La Sale

Petit Jehan de Saintré gives, at the point when the traditions of chivalry were fast disappearing, an account of the education of an ideal knight and rules for his conduct under many different circumstances. When Petit Jehan, aged thirteen, is persuaded by the Dame des Belles-Cousines to accept her as his lady, she gives him systematic instruction in religion, courtesy, chivalry and the arts of success. She materially advances his career until Saintré becomes an accomplished knight, the fame of whose prowess spreads throughout Europe. This section of the romance—apparently didactic in intention—fits in with the author’s other works of edification. But in the second part this virtuous lady falls a victim to a vulgar intrigue with Damp Abbé. One of La Sale’s commentators, M. Joseph Nève, ingeniously maintains that the last section is simply to show how the hero, after passing through the other grades of education, learns at last by experience to arm himself against coquetry. The book may, however, be fairly regarded as satirizing the whole theory of “courteous” love, by the simple method of fastening a repulsive conclusion on an ideal case. The contention that the fabliau-like ending of a romance begun in idyllic fashion was due to the corrupt influences of the Dauphin’s exiled court, is inadmissible, for the last page was written when the prince arrived in Brabant in 1456. That it is an anti-clerical satire seems unlikely. The profession of the seducer is not necessarily chosen from that point of view. The language of the book is not disfigured by coarseness of any kind, but, if the brutal ending was the expression of the writer’s real views, there is little difficulty in accepting him as the author of the Quinze Joyes de mariage and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles.—Both these are masterpieces in their way and exhibit a much greater dramatic power and grasp of dialogue than does Petit Jehan. Some light is thrown on the romance by the circumstances of the duc de Calabre, to whom it was dedicated. His wife, Marie de Bourbon, was one of the “Belles-Cousines” who contended for the favour of Jacques or Jacquet de Lalaing in the Livre des faits de Jacques Lalaing which forms the chief source of the early exploits of Petit Jehan.

The incongruities of La Sale’s aims appear in his method of construction. The hero is not imaginary. Jehan de Saintré flourished in the Hundred Years’ War, was taken prisoner after Poitiers, with the elder Boucicaut, and was employed in negotiating the treaty of Bretigny. Froissart mentioned him as “le meilleur et le plus vaillant chevalier de France.” His exploits as related in the romance are, however, founded on those of Jacques de Lalaing (c. 1422-1453), who was brought up at the Burgundian court, and became such a famous knight that he excited the rivalry of the “Belles-Cousines,” Marie de Bourbon and Marie de Clèves, duchesse d’Orléans. Lalaing’s exploits are related by more than one chronicler, but M. Gustave Raynaud thinks that the Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, published among the works of Georges Chastelain, to which textual parallels may be found in Petit Jehan, should also be attributed to La Sale, who in that case undertook two accounts of the same hero, one historical and the other fictitious. To complicate matters, he drew, for the later exploits of Petit Jehan, on the Livres des faits de Jean Boucicaut, which gives the history of the younger Boucicaut. The atmosphere of the book is not the rough realities of the English wars in which the real Saintré figured but that of the courts to which La Sale was accustomed.

The title of Les Quinze Joyes de mariage is, with a profanity characteristic of the time, borrowed from a popular litany, Les Quinze Joies de Notre Dame, and each chapter terminates with a liturgical refrain voicing the miseries of marriage. Evidence in favour of La Sale’s authorship is brought forward by M. E. Gossart (Bibliophile belge, 1871, pp. 83-7), who quotes from his didactic treatise of La Salle a passage paraphrased from St Jerome’s treatise against Jovinian which contains the chief elements of the satire. Gaston Paris (Revue de Paris, Dec. 1897) expressed an opinion that to find anything like the malicious penetration by which La Sale divines the most intimate details of married life, and the painful exactness of the description, it is necessary to travel as far as Balzac. The theme itself was common enough in the middle ages in France, but the dialogue of the Quinze Joyes is unusually natural and pregnant. Each of the fifteen vignettes is perfect in its kind. There is no redundance. The diffuseness of romance is replaced by the methods of the writers of the fabliaux.

In the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles the Italian novella is naturalized in France. The book is modelled on the Decameron of Boccaccio, and owes something to the Latin Facetiae of the contemporary scholar Poggio; but the stories are rarely borrowed, and in cases where the Nouvelles have Italian parallels they appear to be independent variants. In most cases the general immorality of the conception is matched by the grossness of the details, but the ninety-eighth story narrates what appears to be a genuine tragedy, and is of an entirely different nature from the other contes. It is another version of the story of Floridam et Elvide already mentioned.

Not content with allowing these achievements to La Sale, some critics have proposed to ascribe to him also the farce of Maître Pathelin.

The best editions of La Sale’s undoubted and reputed works are:—Petit Jehan de Saintré by J. M. Guichard (1843); Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles by Thomas Wright (Bibl. elzévérienne, 1858); Les Quinze Joyes de mariage by P. Jannet (Bibl. elzév., 1857). La Salade was printed more than once during the 16th century. La Salle was never printed. For its contents see E. Gossart in the Bibliophile belge (1871, pp. 77 et seq.). See also the authorities quoted above, and Joseph Nève, Antoine de la Salle, sa vie et ses ouvrages ... suivi du Réconfort de Madame de Fresne ... et de fragments et documents inédits (1903), who argues for the rejection of Les Quinze Joyes and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles from La Sale’s works; Pietro Toldo, Contributo allo studio della novella francese del XV e XVI secolo (1895), and a review of it by Gaston Paris in the Journal des Savants (May 1895); L. Stern, “Versuch über Antoine de la Salle,” in Archiv für das Studium der neueren Sprachen, vol. xlvi.; and G. Raynaud, “Un Nouveau Manuscrit du Petit Jehan de Saintré,” in Romania, vol. xxxi.