by Will Durant
The style offended patriots and purists by wedding Gothic towers to Renaissance palaces, and by replacing Flamboyant decoration with classical forms and details. The walls, the cylindrical towers, the high, sloping roofs, the machicolated battlements, the occasional moats, were still medieval, recalling the time when a man’s home had to be his castle and his fort; but the new spirit brought the dwelling out of its massive martial shell, broadened the windows in rectilinear line to let in the sun, beautified them with frames of carved stone, adorned the interior with classical pilasters, moldings, medallions, statues, arabesques, and reliefs, and surrounded the building with gardens, fountains, flowers, and, usually, a hunting wood or a smiling plain. In these amazing homes of luxury, darkness gave place to light, medieval fear and gloom to Renaissance confidence, audacity, and joy. The love of life became an architectural style.
We should credit this first age of the châteaux unduly if we assigned to it either their origin or their full development. Many of them had pre-existed as castles, and were merely modified; the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries perfected the form to an aristocratic elegance, the eighteenth changed the mood and replaced the gay lyric of the châteaux with the grandiose epic of Versailles. Chinon’s castle-chateau was already old when Charles VII received Joan there (1429), and Loches had had a long history as a royal residence and jail when Lodovico il Moro came there as a prisoner (1504) after Louis XII’s second capture of Milan. About 1460 Jean Bourré, state minister to Louis XI, restored the thirteenth-century castle of Langeais into a form essentially medieval—though it is still one of the best preserved of the châteaux. At Châumont, toward 1473, Charles d’Amboise built another chateau in the medieval manner; and at Gaillon his brother the Cardinal raised an immense castle-château (1497–1510), which the Revolution incontinently destroyed. Dunois, noble “bastard of Orléans,” restored the chateau of Châteaudun (1464), and the Cardinal of Orléans-Longueville gave it a new wing in the Gothic-Renaissance compromise. The chateau of Blois still contains thirteenth-century portions; Louis XII built for it an east wing in a harmonious union of brick and stone, of Gothic portal and Renaissance windows; but its supreme glory awaited Francis L
Gothic sculpture made its exit with infinite grace in the exquisitely carved decoration of the tombs and retable in the church at Brou, where the figure of the Sibyl Agrippa is as fair a form as any at Chartres or Reims. But meanwhile Italian artists were remolding French sculpture to Renaissance independence, symmetry, and grace. Intercourse between France and Italy was growing through the visits of ecclesiastics, diplomats, merchants, and travelers; imported Italian objects of art, especially small bronzes, served as envoys of Renaissance and classical forms and taste. With Charles VIII and Georges and Charles d’Amboise the movement became an impetuous stream. It was Italian artists who founded the Italianizing “School of Amboise” at the country capital of the kings. The tombs of French Royalty in the church of St. Denis are a monumental record of the transition from the somber dignity of Gothic sculpture to the smooth elegance and joyous decoration of Renaissance design, proclaiming glory and celebrating beauty even in the triumph of death.
The transition was personified in Michel Colombe. Born about 1431, he was already described in 1467 as “the supreme sculptor of the French realm,” long before the French invasion and absorption of Italy. Gallic sculpture had heretofore been nearly all in stone; Colombe imported Genoese marble, and carved it into figures still stern and stiff with Gothic intensity, but set in frames exuberant with classic ornament. For the château of Gaillon he cut a spacious high relief of St. George and the Dragon—a, lifeless knight on a spirited horse, all enclosed within columns, moldings, and coping of Renaissance design. In The Virgin of the Pillar, carved in stone for the church of St. Galmier, Colombe achieved the full delicacy of the Italian style in the modesty and tenderness of the features, the smooth lines of the falling hair. And perhaps it was Colombe who, in old age, chiseled the Easter Sepulcher (1496) in the priory church at Solesmes.*
In painting, France felt the influence of the Netherlands as well as that of Italy. Nicolas Froment began with an almost Dutch realism in The Resurrection of Lazarus. But in 1476 he moved from Avignon to Aix-en-Provence, and painted for René of Anjou a triptych, The Burning Bush, whose central panel, showing the Virgin enthroned, has Italian qualities in its background, its brunette Madonna, its majestic Moses, its charming angel, its alert hound and trustful sheep; herç Italy has won a complete victory. A like evolution of style marked the work of the “Master of Moulins”—probably Jean Perréal. He went to Italy with Charles VIII and again with Louis XII; he returned with half the arts of the Renaissance in his repertoire—miniaturist, muralist, portraitist, sculptor, and architect. At Nantes he designed—and Colombe carved—the imposing tomb of Duke Francis II of Brittany; and at Moulins he commemorated his patrons, Anne and Pierre of Beaujeu, with the handsome portraits that now hang in the Louvre.
The minor arts did not maintain their late-medieval excellence. Whereas the Flemish illuminators had long since passed to secular subjects and earthly scenes, the miniatures of Jean Bourdichon in Les beures d’Anne de Bretagne (1508) represented a return to medieval simplicity and piety—the lovely legends of the Virgin and her Child, the tragedy of Golgotha, the triumph of resurrection, the stories of the saints; the drawing poor, the backgrounds classical, the color rich and pure, all in a serene atmosphere of feminine refinement and sentiment.19 As if in contrast, the stained glass of the time adopted a Flemish naturalism at first sight unsuited to windows bringing transfigured light to cathedral floors; yet the glass painted in this period for Auch, Rouen, and Beauvais catches some of the thirteenth-century glory. Limoges now rekindled its furnaces, which had been cold for a century, and rivaled Italy and Islam in painting vessels with translucent enamels. The wood carvers had not lost their skill; Ruskin thought the choir stalls of Amiens Cathedral the best in France.20 Colorful tapestries from the end of the fifteenth century caught the attention of George Sand in the Chateau de Brissac (1847), and became a treasure of the Musée de Cluny at Paris; and the Musée des Gobelins has a stirring tapestry (c. 1500) of musicians playing in a garden of fleurs-de-lis.
All in all, excepting the châteaux, the fifteenth century was a fallow age in French art. The soil was plowed by soldiers’ feet and fertilized with wartime blood; but only toward the end of the period would men have the means and leisure to sow the seeds of the harvest that Francis I would reap. The self-portrait of Fouquet betrays an age of humiliation and distress; the miniatures of his pupil Bourdichon reflect the familial peace of Louis XII’s second marriage, and the smiling ease of a recovered land. The worst was over for France; the best was about to come.
IV. FRANÇOIS VILLON: 1431-80
Nevertheless this century of strife and chaos produced a major poet and a major historian. As one result of a national economy and a centralized government, French literature now used the language of Paris, whether the author came from Brittany, Burgundy, or Provence. As if to prove that French had matured, Philippe de Comines chose it, not Latin, for his Mémoires. He took his surname from Comines in Flanders, where he was born. He came of favored lineage, for Duke Philip V was his godfather, he was brought up at the Burgundian court, and at seventeen (1464) he was on the staff of the Count of Charolais. When the Count, become Charles the Bold, captured Louis XI at Péronne, Comines resented the behavior of the Duke, perhaps foresaw his fall, and wisely passed to the service of the King. Louis made him chamberlain and enriched him with estates, and Charles VIII sent him on important diplomatic missions. Meanwhile Comines composed two classics of historical literature: Mémoires, cronique, et hystoire du roy Louis onziesme, and Cronique du roi Charles huytiesme—narratives written in clear and simple French by a man who knew the world and had shared in the events that he described.
These books instance the extraordinary wealth of French literature in memoirs. They have their faults: they spend themselves mostly upon
war; they are not as fresh and vivid as Froissart or Villehardouin or Joinville: they make too many curtsies to God while admiring the unscrupulous statecraft of Louis XI; and more often than not the discursive digressions are pits of platitudes. None the less Comines is the first modern philosophical historian: he seeks the relations of cause and effect, analyzes character, motives, and pretenses, judges conduct objectively, and studies events and original documents to illuminate the nature of man and the state. In these regards he anticipates Machiavelli and Guicciardini, and in his pessimistic estimate of mankind:
Neither natural reason, nor our own knowledge, nor love of our neighbor, nor anything else is always sufficient to restrain us from doing violence to one another, or to withhold us from retaining what we already have, or to deter us from usurping the possessions of others by all possible means.... Wicked men grow the worse for their knowledge, but the good improve extremely.21
Like Machiavelli, he hopes that his book will teach princes a trick or two:
Perhaps inferior persons will not give themselves the trouble to read these memoirs, but princes... may do it, and find some information to reward their pains.... For though neither enemies nor princes are always alike, yet, their affairs being often the same, it is not altogether unprofitable to be informed of what is past.... . One of the greatest means to make a man wise is to have studied histories .... and to have learned to frame and proportion our counsels and undertakings according to the model and example of our predecessors. For our life is but of short duration, and insufficient to give us experience of so many things.22
The Emperor Charles V, the wisest Christian ruler of his age, agreed with Comines, and called the Mémoires his breviary.
The general public preferred romances, farces, and satires. In 1508 appeared the French version of Amadis de Gaule. A dozen companies of players continued to present mistères, moralities, farces, and soties—follies that made fun of everybody, including priests and kings. Pierre Gringore was a master of this form, writing and acting soties with verve and success through a generation. The most enduring farce in French literature, Maistre Pierre Pathelin, was first played about 1464, and as late as 1872.23 Pathelin is a poor lawyer starving for cases. He persuades a draper to sell him six ells of cloth, and invites him to dinner that evening to receive payment. When the draper comes, Pathelin is in bed raving with pretended fever, and professes to know nothing about the ells or the dinner. The draper leaves in disgust, meets the shepherd of his flock, accuses him of secretly disposing of several sheep, and hails him before a judge. The shepherd seeks a cheap lawyer and finds Pathelin, who coaches him to play the idiot and to answer all questions with the baa (French bé) of the sheep. The judge, baffled with baas, and confused by the draper’s mingling of complaints against both the shepherd and the lawyer, gives France a famous phrase by begging all parties, Revenons à ces moutons—“Let us come back to these sheep”;24 and finally, in despair of getting any logic out of the fracas, dismisses the case. The triumphant Pathelin asks for his fee, but the shepherd only answers “Baa,” and the clever deceiver is rooked by the simpleton. The story is unfolded with all the spirit of a Gallic altercation. Rabelais may have remembered Pathelin when he conceived Panurge, and Molière reincarnated Gringore and the unknown author of this play.
The one unforgettable figure in the French literature of the fifteenth century is François Villon. He lied, stole, cheated, fornicated, and killed like the kings and nobles of his time, but with more rhyme and reason. He was so poor that he could not call even his name his own. Born François de Montcorbier (1431), reared in plague and misery in Paris, and adopted by a kindly priest, Guillaume de Villon, he took his foster-father’s name, disgraced it, and gave it immortality. Guillaume put up with the lad’s pranks and truancies, financed his studies at the university, and took proud comfort when François received the degree of master of arts (1452). For three years thereafter Guillaume provided him with bed and board in the cloisters of St. Benoît, waiting for the master to mature.
It must have saddened the hearts of Guillaume and François’ mother to see him turning from piety to poetry, from theology to burglary. Paris was rich in rakes, trulls, quacks, sneak thieves, beggars, bullies, procurers, and drunks, and the reckless youth made friends in almost every category; for a while he served as a pimp.25 Perhaps he had received too much religion, and found a cloister cloying; it is especially difficult for a clergyman’s son to enjoy the Ten Commandments. On June 5, 1455, a priest, Philippe Chermoye, started a quarrel with him (says François), and cut his lip with a knife, whereupon Villon gashed him so deeply in the groin that within the week Philippe was dead. A hero among his comrades, an outlaw hunted by the police, the poet fled from Paris and for almost a year hid in the countryside.
He returned “shrunk and wan,” sharp of features and dry of skin, keeping an eye out for the gendarmes, picking a lock or a pocket now and then, and hungering for food and love. He became enamored of a bourgeois lass, who bore with him till she could find a better cavalier, who beat him; he loved her the more, but commemorated her later as “ma damoyselle au nez tortu”—“my lady of the twisted nose.” About this time (1456) he composed Le petit testament, the shorter of his poetic wills; for he had many debts and injuries to repay, and could never tell when he might close his life with a noose. He scolds his love for the parsimony of her flesh, sends his hose to Robert Vallée, to “clothe his mistress more decently,” and bequeaths to Pernet Marchand “three sheaves of straw or hay, upon the naked floor to lay, and so the amorous game to play.” He devises to his barber “the ends and clippings of my hair”; and leaves his heart, “piteous, pale, and numb and dead,” to her who had “so dourly banished me her sight.” 26
After disposing of all this wealth he seems to have lacked bread. On Christmas Eve, 1456, he joined three others in robbing the College of Navarre of some 500 crowns ($12,500?). Buttressed with his share, François resumed his stay in the country. For a year he disappears from historic sight; then, in the winter of 1457, we find him among the poets entertained at Blois by Charles of Orléans. Villon took part in a poetic tournament there, and must have pleased, for Charles kept him through some weeks as his guest, and replenished the youth’s leaking purse. Then some prank or quarrel cooled their friendship, and François returned to the road, versifying an apology. He wandered south to Bourges, exchanged a poem for a present with Duke John II of Bourbon, and rambled as far as Roussillon. We picture him, from his poetry, as living on gifts and loans, on fruit and nuts and hens plucked from roadside farms, talking with peasant girls and tavern tarts, singing or whistling on the highways, dodging the police in the towns. Again we lose track of him; then, suddenly, he reappears, condemned to death in a prison at Orléans (1460).
We do not know what brought him to that pass; we know only that in July of that year Marie of Orléans, daughter of the poet duke, made a formal entry into the city, and that Charles celebrated the occasion with a general amnesty to prisoners. Villon emerged from death to life in an ecstasy of joy. Soon hungry, he stole again, was caught, and—his previous escapades being held against him—was thrown into a dark and dripping dungeon in the village of Meung-sur-Loire, near Orléans. Four months he lived there with rats and toads, biting his scarred lip, and vowing vengeance on a world that punished thieves and let poets starve. But not all the world was unkind. Louis XI, passing through Orléans, declared another amnesty, and Villon, told that he was free, danced a fandango on his prison straw. He rushed back to Paris or its vicinity; and now, old and bald and penniless at thirty, he wrote his greatest poems, which he called simply Les Lais (The Lays); posterity, finding so many of them cast again into the form of ironic bequests, termed them Le grand testament (1461–62).
He leaves his spectacles to the hospital for blind paupers, so that they may, if they can, distinguish the good from the bad, the lowly from the great, among the skeletons in the charnel house of the Innocents. So soon in life obsessed with death, he m
ourns the mortality of beauty, and sings a Ballade des dames du temps jadis—of yesterday’s belles:
Dictes moy ou, n’en quel pays,
Est Flora la belle Romaine,
Archipiades, ne Thaïs,
Qui jut sa cousine germaine,
Echo parlant quant bruyt on maire,
Dessus rivière ou sus estan,
Que beaulté of trop plus qu’humaine.
Mais ou sont les neiges d’autan?*
He considers it nature’s unforgivable sin to ravish us with loveliness and then dissolve it in our arms. His bitterest poem is Les regrets de la belle heaulmière—the lament of the fair helm-maker:
Where is that clear and crystal brow?
Those eyebrows arched, and golden hair?
And those bright eyes, where are they now,
Wherewith the wisest ravished were?
The little nose so straight and fair,
The tiny, tender, perfect ear;
Where is the dimpled chin, and where
The pouting lips so red and clear? 28
The description proceeds from lure to lure, omitting none; and then, in plaintive litany, each charm decays:
The breasts all shriveled up and gone,
The haunches, like the paps, withdrawn,
The thighs no longer like to thighs,
Withered and mottled all like brawn—
which here, alas, means sausages (saulcisses).
And so, no longer loving love or life, Villon bequeaths himself to the dust:
Item, my body I ordain
Unto the earth, our grandmother;
Thereof the worms will have small gain;
Hunger hath worn it many a year.
