Inescapable Rose: Jean le Seneschal's 'Cent Ballades' and the art of cheerful paradox

Medium Aevum, Spring, 1998 by Jane H.M. Taylor

The Societe des Anciens Textes Francais brought out an elegant, meticulous edition of Jean le Seneschal's Livre des cent ballades in 1905:(1) the response has been, very largely, a resounding silence. At best, the collection is referred to, briefly, as charmant,(2) but Italo Siciliano for one was exasperated -- a hundred ballades? sheer wanton self-indulgence!(3) Burgeoning interest in the lyric recueil has -- marginally -- revived their stock,(4) and even from time to time promoted them from footnote to topic, as in the only major article so far devoted to them, by Jacqueline Cerquiglini.(5) But in general, even critics sympathetic to late-medieval French lyric(6) have viewed them as repetitive, mediocre. The paper which follows is not a rehabilitation -- the Livre des cent ballades is not a masterpiece to be resurrected -- rather it is a recognition that this sequence of apparently banal poems proposes and sustains not a tired paradox but one that is interestingly sophisticated, only fully to be appreciated if this late medieval `anthology' -- a correlation of names and historical references suggests a date shortly after 1389 -- is read dialectically, in the intertextual mode imposed on all subsequent amatory tales and treatises by the Roman de la Rose.

By intertextual mode here I mean, of course, more than that these treatises mention Jean de Meun or the Rose: names are no particular evidence that the writer has read attentively, or even that he has read at all.(7) To find brief references everywhere in the love treatises of the generation following the completion of Jean de Meun's continuation is simply a measure of its notoriety: in Mahieu le Poirier's Court d' Amours (c.1322), for instance, where a mari jaloux invokes the authority of Jean's work:

J'en atrai a tesmoing cheli

qui fist le Roumant de le Rose,

car selonc chou qu'il en propose

onques preude fenme ne fu,(8)

or in Nicole de Margival's Le Dit de la panthere d'amours (c.1320), where the God and Goddess of Love, by an interesting intertextual irony, advise the poet to rely on the romance as so complete a textbook in matters amorous that they do not need to duplicate it:

Qui veult d'amors a chief venir,

Dedens le rommant de la Rose

Trouveras la science enclose.

La porras, se tu veus, aprendre

Comment vrais amahs doit entendre

A servir Amors sans meffaire,

Si nous en pouons bien ci taire.(9)

In the same way, if we discover that references to the Rose are ubiquitous among contemporaries of the Cent Ballades -- Jean Le Fevre in 1380 or so citing it as one of the indispensable authorities on matters matrimonial(10) or referring casually to an arresting metaphor, the nasse of marriage, deployed by La Vieille;(11) or Honore Bouvet, in 1398, pegging a furious political diatribe to the ghost of Jean de Meun(12) -- we need see this as nothing more than a strategic enlistment of a famous authority.

By intertextual mode, I mean that the writer of the text or treatise engages dialectically and intellectually, in however clumsy or ill-informed a way, with the topoi and the arguments of the Rose (and not only, of course, in the erotic sphere: Guillaume de Deguileville likewise manipulates the topoi of the Rose to recast them theologically, as Sylvia Huot has shown(13)). An example of such dialectical engagement is Machaut's Fontaine amoureuse (c.1360), presented, pointedly, as not a dream:

Il n'a pas lonc temps que j'estoie

En un lit ou pas ne dormoie

Einsois faisoie la dorveille

Corn cils qui dort et encor veille.(14)

The fountain is specifically not the fountain of Narcissus (although the pillar on which it stands is carved with the story of Narcissus, the epitome of self-love; see ll.1310-12), but it is the work of Pygmalion, done at Venus' command:(15) how can one not read it both against Narcissus' fountain in the garden of Deduit and against the Pygmalion who creates the perfectly compliant object of his own passion and persuades Venus to give it life?(16) Read so, the fountain -- significantly underscored by its placing at the very centre of the poem -- becomes the emblem of the maker as the fountain in the Rose was of the lover,(17) and by the same token, fittingly, emphasizes the elegance of the fiction rather than the urgent eroticism of Jean's Rose. Another textual echo apparently works similarly: Narcissus, says Machaut, is carved with fastidious and lifelike accuracy: his statue is set on a pillar:

Car sus un grant pilier d'ivoire

Estoit assise, ou l'istoire

De Narcisus fu entaillie

Et si soutieument esmaillie

Que par ma foy! y m'estoit vis,

Quant je le vi, qu'il estoit vis.(18)

It is difficult not to be reminded of the little statue, set on pilerez d'argent, which can be glimpsed in the slit through which Venus aims her arrow, and which was so remarkable that it could only be compared with Pygmalion's work.(19) But Machaut's statue is merely to be admired -- to be `read' -- whereas Jean de Meun's is, of course, a highly erotic metaphor; the shift of emphasis (Cerquiglini talks of the `passage ... de l'amour de l'amour a l'amour de la litterature'(20)) is perceptible only to the reader who can weigh the significance of Pygmalion against Narcissus, and therefore to the reader of the Rose. More intellectually, for it could be argued that the prime effect of the Rose on its avatars is to intellectualize love poetry and to make dialogue and debate the primary mode whereby the erotic is apprehended, take Machaut's Remede de Fortune,(21) whose primary setting, the park of Hesdin, is also unmistakably reminiscent of the Rose. The lover here is so overcome by love and desire that he has never dared to approach his lady, and even when she enjoys a lai of his that he has had sent her anonymously, terror prevents his admitting that he is the author. In this extremity, he is comforted by Esperance, who is, as critics have consistently argued, a conflation of Jean de Meun's Raison and Boethius' Philosophy.(22) Her long speech has distinct echoes not only of Guillaume de Lorris's Raison but even of Jean de Meun's Ami,(23) but her message is very different. For her, the miseries of erotic love to which the lover is prey are -- paradoxically enough -- blessings: