euphues before you come anywhere near that.  There is, on the other hand, in our stuff, a sort of distant community of spirit with Jehan de Paris; but it works in an altogether lower and less imaginative sphere and fashion; no sense of art being present, and very little of craft.  It is astonishing that a language which had had, if only in verse, such an unsurpassable tale-teller as Chaucer, should have been so backward.  But then the whole conditions of the fifteenth century, especially in England, become only the more puzzling the longer one studies them.  Even in France, it will be observed, the output of Tale is by no means large. Nor shall we find it very greatly increased even in the next age, though there is one masterpiece in quantity as well as quality.  But, for our purpose, the Cent Nouvelles and the two separate pieces just discussed continue, and in more and more striking manner, to show the vast possibilities when the way shall have been clearly found and the feet of the wayfarers firmly set in it.