RE-FASHIONING BOETHIUS: PROSE AND POETRY IN CHARTIER'S "LIVRE DE L'ESPERANCE"

Abstract

Alain Chartier (f.1385-1430) is among the most important writers of fifteenthcentury France. He is best known today for the Belle Dame sans mercy, a poem that touched off an astonishing flurry of responses, continuations, and imitations in the decades that followed.1 In addition to this poem of feminine resistance and masculine dejection, however, Chartier produced an extremely varied corpus of prose and verse texts in both Latin and French, including forme fixe love poetry, love debate, and commentaries on the social and political turmoil of the times. His works were widely disseminated in manuscript compilations and early printed editions, with his reputation remaining strong well into the sixteenth century.2 In the post-Romantic era, however, with its pervasive disregard for late medieval courtly lyric as 'banal' and 'impersonal', Chartier's poetic works found little favour. Arthur Piaget, writing at the turn of the twentieth century, stated categorically that 'chez Alain Chartier le prosateur vaut mieux que le poete ... Chartier, qui se faisait de la poesie la meme pauvre idee que ses contemporains, ne voyait en elle qu'un passe-temps a l'usage des hautes classes de la societe.'3 Fortunately, this dismissive attitude has lost ground in recent years, but Chartier's work as a whole has yet to recover the recognition it deserves. The present study, a small step in this much larger process, will address Chartier's use of both prose and verse by focusing on what is probably his last work, the Livre de ?'Esperance, which remained unfinished at his death in 1430.The Livre de ?'Esperance is modelled on the Consoktion of Philosophy, but with an overtly Christian, rather than philosophical, message.4 Chartier's persona needs to be rescued not from the Muses of personal elegy, but from Melancholy and attendant disorders of the spirit - Indignation, Defiance, and Desespoir - and he is visited not by Philosophy but by the three Theological Virtues, accompanied by an unnamed fourth female persona. Only the first two virtues, Foy and Espetance, speak, but one can assume that if completed the text would have included the consolation of Charity and, perhaps, of the other personification (Happiness? Divine Grace? one can only speculate). Many medieval French reworkings of Boethius - including translations of the Consoktion as well as adaptations and more distant echoes - ignore the prosimetrum format of their model, being entirely in either verse or prose.5 Chartier, however, follows the Boethian format closely, opening with a verse passage outlining his wretched condition and then proceeding to an alternation of prose passages with poems in a variety of metrical forms. This essay will consider Chartier's use of the. prosimetrum, with particular attention to the place of poetry in the work as a whole.In a departure from the Boethian model, it is not the first-person protagonist who engages in dialogue with the Virtues but his rational faculty, Entendement, personified as a 'jeune bachelier qui m'avoit suy une foiz de loing, l'autre de pres' (prose I, lines 27f). As a result, the dialogue of the Esperance is explicitly situated within the mind of the authorial persona. His Intellect stifled and drugged by Melancholy, he falls prey to the voices of madness that emerge from within, 'en la region de Tymaginative, que aucuns appelent fantasie' (prose 2, lines 8f.). His salvation comes when Entendement awakens, 'se retrait vers la partie de ma memoire, et ouvrit a grant effors pour donner plus grant clarte ung petit guichet dont les varroux estoient compresses du rooil de oubliance' (prose 5, lines 46-8). It is from within his memory that the Theological Virtues emerge; and Faith's first words are a reminder that Entendement was created 'pour gouverner la partie vegetative despotiquement et Fappetit sensitive par seigneurie royale et politique' (prose 5, lines 77f.). The rational faculty, in other words, recovers its ability to govern the authorial mind, suppressing the self-destructive urges of a sickened imagination, through its memory of Christian virtue. …