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Updated: May 5, 2025
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.
When Mr. Besant says that "there is no English humor comparable for a moment with that of the fabliaux," we are forced to suppose either that he uses the word "humor" in some unexplained and inexplicable sense, or that he leaves out of the account what would generally be considered the greatest of humorous productions.
Then had come a nearer acquaintance with it, the shudders that chronicles brought, and the intimations of the fabliaux; but still it had been distant, a belonging of the past incompetent of survival. And it was not until within recent years that she learned that it had indeed survived. Even then the tidings that reached her had as much consistency to her mind as the news of cholera in Singapore.
They were the troubadours of the North. They composed romances of chivalry, and Fabliaux, or amusing tales. They sang in a more warlike and virile strain than the poets of the South. Their first romances were written late in the twelfth century. About that time Villehardouin wrote in French a history of the conquest of Constantinople.
The Franklin's Tale and the Reeve's Tale are also based either on stories of Boccaccio or else on French 'Fabliaux, to which Chaucer, as well as Boccaccio, had access. I do not wish to lay too much stress upon Chaucer's direct obligations to Boccaccio, because it is incontestable that the French 'Fabliaux, which supplied them both with subjects, were the common property of the mediæval nations.
It was no longer a disgrace even to a knight if he refused to take the Cross. Rutebeuf, a French minstrel, who flourished about this time , composed a dialogue between a crusader and a non-crusader, which the reader will find translated in "Way's Fabliaux."
And as for the licentiousness of their poetry which has been alleged as proof of their profligacy I can only say, that it is no more licentious than the fabliaux of their French conquerors, while it is far more delicate and refined.
The reign of town poetry, of fabliaux and meistersang, comes later; the poets of the early Middle Ages, trouvères, troubadours, and minnesingers are, with barely one or two exceptions, all knights. And their song comes from the castle.
The Unfortunate Traveller is a sort of compilation or congeries of current fabliaux, novelle, and facetiæ, with the introduction of famous actual persons of the time, from the crowned heads of the period, through Luther and Aretine downwards, to give bait and attraction.
Was the marriage-tie, for instance, really more sacred in France during the fifteenth century than in Italy? The 'fabliaux' and farces would lead us to doubt it, and rather incline us to think that unfaithfulness was equally common, though its tragic consequences were less frequent, because the individual was less developed and his claims were less consciously felt than in Italy.
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