Domnei: A Comedy of Woman-Worship

by James Branch Cabell

  "Ah, but I did it to save Perion," she wisely said.

  "Unfathomable liar," he returned, "you boldly and unscrupulously boughtof life the thing which you most earnestly desired. Nor Solomon norPeriander has won more. And thus I saw that which no other man hasseen. I saw the shrewd and dauntless soul of Melicent. And so I lovedyou, and I laid my plan--"

  She said, "You do not know of love--"

  "Yet I have builded him a temple," the Jew considered. He continued,with that old abhorrent acquiescence, "Now, a temple is admirable, butit is not builded until many labourers have dug and toiled waist-deepin dirt. Here, too, such spatterment seemed necessary. So I played, infine, I played a cunning music. The pride of Demetrios, the jealousy ofCallistion, and the greed of Orestes--these were as so many stops ofthat flute on which I played a cunning deadly music. Who forbids it?"

  She motioned him, "Go on." Now she was not afraid.

  "Come then to the last note of my music! You offer to bargain, saying,_Save Perion and have my body as your chattel_. I answer _Click_! Theturning of a key solves all. Accordingly I have betrayed the castle ofNacumera, I have this night admitted Perion and his broad-shoulderedmen. They are killing Orestes yonder in the Court of Stars even while Italk with you." Ahasuerus laughed noiselessly. "Such vanity does notbecome a Jew, but I needs must do the thing with some magnificence.Therefore I do not give Sire Perion only his life. I give him alsovictory and much throat-cutting and an impregnable rich castle. Have Inot paid the price, fair Melicent? Have I not won God's masterpiecethrough a small wire, a purse, and a big key?"

  She answered, "You have paid."

  He said:

  "You will hold to your bargain? Ah, you have but to cry aloud, and youare rid of me. For this is Perion's castle."

  She said, "Christ help me! You have paid my price."

  Now the Jew raised his two hands in very horrible mirth. Said he:

  "Oh, I am almost tempted to praise Javeh, who created the invinciblesoul of Melicent. For you have conquered: you have gained, as always,and at whatever price, exactly that which you most desired, and you donot greatly care about anything else. So, because of a word said youwould arise and follow me on my dark ways if I commanded it. You willnot weight the dice, not even at this pinch, when it would be so easy!For Perion is safe; and nothing matters in comparison with that, andyou will not break faith, not even with me. You are inexplicable, youare stupid, and you are resistless. Again I see my Melicent, who is notjust a pair of purple eyes and so much lovely flesh."

  His face was as she had not ever known it now, and very tender.Ahasuerus said:

  "My way to victory is plain enough. And yet there is an obstacle. Formy fancy is taken by the soul of Melicent, and not by that handsomepiece of flesh which all men--even Perion, madame!--have loved so longwith remarkable infatuation. Accordingly I had not ever designed thatthe edifice on which I laboured should be the stable of my lusts.Accordingly I played my cunning music--and accordingly I give youPerion. I that am Ahasuerus win for you all which righteousness andhonour could not win. At the last it is I who give you Perion, and itis I who bring you to his embrace. He must still be about hismagnanimous butchery, I think, in the Court of Stars."

  Ahasuerus knelt, kissing her hand.

  "Fair Melicent, such abominable persons as Demetrios and I are fatallyalike. We may deny, deride, deplore, or even hate, the sanctity of anynoble lady accordingly as we elect; but there is for us no possibleescape from worshipping it. Your wind-fed Ferions, who will not everacknowledge what sort of world we live in, are less quick to recognisethe soul of Melicent. Such is our sorry consolation. Oh, you do notbelieve me yet. You will believe in the oncoming years. Meanwhile, Oall-enduring and all-conquering! go now to your last labour; and--ifmy Brother dare concede as much--do you now conquer Perion."

  Then he vanished. She never saw him any more.

  She lifted the Jew's lamp. She bore it through the Women's Garden,wherein were many discomfortable shadows and no living being. She cameto its outer entrance. Men were fighting there. She skirted a hideousconflict, and descended the Queen's Stairway, which led (as you haveheard) toward the balcony about the Court of Stars. She found thisbalcony vacant.

  Below her men were fighting. To the farther end of the court Orestessprawled upon the red and yellow slabs--which now for the most partwere red--and above him towered Perion of the Forest. The conqueror hadpaused to cleanse his sword upon the same divan Demetrios had occupiedwhen Melicent first saw the proconsul; and as Perion turned, in the actof sheathing his sword, he perceived the dear familiar denizen of allhis dreams. A tiny lamp glowed in her hand quite steadily.

  "O Melicent," said Perion, with a great voice, "my task is done. Comenow to me."

  She instantly obeyed whose only joy was to please Perion. Descendingthe enclosed stairway, she thought how like its gloom was to thetemporal unhappiness she had passed through in serving Perion.

  He stood a dripping statue, for he had fought horribly. She came tohim, picking her way among the slain. He trembled who was fresh fromslaying. A flood of torchlight surged and swirled about them, andwithin a stone's cast Perion's men were despatching the wounded.

  These two stood face to face and did not speak at all.

  I think that he knew disappointment first. He looked to find the girlwhom he had left on Fomor Beach.

  He found a woman, the possessor still of a compelling beauty. Oh, yes,past doubt: but this woman was a stranger to him, as he now knew withan odd sense of sickness. Thus, then, had ended the quest of Melicent.Their love had flouted Time and Fate. These had revenged thisinsolence, it seemed to Perion, by an ironical conversion of each rebelinto another person. For this was not the girl whom Perion had loved infar red-roofed Poictesme; this was not the girl for whom Perion hadfought ten minutes since: and he--as Perion for the first timeperceived--was not and never could be any more the Perion that girl hadbidden return to her. It were as easy to evoke the Perion who had lovedMelusine....

  Then Perion perceived that love may be a power so august as to bedwarfconsideration of the man and woman whom it sways. He saw that this isreasonable. I cannot justify this knowledge. I cannot even tell youjust what great secret it was of which Perion became aware. Many menhave seen the sunrise, but the serenity and awe and sweetness of thisdaily miracle, the huge assurance which it emanates that the beholderis both impotent and greatly beloved, is not entirely an affair of thesky's tincture. And thus it was with Perion. He knew what he could notexplain. He knew such joy and terror as none has ever worded. A curtainhad lifted briefly; and the familiar world which Perion knew, for thebrief instant, had appeared to be a painting upon that curtain.

  Now, dazzled, he saw Melicent for the first time....

  I think he saw the lines already forming in her face, and knew that,but for him, this woman, naked now of gear and friends, had beento-night a queen among her own acclaiming people. I think he worshippedwhere he did not dare to love, as every man cannot but do when starklyfronted by the divine and stupendous unreason of a woman's choice,among so many other men, of him. And yet, I think that Perion recalledwhat Ayrart de Montors had said of women and their love, so long ago:--"They are more wise than we; and always they make us better byindomitably believing we are better than in reality a man can ever be."

  I think that Perion knew, now, de Montors had been in the right. Thepity and mystery and beauty of that world wherein High God had--scornfully?--placed a smug Perion, seemed to the Comte de la Foret, Ithink, unbearable. I think a new and finer love smote Perion as a swordstrikes.

  I think he did not speak because there was no scope for words. I knowthat he knelt (incurious for once of victory) before this stranger whowas not the Melicent whom he had sought so long, and that allconsideration of a lost young Melicent departed from him, as mistsleave our world when the sun rises.

  I think that this was her high hour of triumph.

  CAETERA DESUNT

  THE AFTERWORD

  _These live
s made out of loves that long since wereLives wrought as ours of earth and burning air,Was such not theirs, the twain I take, and giveOut of my life to make their dead life liveSome days of mine, and blow my living breathBetween dead lips forgotten even of death?So many and many of old have given my twainLove and live song and honey-hearted pain._

  Thus, rather suddenly, ends our knowledge of the love-business betweenPerion and Melicent. For at this point, as abruptly as it began, theone existing chronicle of their adventures makes conclusion, like a bitof interrupted music, and thereby affords conjecture no inconsiderablebounds wherein to exercise itself. Yet, in view of the fact thatdeductions as to what befell these lovers afterward can at best resultin free-handed theorising, it seems more profitable in this place tospeak very briefly of the fragmentary _Roman de Lusignan_, since thehistory of Melicent and Perion as set forth in this book makes nopretensions to be more than a rendering into English of thismanuscript, with slight additions from the earliest known printedversion of 1546.

  2

  M. Verville, in his monograph on Nicolas de

  Caen,[1: Paul Verville, _Notice sur la vie de Nicolas de Caen_, p. 112(Rouen, 1911)] considers it probable that the _Roman de Lusignan_ wasprinted in Bruges by Colard Mansion at about the same time Mansionpublished the _Dizain des Reines_. This is possible; but until a copyof the book is discovered, our sole authority for the romance mustcontinue to be the fragmentary MS. No. 503 in the Allonbian Collection.

  Among the innumerable manuscripts in the British Museum there isperhaps none which opens a wider field for guesswork. In its entiretythe _Roman de Lusignan_ was, if appearances are to be trusted, aleisured and ambitious handling of the Melusina legend; but in thepreserved portion Melusina figures hardly at all. We have merely thefinal chapters of what would seem to have been the first half, orperhaps the first third, of the complete narrative; so that thismanuscript account of Melusina's beguilements breaks off,fantastically, at a period by many years anterior to a date which thosebetter known versions of Jean d'Arras and Thuring von Ringoltingenselect as the only appropriate starting-point.

  By means of a few elisions, however, the episodic story of Melicentand of the men who loved Melicent has been disembedded from whatsurvives of the main narrative. This episode may reasonably beconsidered as complete in itself, in spite of its precipitouscommencement; we are not told anything very definite concerningPerion's earlier relations with Melusina, it is true, but then they arehardly of any especial importance. And speculations as to the tale'sperplexing chronology, or as to the curious treatment of the Ahasueruslegend, wherein Nicolas so strikingly differs from his precursors,Matthew Paris and Philippe Mouskes, or as to the probable course oflatter incidents in the romance (which must almost inevitably havereached its climax in the foundation of the house of Lusignan byPerion's son Raymondin and Melusina) are more profitably left to M.Verville's ingenuity.

  3

  One feature, though, of this romance demands particular comment. Thehappenings of the Melicent-episode pivot remarkably upon _domnei_--uponchivalric love, upon the _Frowendienst_ of the minnesingers, or upon"woman-worship," as we might bunglingly translate a word for which inEnglish there is no precisely equivalent synonym. Therefore thisEnglish version of the Melicent-episode has been called _Domnei_, atwhatever price of unintelligibility.

  For there is really no other word or combination of words which seemsquite to sum up, or even indicate this precise attitude toward life._Domnei_ was less a preference for one especial woman than a code ofphilosophy. "The complication of opinions and ideas, of affections andhabits," writes Charles Claude Fauriel,[1: _Histoire de la litteratureprovencale_, p. 330 (Adler's translation, New York, 1860)] "whichprompted the chevalier to devote himself to the service of a lady, andby which he strove to prove to her his love and to merit hers inreturn, was expressed by the single word _domnei_."

  And this, of course, is true enough. Yet _domnei_ was even more than acomplication of opinions and affections and habits: it was also amalady and a religion quite incommunicably blended.

  Thus you will find that Dante--to cite only the most readily accessibleof mediaeval amorists--enlarges as to _domnei_ in both these last-namedaspects impartially. _Domnei_ suspends all his senses save that ofsight, makes him turn pale, causes tremors in his left side, and sendshim to bed "like a little beaten child, in tears"; throughout you havethe manifestations of _domnei_ described in terms befitting thesymptoms of a physical disease: but as concerns the other aspect, Dantenever wearies of reiterating that it is domnei which has turned histhoughts toward God; and with terrible sincerity he beholds in Beatricede'Bardi the highest illumination which Divine Grace may permit tohumankind. "This is no woman; rather it is one of heaven's most radiantangels," he says with terrible sincerity.

  With terrible sincerity, let it be repeated: for the service of domneiwas never, as some would affect to interpret it, a modish and orderedaffectation; the histories of Peire de Maenzac, of Guillaume deCaibestaing, of Geoffrey Rudel, of Ulrich von Liechtenstein, of theMonk of Pucibot, of Pons de Capdueilh, and even of Peire Vidal andGuillaume de Balaun, survive to prove it was a serious thing, a starkand life-disposing reality. En cor gentil domnei per mort no passa, asNicolas himself declares. The service of domnei involved, it in factinvited, anguish; it was a martyrdom whereby the lover was uplifted tosaintship and the lady to little less than, if anything less than,godhead. For it was a canon of domnei, it was the very essence ofdomnei, that the woman one loves is providentially set between herlover's apprehension, and God, as the mobile and vital image andcorporeal reminder of heaven, as a quick symbol of beauty and holiness,of purity and perfection. In her the lover views--embodied, apparent tohuman sense, and even accessible to human enterprise--all qualities ofGod which can be comprehended by merely human faculties. It isprecisely as such an intermediary that Melicent figures toward Perion,and, in a somewhat different degree, toward Ahasuerus--since Ahasuerusis of necessity apart in all things from the run of humanity.

  Yet instances were not lacking in the service of _domnei_ where worshipof the symbol developed into a religion sufficing in itself, and becamecompetitor with worship of what the symbol primarily represented--suchinstances as have their analogues in the legend of Ritter Tannhaeuser,or in Aucassin's resolve in the romance to go down into hell with "hissweet mistress whom he so much loves," or (here perhaps most perfectlyexampled) in Arnaud de Merveil's naive declaration that whateverportion of his heart belongs to God heaven holds in vassalage toAdelaide de Beziers. It is upon this darker and rebellious side of_domnei_, of a religion pathetically dragged dustward by the luxurianceand efflorescence of over-passionate service, that Nicolas has touchedin depicting Demetrios.

  4

  Nicolas de Caen, himself the servitor _par amours_ of Isabella ofBurgundy, has elsewhere written of _domne_i (in his _Le Roi Amaury_) interms such as it may not be entirely out of place to transcribe here.Baalzebub, as you may remember, has been discomfited in his endeavoursto ensnare King Amaury and is withdrawing in disgust.

  "A pest upon this _domnei_!"[1: Quoted with minor alterations fromWatson's version] the fiend growls. "Nay, the match is at an end, and Imay speak in perfect candour now. I swear to you that, given a manclear-eyed enough to see that a woman by ordinary is nourished much ashe is nourished, and is subjected to every bodily infirmity which heendures and frets beneath, I do not often bungle matters. But when afool begins to flounder about the world, dead-drunk with adoration ofan immaculate woman--a monster which, as even the man's own judgmentassures him, does not exist and never will exist--why, he becomes asunmanageable as any other maniac when a frenzy is upon him. For thenthe idiot hungers after a life so high-pitched that his gross facultiesmay not so much as glimpse it; he is so rapt with impossible dreamsthat he becomes oblivious to the nudgings of his most petted vice; andhe abhors his own innate and perfectly natural inclination tocowardice, and filth, and self-deception. He, in fine, affords me andall other rational people no available hand
le; and, in consequence, hevery often flounders beyond the reach of my whisperings. There may beother persons who can inform you why such blatant folly should thus bethe master-word of evil, but for my own part, I confess to ignorance."

  "Nay, that folly, as you term it, and as hell will always term it, isalike the riddle and the masterword of the universe," the old kingreplies....

  And Nicolas whole-heartedly believed that this was true. We do notbelieve this, quite, but it may be that we are none the happier for ourdubiety.

  EXPLICIT

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  I. LES AMANTS DE MELICENT, Traduction moderne, annotee et procedee d'unnotice historique sur Nicolas de Caen, par l'Abbe. * * * A Paris. PourIaques Keruer aux deux Cochetz, Rue S. Iaques, M. D. XLVI. AvecPrivilege du Roy. The somewhat abridged reprint of 1788 was believed tobe the first version printed in French, until the discovery of thisunique volume in 1917.

  II. ARMAGEDDON; or the Great Day of the Lord's Judgement: a Parcenesisto Prince Henry--MELICENT; an heroicke poeme intended, drawne fromFrench bookes, the First Booke, by Sir William Allonby. London. Printedfor Nathaniel Butler, dwelling at the _Pied Bull_, at Saint Austen'sGate. 1626.

  III. PERION UNO MELICENT, zum erstenmale aus dem Franzosischen insDeutsche ubersetzt, von J. H. G. Lowe. Stuttgart und Tuebingen, 1823.

  IV. Los NEGOCIANTES DO DON PERION, publicado por Plancher-Seignot. Riode Janiero, 1827. The translator's name is not given. The preface issigned R. L.