The history and pleasant chronicle of Little Jehan de Saintré, and of the lady of the fair cousins, without being any otherwise named ;

Introduction

AS few things would appear to me to be more discreditable ; or, in the long run, mofe shortsighted, than for any man who has earned to himself some little reputation for taste and judgment, simply to attain some temporary end, deliberately to prostitute, or trifle with the same, I shall very candidly avow to the reader, had the translation of SaintrS to be entered on afresh, it is not by any means a thing certain that I had been the effecter of the same. However if, when undertaken, surprised out of a more wonted wariness "by the unexpected richness of a part, I may have been prevailed upon to look somewhat too good-naturedly on the work as a whole, it is still possible, envisaging it under all the apathy and reaction inevitable to the subsidence of a somewhat heightened enthusiasm, that I may now be allowing myself to think a little too hardly of it. It is, if not with the expectation, at least the hope, that the latter impression may prove to be the more grounded of the two, that it is now submitted to the public.

But few, it may be safely ventured to predict, will come to the last page of this romance with other feelings than those of regret and of surprise : regret, that a man who had shown himself equal to the denouement, should have

a 2

Introduction.

been at all the pains which he was to oblige us with the mystification of the same. ; (though, how well much more was to have been made of his subject, I must confess, I am at a loss to conceive) : surprise, that such as it is, it should never till now have been rendered into the English tongue. In truth, it is a very remarkable work. In some respects it is one of the most 'original productions that I ever remember to have met with. But with very little exaggeration it may be said to be the Waverley, and even more than the Waverley of a comparatively unlettered age. .Or I am much deceived, let which will be the second, with 'it must ever remain the honour of being accounted the first novel, in the conventional and modern acceptation of the term, of which there is any record, originating either in France or in England ; at any rate, the first comic one. This, of course, I do not undertake to assert; I merely state as much to be my impression. A dozen like it might easily be eluding the research of so erratic and capricious a reader as myself. HeVe we have a man, at a time when every forest was the haunt of fays; when every dungeon had its dragon, den its giant, court its dwarf; when hermits, palmers wept, recluses prayed ; when every lady had her milk-white palfrey ; unprotected female her champion ; damsel her lover ; virgin her ravisher or her deliverer ; when every castle was enchanted, the very stones were bewitched : — in a word, when all kindred and contemporary literature was no better, or other, than one interminable and unintelligible rigmarole of, however picturesque, solemn, clumsy and unmanageable adventure, boldly discarding, at a swoop, all such auxiliaries ; fearlessly retreating upon nature, pure, simple, unadulterate. Nor fain the effect have been other than answerable to the

Introduction.

design. I question if even Don Quixote, with all its strained, common-place, far-fetched hyperbole, extravagance, can have ever done so much with the ordinary sort, to open the eyes of the world to the weaker side of chivalry, as must the keen, fine irony, raillery of Saintre", among the more accomplished classes. Anything more creditable than the plot, all things considered ; or characters more admirably sustained than those of the hero and the heroine, it would be difficult to find, and unreasonable to look for, at any such early day. •

If I spoke, a moment ago, o£ Saintre" being "the Waverley, and even more than the Waverley of a comparatively unlettered age," I must be understood to have been instituting a comparison simply between the originality, not the literary pretensions of the two works. That Scott was greatly struck with Saintre" ; more so, perhaps, than he was altogether aware of at the time, is evident. I think it will be very hard for any observant reader of our work, to resist the conclusion, that it was to it that he was indebted for the first hint of the general outline of the plan of the Waverley novel.

' The romance of Saintre is generally supposed, though, to my mind, upon entirely inadequate grounds, to be of a feemi-historical character. The impression may probably be traced to the editor of the Paris edition of 1724 ; a man in no way competent to have taken any such charge in hand. He has evidently, as he himself allows, been at no end of trouble to identity the " Lady of the Fair Cousins," with one or other of the nieces of the King ; taking it for granted that she must have stood in such a relation to the crown. And this simply because the Queen calls her Fair Cousin; and that the Lady herself speaks of the

Introduction.

royal dukes, as Fair Uncles. But as to the Queen's calling her Fair Cousin, that amounts to exactly nothing ; as such condescension was then, in the interchange of familiarity and sprightliness, common enough. Besides, it would then be niece, not cousin. Whilst, that she should allude to the dukes, as Fair Uncles, weighs equally little with me. She only once, I think, either addresses them, or refers to them, as being her personal relatives. And this allusion may be either an oversight, or a misprint, or an interpolation ; for anything, more slovenly, disgraceful, barbarous, or, at times, unintelligible than the . copy from which this translation is made, it would be literally impossible to conceive. Fair Uncles, which is the honorary with which a King would address his uncles, or the junior branches of a royal blood approach theirs, might clearly also be the one by which those dignitaries would be spoken of unceremoniously in a court, behind their backs. The lady can have been of no such rank, for abundant and very obvious reasons. JTp hejome of the kindred of the Fair Cousins^ ( would appear to me only to mean, that she was a woman moving in such a sphere as entitled her to be the familiar of her sovereign and his court. To this day, the English peerage is cousin to the crown. She seems to have been a lady of the provinces, and was, .apparently, an heiress in her own right, But as nothing to be depended on is, I imagine, known of either Saintre or the lady, it is idle to be discussing how far the work may be founded upon fact ; or to what extent it is merely an effort of the imagination^ I repeat, my own impression is, that De la Salles was, as regards invention, originality, acquirement, very much such a person as Scott ; and that "Saintri," or 'Tis one-hundredand-twenty years since, is no better than a hodge-podge ; as

Introduction. vii is " Waverley, or 'Tis sixty years since," of literary, traditional, and historical gleaning ; all worked up together by a man of a high and a fine fancy and observation.

It is seldom that the moral of a work, or, at any rate, the individuality of its author, is not, at least to some degree, to be gathered from its pages. In the case before us, however, it would be a pretty difficult task to do so. Scott, as may be seen in his " Essay on Chivalry," appears to have attached a very much more serious importance to this gentleman's authority, purpose, than I have been able to bring myself to do. In fact, in my opinion, he was no better than a wag ; and a wag of the first water too : the Fielding, or the Hamilton of his day. So far as one can guess at him, like Hamilton, he must have been a fine, and even a very fine gentleman ; or, with Fielding, he probably could have been one when he had a mind : most certainly he knew what one was ; no man better.

The first part of Saintre, looking at it as dispassionately as I am able, would hardly seem to me to be much inferior to the feebler portions of the Q-rammont Memoirs ; and only to be at all so, because the subject would not permit, on the part of De la Salles, of a like display of his well-nigh unrivalled natural powers. In the general style of the two works, there is, at times, a certain resemblance : — the same straining, the same labour is observable in much of each. But however we may be divided about the opening, (for touching the middle, which is written without any sort of pretension, and with a charming, almost an infantine simplicity and pathos, I do not suppose that there can be much difference of opinion), I think it would be no easy matter to point to ninety or an hundred consecutive pages in any romance, French or English, ancient or modern, of viii Introduction.

a rarer, more animated, more varied or sustained excellency, than that which is evidenced of the concluding chapters of our author. The attention may not be harrowed, tortured, with all the sickening curiosity which rivets us to the pages of a Eichardson ; but, in return, we are quite as interested as it is either healthy, safe, or desirable to be. And where, in Eichardson, or where anywhere, save in Fielding, is to be found so much nervousness with so much airiness — so much ease with so much strength — so much dignity with so much irony — so much gravity with so much humour ?

Ere taking my leave of Saintre, I may be permitted to observe, that, possibly, it is to our author that the poet, Crabbe, was indebted for a hint when composing one of the most beautiful of all his tales, The Confidant. The parallel will at once occur to every reader, between the artifice of which Saintre availed himself to bring home to the lady all the sense of her unworthiness, and that with which the splendid fellow of a farmer confounds the " traitor friend.''

Though this may not be exactly the place to launch out into any sort of digression, inquiry, touching the aspect of society in the middle ages, I may, I trust, in availing myself of the only one which is open to me, be permitted to state, that, in my opinion, there is very much misapprehension pervading all popular and received appreciation )f those times ; and this misconception I take to be chiefly Dased upon a mistaken estimate, as well of the character is the worth of politer mediaeval literature. I cannot ittach anything like the same importance, as authority, to

Introduction.

IX old romance, that either did St. Pelaye or yet Sir Walter Scott. The latter resumes, in epitome, his conclusions thus : " We may here observe, once for all, that we have no hesitation in quoting the romances of Chivalry as good evidence of the laws and customs of Knighthood. The author, like the painter of the period, invented nothing, but, copying the manners of the age in which . they lived, transferred them, without doubt or scruple, to the period and personages of whom they treated. But the romance of Jean de SaintrS is still more authentic evidence, as it is supposed to contain no small measure of fact, though disguised and distorted. Probably the achievement of the Polish Knights may have been a real incident." Having thus delivered himself, he proceeds to lay before the reader, as deliberate statements, or rather, as authorities equivalent to such, passages from our author, which, to my poor way of thinking, to use a legal phrase, are not evidence. In fact, so far were the authors of that period from " inventing nothing," that it would be quite as near the mark to say, that they invented everything. For all that is out of nature — even unfaithful imitation of that nature, is pure invention, or the tantamount, practically, of such. And, I am sure, for any one to look for nature, (farther than occasional strokes and touches of the same), in any of the old romances previous to that of Saintre, would be to look for what is not to be met with. If they " invented nothing ;" then must the " Land of Fairy " have been somewhere ; enchantment been something ; giants and hobgoblins somebodies. This, however, I waive as captious. But if they " invented nothing," then must this idle young lady of the Fair Cousins have been acquainted with the Latin tongue — familiar with her Bible — well read

Introduction.

in the classics, fathers, canon law, bulls, and decretals. It may be replied, " But, possibly, all this was but the scrapings of some contemporary, and now long-lost manual !" This I deny not. But why then should such a work have been interlarded, as this must have been, with Latin ! I may be in the wrong, but I think it would be very difficult for any man, well considering the roguery and wickedness with which these scraps are dovetailed together ; particularly if tolerably versant with contemporary lore and manners, to arrive at any other conclusion, than that the long-winded sermon of the lady of the Fair Cousins is one scarce interrupted burlesque, from beginning to end ; as, indeed, is a considerable proportion of the whole work. In fact, the middle part comprises all, which, to my mind, is written with any sort of conscience or sobriety. Some such education, doubtless, was bestowed upon the young gentlemen of the age ; but it would require a vaster amount of credulity than, unhappily, has been apportioned out to me, to reconcile to my mind, that this was a literal or an identical course.

At the risk of being thought a little prolix, I will yet farther try to make it clear, by a reference to Saintre", how highly dangerous it is to accept of the old romances, and, above all, this of Saintre, as affording an unequivocal gicture of the manners of the times. The manners, unquestionably, are there ; but it will ever require a man of an unusual research ; of no common coolness, leisure wariness, sagacity ; of a quick and trenchant knowledge of human nature, as well in all its known and possible combinations, as in its unknown and impossible ones to draw the line, and say, where consistency, nature ends, and where extravagance, incongruity begins.

Introduction.

In the first place, our author tells us, that Saintre and Bouciquaut slept together in the chamber with the King ; adding, however, with his accustomed drollery, that they were, as a matter of course, turned out on certain state occasions. Yet, another time, we find several females sleeping in the room, when he expressly informs us that the King and Queen were in bed together. How is this to be reconciled ? Is it at all probable that he would have called in the women at a time when he had certainly turned out the men ? Or supposing, as it is almost certain, that women habitually slept in the Queen's apartment ; is it likely that he would have left them there when with her himself? I am sure I cannot tell. It is only one of a score of inconsistencies which might be pointed to in his book. My own notion, however, is, that women would -not be in the room; and that he simply' put them there for the fun of the thing, and because they came in handy to his purpose. In fact, so thoroughly have a large proportion of us allowed ourselves to be carried away with the imagination, that it is only, or, at any rate, mainly, in the pages of old romance that we are to look for a reliable representation of the feudal world, that I hardly know to what to parallel the delusion, if not to the conviction which prevailed, with reference to the Highland clans, in the days of the fourth George. Not only do they offer but a very partial and inadequate view of the interior of society among the upper orders; but they almost in toto ignore the very existence of that grave and learned middle-class body, the magistracy ; of all the wealthy burgher, manufacturing, and banking classes; as, consequently, the relations in which these powerful communities must have stood toward the former, each other and the state.

xii Introduction.

"But," says Lockhart, "the most striking homage, (though apparently an unconscious one) that his (Scott's) genius received during this festive period, was, when his Majesty, after proposing the health of his hosts, the magistrates, and corporation of the northern capital, rose and said, there was one toast more, and but one, in which he must request the assembly to join him. "I shall simply give you," said he, " The chieftains and elans of Scotland; and prosperity to the land of cakes." So completely had this hallucination taken possession, that nobody seems to have been startled, at the time, by language which thus distinctly conveyed his Majesty's impression that the marking and crowning glory of Scotland consisted in the Highland clans and their chieftains."

I repeat now, what I advanced in the introduction to Episodes, that if ' is a very grievous misapprehension to - fancy that the middle ages, all through, were anything like so corrupt, demoralized, unpolished, unsafe, as they are generally enough supposed to have been. It will be rejoined, Eead the one you will, of the songs, the tales, of the troubadours ; are they not one tissue of coarseness, of obscenity ? are they not all rolling on intrigue, seduction, license ? To this I will simply reply, by requesting my interrogator to turn to chapter one hundred and twentyseven of the Booh of the Knight of the Tower ; and when he has read it, to inform me whether he thinks, had such been the case, the minstrels then had swarmed in the halls of La Galloniere, as we have the word of the good Knight to the effect that they did ? I will farther reply by asking him, if he thinks it at all probable that such a man as Landry would ever have permitted any such profanity to have been echoed, and been re-echoed within the

Introduction. xiii bounds of his four walls ? if lie thinks that the many " good ladies, as well in France as elsewhere, who would be too numerous to tell of," were likely, any more, to have countenanced the like indecency ? And even admitting that they did — as, to a considerable extent, I am prepared to concede to be the case — then must I be allowed to tell him, that such complaisance and such forbearance, on the part of these holy people, toward their comparatively low and vulgar-minded neighbours, would appear to me but as one evidence the more of all their broad and admirable charity : a charity which, this day, we are refusing to extend to them themselves. At the worst, and at the most, this literature can be only pointed to as« an evidence of what people then were willing to listen to — what they found their entertainment in ; how they acted, was another matter. I am no antiquary, but I am satisfied that I am possessed of as lair an insight into the spirit, the genius, and the literature of the middle ages as are most men not professedly such. And I deliberately say, that out of some hundreds of tales which have fallen under my notice, I can hardly recall a dozen that are not as unmistakeably works of imagination ; as certainly, I say not as much, out of this world, as are GrulUver's Travels, or the Arabian Nights' Entertainments. There is no necessary sympathy between impurity of writing, speaking; where only coarse, pleasant, not warm ; and impurity of morals or of manners. If anything, it is the other way. And it is a miserable thing for us to be allowing ourselves to draw our conclusions regarding the condition of society in the middle ages, from the extravagance of the romancers, or the licence of the troubadours. What the Knight of the Tower has recorded of his own times, the reader shall iv Introduction.

nesently see for himself. What does Montaigne, if ossible, even an higher authority than the Knight, tell s of the extraordinary, almost incredible virtue of the eneration immediately preceding his own? the very be, too, when the lovely and accomplished Queen of Tavarre was penning those ingenious tales, which, in the jftiness of our virtue, are now pointed to as an overwhelming evidence of the grossness and immorality of the ixteenth century ! To the charming sketch which he ias left us of that " best of fathers," the following testinony is appended : — " It is a wonder to thinke on the trange tales I have heard my father report of the chasitie of his "times. * * Hee was wont to say, that in a phole province there was scarse any woman of qualitie hat had an ill name. Hee would often report strange amiliarities, namely of his owne, with very honest women, without any suspicion at all. And protested very religiously, that when he was married, he was yet a pure i^irgine ; yet had he long time followed the warres beyond he mountaines, and therein served long. * * And he vas well strucken in yeares when he tooke a wife." We hould have recollected that these ballads, these tales, were 10 other than what they professed to he ; ballads, tales ; lot police reports, or yet the records of an Arches Court. With about as much justice might the Grammont Memoirs oe appealed to, as conveying an adequate idea of the morals >f the aristocracy in general in the reign of the second Charles. Yet, unconscionable a sinner as the fellow was, Hamilton has had.the common honesty to admit, that it was little short of a miracle for any woman, in England, to part with her virtue before marriage. If it was a *' miracle " that it should be parted with before, he must

Introduction. xv allow me to hold myself excused, if I consider it to have been well nigh equally a miracle to have been dispensed with after. I will leave it to any fair man to say, in what light will posterity, applying the same rule and compass to Tom Jones that we now are doing to the pages of .the troubadours, romancers, almost certainly regard the age which elicited that work ? I mean, what will be the impression left upon the minds of, I say not all men, but nine men out of ten ? Surely an unfavourable one. True, a more lovely, a more bewitching creature than Sophia Western scarce ever can have flitted 'cross painters' vision, or 'cross poets' brain. A worthier old body than Mrs. Nightingale can have but rarely lived. Yet still, I say, the whole cast of this, unquestionably the noblest novel in the English, or in any other language, savours, and will savour still more, with time, of gross licentiousness. Yet what has Fielding himself*had the grace to admit of the ladies of his own age? "There is not, indeed," says he, "a greater error than that which universally prevails among the vulgar, who, borrowing their opinions from some ignorant satirists, have affixed the character of lewdness to these times ; on the contrary, I am convinced there never was less of love-intrigue carried on among persons of condition than now. * * . In my humble ' opinion, the true characteristic of the present beau monde is rather folly than vice, and the only epithet which it deserves, is that of frivolous." That Dr. Johnson entertained similarly exalted convictions as regarded the general respectability of the females of the upper classes in his own day, every reader of Boswell will recall. And this, too, be it remembered, at a moment when literature, if not as coarse, as naked, as that which we are consider-

Introduction.

ing, ten times more disreputable, warm, seductive, dangerous, was to be found on every drawing-room table, and, in every lady's closet! And if, despite of all this evidence, it is still insisted on, that even to listen to, not to say relish, such a character of writing, is evidence in itself of an innately impure and indelicate turn of mind, then must Shakespeare, then must Milton, then must Johnson, then must Berkley, then must Scott, with thousands besides of the noblest and sublimest of God's created beings, have been men possessed of vitiated, perverted minds, tastes, imaginations : an implication too monstrous to be entitled to one moment of serious refutation.

I repeat, there is much exaggeration about the indelicacy of .mediaeval literature. That a number of the songs, the tales of the troubadours, are coarse enough, to our ears, I will not attempt to palliate or deny ; but if so ; they are rather tinctured with the coarseness of a redeeming, an enviable, a charming, and a primitive simplicity, than with the objectionableness of a deliberate, a conscious, or even a possible offensiveness. But when our levity ; high spiced, conscious imaginations, are pitted with their dignity, gravity, single-mindedness, and earnestness, it is small wonder that we are at sixes and sevens. If we find three little girls, the well-brought-up, exemplary daughters of so pious, so nice, so scrupulous, so thoughtful a man; so fine a gentleman as was the Knight of the Tower, as familiar as with their garter with all those mysteries to which by wedlock alone is a woman supposed to have become initiated ; if we find him opening himself unreservedly to them on topics which never now could, or, at any rate, should be touched on, save of a mother, a pastor, or a family physician : if we

Introduction.

xvn find in the mouth of Froissart, the purest, the most etherial, sublime of well nigh all historiographers ; and even, too, under circumstances the most solemn, sad, and tragic ; words which, now-a-days to be recovered, must be hunted for mid the lowest canaille of the back slums of Paris — in the name of all that is reasonable and unreasonable, why should we be c avilling at the same in the lay of a troubadour, or the prattle of a minstrel ? Now, if there cannot possibly have been any sort of indelicacy in the employment of words — argue, or flatter ourselves to the contrary as we will — it only remains to be seen, does the imputed impropriety consist in the colouring? That any such freedom of colouring, as is generally supposed, is to be met with in the more reputable novels, such as Pereeforest, Launeelot, Suon de Bourdeaux; or ballads, such as many to be seen in Percy, (for even in those days there were Tom Littles, Chevalier Faublas, and Harriet Wilsons,) I utterly deny. It is downright insanity to talk, a la Ascham, or La None, as I have often seen and heard it done, " of the unblushing effrontery with which the most barefaced intrigues are recounted." In the first place, there is hardly an intrigue in one of them, from the first to the last, such as ever did take place, or ever could take place, since human nature was constituted human nature. This remark is only made to show that these writings are not, too implicitly, to be accepted as pictures of bygone times; and that they are nothing better than so many miserable, primitive, childish, chalk-on-the-wall skeletons, daubings, of an age of comparative inexperience, if not innocence. So far from these pictures being drawn with the "most unblushing effrontery," I would, on the contrary, say, that they are effected with the most laudable

b

Introduction.

and scrupulous delicacy. The simple fact is generally all of which the reader is apprised ; nothing beyond. Just compare the quietness, the consideration of the ten following words, which the reader will presently find in their place, in Saintre" ; " and when they were come out of the secret closet ;" without so much as a hint of, or an allusion to what, for all that, the youngest among us must surmise to have passed within; I say, compare this with the disgusting, prurient, morbid, filthy pleasure with which a Richardson trailed, through eight octavo volumes, his one idea, which same idea, from its very first conception, was lascivious and objectionable in the highest degree ? Compare it even with the innuendo, the transparency with which, at this very hour, intrigue, the grand staple of all romance, ancient or modem, as often as not is introduced.

In support' of the other allegation, that there is scarcely an intrigue in old romance ; at least as related, that ever did take place, or ever could take place, I would point to that of the abbot and the lady, which, in its general character, is an average sample of a disclosure of the kind. To suppose that what is there insinuated to have taken place, could, under the circumstances, have done so, and remained undetected, is to suppose a simple impossibility. Hence, though a great lady may have committed herself with her chaplain, as well in the fourteenth century as she might in the nineteenth, the tale of Saintre" is no evidence that this one did. Nature has her own ways of telling her tales; tales which, though ear of man may ne'er have heard, yet eye of man will seldom fail to reach. Though morals may be outraged; indignant nature, roused, will ever be the vindicator, the pro-