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Updated: May 5, 2025
They furnished, also, the romances of chivalry for the English Court, and have had an effect on English poetry that can be seen even in the present day. Geoffrey Chaucer in the fourteenth century borrowed freely from French, Latin and Italian works. The comic Fabliaux and the allegorical poetry of the Trouveres and Troubadours furnished him with many of his incidents and characters.
In the first page of his book he speaks of humor as "a branch" of satire; in the second he identifies French satire as the "esprit gaulois;" in the third he tells us that "the French type for satire and humor has preserved one uniform character from generation to generation;" and in his last page he claims superiority for the French over the English humorists, on the ground that "Rabelais has a finer wit than Swift," that "we have no political satire so good as the Satyre Mènipée," "no English humor comparable for a moment with that of the fabliaux," "no letter-writer like Voiture," "no teller of tales like La Fontaine," and "no chansonnier like Béranger."
His most celebrated work is the Decameron, the idea of which is taken from an old Hindu romance which was translated into Latin in the twelfth century. Most of these tales have also been found in the ancient French fabliaux, and while Boccaccio cannot be said to have really invented them, he did clothe them anew, and his tales in their turn have been translated into all the European languages.
I have no personal objection to the marquis; he has never been in any great scandals. He is Norman, and has estates in Normandy, Dauphiny, Touraine; he is hospitable, luxurious. Renee will have a fine hotel in Paris. But I am eccentric: I have read in our old Fabliaux of December and May. Say the marquis is November, say October; he is still some distance removed from the plump Spring month.
Pagan lords have lived there, one of whom gave as a dower to his daughter the strips of land in Borysthenes called the "race-courses of Achilles." The Duke de Guyenne, in the fabliaux, passes through Rheims on his way to besiege Babylon; Babylon, moreover, which is very worthy of Rheims, is the capital of the Admiral Gaudissius.
The mischief done by asceticism was the warping of the moral nature of men, not of their æsthetic feelings; it had no influence upon the vast numbers, the men and women who relished the profane and obscene fleshliness and buffoonery of stage plays and fabliaux, and those who favoured the delicate and exquisite immoralities of Courtly poetry.
The Arabian tales, which had found their way into France, were also turned into verse, while the anecdotes that were picked up in the castles and towns of France, furnished other material for the fabliaux. These tales were the common property of the country at large, and are the source from which Boccaccio, La Fontaine, and others drew their inspiration.
Other chivalric poetry of this epoch had to do with Godfrey of Bouillon, the Crusades, and old French tales and fabliaux which were brought into Europe by the oral narratives of the Crusaders. The Northern mythology always abounded with mountain spirits, mermaids, giants, dwarfs, dragons, elves and mandrakes.
When LE GRAND D'AUSSY, whose "Fabliaux" are so well known, adopted, in the warmth of antiquarian imagination, the plan suggested by the Marquis de Paulmy, first sketched in the Mélanges tirés d'une grande Bibliothèque, of a picture of the domestic life of the French people from their earliest periods, the subject broke upon him like a vision; it had novelty, amusement, and curiosity: "le sujet m'en parut neuf, riche et piquant."
Eveline, though well acquainted with the Saxon language, soon left off listening to the singer, to reflect for a moment on the gay fabliaux and imaginative lais of the Norman minstrels, and then to anticipate, with anxious apprehension, what nature of visitation she might be exposed to in the mysterious chamber in which she was doomed to pass the night. The hour of parting at length approached.
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