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From this time forth, whenever he hears the bell for Mass he dances and jumps and leaps until he falls to the ground from sheer fatigue. This goes on for a long time until, one day, he is discovered by a young monk who blames him because he does not come to matins, and following, finds him dancing and capering, as he thinks, just for his own pleasure. The young monk goes to the Abbot and tells him what he has seen.

The Abbot, Bernard of Clairvaux, swears him to silence and goes himself to the crypt. Lo, he sees the man leaping and jumping until he falls to the ground in a swoon. And then the Abbot observes descend from the vaulting so glorious a lady that never has he seen one so fair or so richly crowned. Her clothes are adorned with gold and precious stones. She is accompanied by angels who solace and sustain the tumbler. The sweet, noble lady takes a white cloth and with it gently fans her minstrel before the altar, but of this the man knows nothing nor does he perceive that he is in such fair company.

Not long afterward the Abbot sends for the man. He is fearful because he believes he must have wronged God and his Mother. The Abbot examines him and requires him to tell everything that he has done. The man does so, then falls weeping and kisses the Abbot’s feet. The Abbot, weeping himself, raises him up and tells him he should never fear and adds, “Fair, gentle brother, pray for me and I will pray for thee.” The man is so overcome with joy that he can no longer devote himself to Our Lady, and in a short while he dies.

I will not tell you how this lovely story ends because I hope you can find it in a book edited by Jessie Weston called “The Tumbler of Our Lady,” published in the year 1900. There are other miracles in the book because the time—the twelfth century of our era and the thirteenth also—was a time when such miracles were believed by everyone. I think it is a shame that this is no longer so. Note: For more about this, read the entry on Henry Adams’s Mont-Saint Michelle and Chartres.

At the same time it is important to remember that this kind of simple faith was not shared by all in the twelfth century. For example, the famous and again anonymous “Ballad of Aucassin and Nicolette” tells a very different kind of story. Aucassin loves Nicolette with all his heart, but his adoration is not rewarded, at least at first. He even rebels against the warnings of a great churchman who declares that his illicit love threatens both him and his lady. He responds:

In Paradise what have I to win? Therein I seek not to enter, but only to have Nicolette. For into Paradise go none but such folk as I shall tell thee now: Thither go those same old priests, and halt old men and maimed, who all day and night cower continually before the altars, and in the crypts; and such folk as wear old arnicas and old clouted frocks, and naked folk and shoeless, and covered with sores, perishing of hunger and thirst, and of cold, and of little ease. These be they that go into Paradise, with them have I naught to make. But into Hell I would fain go; for into Hell fare the goodly clerks and goodly knights that fall in tourneys and great wars, and stout men at arms, and all men noble. With these would I liefly go. And thither pass the sweet ladies and courteous that have two lovers, or three, and their lords also thereto. Thither goes the gold, and the silver, and cloth of vair, and cloth of gris, and harpers, and makers, and the princes of this world. With these would I fain go, let me but have with me Nicolette, my sweetest lady.

In the end he doesn’t have to make this choice. He overcomes all obstacles, wins Nicolette, marries her, and all is well.

JOSEPH BÉDIER

1864–l938

The Romance of Tristan and Iseult

Joseph Bédier was born in Paris in 1864. He was a distinguished scholar who made contributions to our knowledge of medieval literature. His major scholarly work, the four-volume Les Légendes Épiques (1908-21), advanced a theory that is now widely accepted about the old French epic poems, the chansons de geste. These were composed by the troubadours, according to Bédier, on subjects and themes proposed by the monks who traveled on pilgrimages from various sites in France to the shrine of Saint James in Spain, Santiago de Compostela. The troubadours traveled with the monks on these long, slow journeys from the cold north of France to the warm spring of Galicia at Easter time, singing as they rode. One imagines the sun glinting on the armor of the knights who, for protection, rode along with these bands of pious travelers, the banners waving in the gentle breezes, the birds singing in the trees and the fields full of flowers….

The favorite of all the chansons de geste was the story of Tristan and Iseult. Many poets sang the tale and so it took a number of different forms, but the basic events in the story were these: Iseult of Ireland was to marry King Mark of Cornwall. Her mother prepared a potion of exceeding strength for her daughter and the bridegroom to drink, a potion that would ensure their everlasting love. King Mark sent his nephew, Tristan, to Ireland to accompany his bride to her new home. They took ship to cross the Irish Sea but during the voyage, by accident the story says, they drank the potion. They were thus bound together in love forevermore, a love that could only end with their deaths.

They tried to remain loyal to the king. They slept with a drawn sword, naked and shining, between them in the bed. King Mark somehow understood and forgave them. Iseult married the king. Tristan left England and crossed the sea to Brittany. There he met and married another woman, Iseult of the White Hands, “for her name and beauty,” but the marriage was a formality; the symbolic sword was still drawn in the bed. Nevertheless Tristan was betrayed by his enemies at the court of King Mark and, wounded by a poisoned arrow, was dying. It was agreed that Iseult of Ireland should be sent for since she possessed the arts of healing. She came, but the lovers were betrayed by Iseult of the White Hands and died in one another’s arms.

The original versions of the tale were harsh and unforgiving: adultery was both a crime and a cruel joke. During the twelfth century, the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas produced a softer, more romantic version. Gottfried von Strassburg wrote, around 1200, an even later version that is the jewel of German medieval poetry; it was on this version that Wagner based his opera Tristan und Isolde. Bédier preferred the version of Thomas and produced an adaptation of it in modern French in 1900; the English title is The Romance of Tristan and Iseult.

Bédier, besides being a good scholar, was also a good writer and his version is one of the most beautiful of prose poems. The journey across the windswept sea from Ireland to Cornwall, the drinking of the potion and its immediate, terrible effect, the drawn sword in the bed of love, the gift given to Iseult by Tristan when he must leave her, the treachery of Iseult of the White Hands—all of these episodes possess an almost unearthly loveliness and sadness that in my opinion are rare indeed. Above all the tale, as Bédier tells it, is unmarked by any hint of scandal, duplicity, or shame: the lovers try to be loyal to their rightful lord and their fall from grace is noble. The story is a tragedy of love in which the end result is death.