Eleanor Of Aquitaine (25 page)

Amongst the throng of gifted persons, literati, journeymen artists, and philosophers that jostled each other in the countess's foyer, was one André, a clerk known as the Chaplain. He had once served his calling in the court of Louis Capet, so perhaps he went down to Poitiers as one of Marie's spiritual counselors. If so, he came under the disturbing necessity, in her employ, of sacrificing his high principles for the sake of his stipend. What the countess obviously needed for her royal academy was not advice for penitents, but a code of manners to transform the anarchy and confusion that confronted her into something refined, serious, and decorous, a code to give currency to her own ideals for an elect society to be impelled not by the brute force that generally prevailed, nor by casual impulse, but by an inner disciplined sense of propriety. What progress could be made in dialectic by untutored squires who rode hacks into mess halls, or by hoydens who diverted eyes from psalters in the very midst of mass? And upon what could one ground a code of chivalry save on the classic and universal theme of love? "Oh what a wonderful thing is love," the chaplain presently exclaims, "which makes a man shine with so many virtues, and teaches everyone… so many good traits of character." Marie set André at work. Perhaps she suggested his model, though any clerk of his day with access to a monastic library would have hit upon it easily. Abélard had quoted it in Paris, and so had Abbé Bernard. It was Ovid's treatises on the Art of Loving and the Remedy for Love, the
Ars Amatoria
and the
Remedia Amoris
.

Ovid's
Ars Amatoria
, as the poet himself contrived it, is a bit of foolery for a sophisticated audience that well appreciates the author's transparent intention to make fun of the young Roman's illicit love affairs by pretending to take them seriously. It is a screed on the fine art of seduction done with all the delicate analysis of a disputation. In it the art of loving is reduced to rule. How to proceed and succeed with the business of seduction: how to dress, how to scrape an acquaintance, how to get on in conversation, how to humor the mood of the fair one, how to give and withhold, to please and torment — the gamut of the little comedy — furnish the themes of his discourse. The
Ars
is elegantly embellished with allusions to classical instances, which enhance its air of make-believe solemnity.

This work, which provides an admirable framework for Marie's doctrines of civility, underwent, however, a most remarkable change in André's redaction, which offers itself to the court as a guide to a young man seeking to equip himself for admission to elect society. André's work,
⁸
like Ovid's, is frankly erotic. It would not have occurred to Marie to be squeamish about the seduction and adultery in her original. Both works discourse with all the precision of dialectic on the science of loving in all its branches, define the principles of love, its disciplines, its code, its etiquette. But whereas in the work of Ovid, man is the master, employing his arts to seduce women for his pleasure, in André's work, woman is the mistress, man her pupil in homage, her vassal in service.

There are internal evidences of the strain this redaction imposed upon André. He was unable to make either the free doctrines of the classical poet or the fantastic notions of the countess rest comfortably in his clerical mind. Sensing the doubly subversive nature of the document upon which he was engaged, he seems to have made good Latin of it only under a certain compulsion from his sovereign lady. The chaplain's discourse is so full of the conflict between pagan naturalisim and Christian restraint that the reader perceives through his mind's eye the shadow of Marie at his elbow, correcting, refining, interpolating, and deleting, with the high-handed disregard for sources that made composition a pleasure of self-expression in her day. It is therefore not surprising to find that André at some time added to his work a final section,
De Remedio
, in which he repudiates the essential philosophy of the major portion, and warns the social neophyte to be wary. Chretien de Troyes, another of Marie's literary vassals, also revolts from the too liberal implications of her scheme. In his
Cligés
he gainsays the doctrine he had expressed in
Lancelot
, which latter he wrote upon urgency of Marie and on themes supplied by her.

Besides taking liberties with her classic original, the editorial Marie infused André's gentleman's guide with the very breath of the prevailing mode. To support the rather threadbare dicta of Ovid, who was after all in that court the passion of the elder generation, Marie's code professed to derive authority for good form from the authentic practice of chivalry in the court of King Arthur in Caerleon on Usk, than which nothing could afford a more unexceptionable pattern for society. It elucidated for aspiring knights the true inwardness of Gawain, the sustaining principles of Arthur himself.

At least one other important source Marie employed. She levied upon the social traditions of her Poitevin forebears. Nostredame relates that in Provence chatelaines were accustomed to entertain their seasonal assemblies with so-called "courts of love," in which, just as feudal vassals brought their grievances to the assizes of their overlords for regulation, litigants in love's thrall brought their problems for the judgment of the ladies. André in his famous work makes reference to antecedent decisions in questions of an amatory nature by "les dames de Gascogne,"
¹⁰
and the poetry of the troubadours presupposes a milieu in which their doctrines of homage and deference could be exploited. Thus we have in Andrés
Tractatus
the framework of Ovid with the central emphasis reversed, the Arthurian code of manners, the southern ritual of the "courts of love," all burnished with a golden wash of troubadour poetry learned by the queen's forebears and their vassals in the deep Midi, probably beyond the barrier of the Pyrenees.
¹¹
Marie made these familiar materials the vehicle for her woman's doctrine of civility, and in so doing she transformed the gross and cynical pagan doctrines of Ovid into something more ideal, the woman's canon, the chivalric code of manners. Manners, she plainly saw, were after all the fine residuum of philosophies, the very flower of ethics.

There is something ghoulish in exposing André's book, which is also Marie's, to the callous scrutiny of an age hostile to sentiment. A faint odor of cloistral mold and feudal decay clings to it. But the ideal of
l'amour courtois
which grew up in Poitiers had, as has been well said, more than a little to do with freeing woman from the millstone which the church in the first millennium hung about her neck as the author of man's fall and the facile instrument of the devil in the world. The court of Poitiers gave its high sanction to ideals which spread so rapidly throughout Europe that the "doctrine of the inferiority of woman has never had the same standing since."
¹²
The code of André gives glimpses of a woman's notions of society different in essential respects from the prevailing feudal scheme, which was certainly man-made. In the Poitevin code, man is the property, the very thing of woman; whereas a precisely contrary state of things existed in the adjacent realms of the two kings from whom the reigning Duchess of Aquitaine was estranged. The sheer originality of Marie's scheme can be grasped by trying to imagine Henry Fitz Empress (or Louis Capet for that matter) transformed by its agency into the beau ideal. As critics we may make what we please of this upside down philosophy of women. There it is in the first two books of André the Chaplain. There have always been two schools of thought about it.

With this anatomy of the whole corpus of love in hand, Marie organized the rabble of soldiers, fighting cocks, jousters, springers, riding masters, troubadours, Poitevin nobles and debutantes, young chatelaines, adolescent princes, and infant princesses in the great hall of Poitiers. Of this pandemonium the countess fashioned a seemly and elegant society, the fame of which spread to the world. Here was a woman's assize to draw men from the excitements of the tilt and the hunt, from dice and games to feminine society, an assize to outlaw boorishness and compel the tribute of adulation to female majesty.

The book, together with the poetry of the troubadours, enables us to catch a glimpse of those famous assemblies in the queen's new hall to which lovers brought their complaints for the judgment of the ladies. The female portion of the academy, disciplined by the fashionable example of the countess and the queen to a noble grace of bearing, a flattering condescension, mount the dais, an areopagus sometimes sixty strong.
¹³
They gather about the queen,
¹⁴
and among them shine, besides Mane, Isabel, Countess of Flanders,
¹⁸
who is the queen's niece; Ermengarde, Countess of Narbonne, doubtless familiar with some such proceedings in the south;. probably also Henry Plantagenet's sister, the lovely Emma of Anjou; perhaps also, if she was another sister of the king, Mane de France
¹⁷
— all except Ermengarde, who was more nearly the queen's contemporary, women from twenty five to thirty, the notable high priestesses of art and beauty in the day.

The chronicle of Geoffroi de Vigeois leads us to conclude that the standards of the court impressed themselves upon Poitou and the Limousin. "Time was," he says, "when the Bishop of Limoges and the Viscount of Comborn were content to go in sheep and fox skins. But today [the queen's day] the humblest would blush to be seen in such poor things. Now they have clothes fashioned of rich and precious stuffs, in colors to suit their humor. They snip out the cloth in rings and longish slashes to show the lining through, so they look like the devils that we see in paintings. They slash their mantles, and their sleeves flow like those of hermits. Youths affect long hair and shoes with pointed toes." "As for women," he goes on, "you might think them adders, if you judged by the tails they drag after them." (This last is precisely the extravagance of which Abbé Bernard had complained in the Ile de France) The price of fur and cloth had doubled in the Limousin during the period of Geoffroi's observation. 18 As for minor luxuries, the
Tractatus
, in listing gifts a lover might make to his mistress, reveals what might have been seen in the smart new
fenestrae
of the Rue Saint Porchaire: "a handkerchief, a fillet, a wreath of gold or silver, a brooch, a mirror, a purse, a girdle, a tassel, a comb, sleeves, gloves, a ring, a powder box, little dishes, or any small object useful for the toilet or serving to remind of the lover, if it be certain that, in receiving the token, the lady is without touch of avarice."
¹⁹
The grants made by the queen in this period to a local merchant prince suggest that Eleanor herself invested heavily in the goods mentioned by the chronicler.

While the ladies, well accoutered, sit above upon the dais, the sterner portion of society purged, according to the code, from the odors of the kennels and the highway and free for a time from spurs and falcons, range themselves about the stone benches that line the walls, stirring the fragrant rushes with neatly pointed shoe. There are doubtless preludes of music luring the last reluctant knight from the gaming table,
tensons
or
pastourelles
, the plucking of rotes, the "voicing of a fair song and sweet," perhaps even some of the more complicated musical harmonies so ill-received by the clerical critics in London; a Breton
lai
adding an episode to Arthurian romance, or a chapter in the tale of "sad man" Tristram, bringing a gush of tears from the tender audience clustered about the queen and the Countess of Champagne.

After the romance of the evening in the queen's court, the jury comes to attention upon petition of a young knight in the hall. He bespeaks the judgment of the queen and her ladies upon a point of conduct, through an advocate, of course, so he may remain anonymous. A certain knight, the advocate deposes, has sworn to his lady, as the hard condition of obtaining her love, that he will upon no provocation boast of her merits in company. But one day he overhears detractors heaping his mistress with calumnies. Forgetting his vow in the heat of his passion, he warms to eloquence in defense of his lady. This coming to her ears, she repudiates her champion. Does the lover, who admits he has broken his pledge to his mistress, deserve in this instance to be driven from her presence?

The Countess of Champagne, subduing suggestions from the floor and the buzz of conference upon the dais, renders the judgment of the areopagus. The lady in the case, anonymous of course, is at fault, declares the Countess Mane. She has laid upon her lover a vow too impossibly difficult. The lover has been remiss, no doubt, in breaking his vow to his mistress, no matter what cruel hardship it involves; but he deserves leniency for the merit of his ardor and his constancy. The jury recommends that the stern lady reinstate the plaintiff. The court takes down the judgment. It constitutes a precedent. Does anyone guess the identity of the young pair whose estrangement is thus delicately knit up by the countess? As a bit of suspense it is delicious. As a theme for talk, how loosening to the tongue.

A disappointed petitioner brings forward a case, through an advocate, involving the question whether love survives marriage. The countess, applying her mind to the code, which says that marriage is no proper obstacle to lovers
(Causa coniugii ab amore non est excusatio recta)
and after grave deliberation with her ladies, creates a sensation in the court by expressing doubt whether love in the ideal sense can exist between spouses.
²³
This is so arresting a proposition that the observations of the countess are referred to the queen for corroboration, and all wait upon the opinion of this deeply experienced judge. The queen with dignity affirms that she cannot gainsay the Countess of Champagne, though she finds it admirable that a wife should find love and marriage consonant. Eleanor, Queen of France and then of England, had learned at fifty two that, as another medieval lady put it, "Mortal love is but the licking of honey from thorns."