Untitled - Monoskop

LITERATURE OF ENTERTAINMENT
there no mention of Duke Charles in this collection, but all the names of real
people which could have connected any of the poetry with him were carefully
replaced by allegorical figures, as if to throw the reader off the scent. As a
result knowledge of his poetry remained confined to the royal family and their
immediate circle, and the fact that he had been a poet at all was scarcely
known to the general public. La Croix du Maine, who was most painstaking
in his notices of fifteenth-century writers in his Bibliotheque of 1 584, does not
mention him. Yet his poetry survives in a dozen manuscripts, including his
own copy. A selection of his poetry made from one of these manuscripts came
out in his own name in 1740, and the first complete edition in 1803. What,
then, was Antoine Verard doing in 1509?
The poems which appear first in the collection are undoubtedly by
Octavien de Saint-Gelais. They are followed by La Chasse d'Amours, a
narrative poem of 8,828 lines, which is of uncertain but quite recent
authorship. La Chasse d'Amours is based on La Retenue d'Amours, by Charles
d'Orleans, in places textually. It is succeeded by a series of ballades and
rondeaux, all presented as being the work of L'Amant Parfait (the hero of La
Chasse d'Amours} and his lady, but really by identifiable authors of whom
Charles d'Orleans is the most important. Further on in the collection there is
another series of ballades and rondeaux, almost all by Charles d'Orleans,
with all reference to him suppressed. Verard had not always been scrupulous
in his treatment of authors, dead or alive. His Art de chevalerie selon Vegece of
1488 was Christine de Pisan's Le livre desfais d'armes et de chevalerie of 1414: he
omitted any mention of her name and even altered the text to make it appear
that it was written by a man. 1 He
published the earliest work of Jean Bouchet,
Les regnars traversans les perilleuses voyes, some time between 1500 and 1503,
under the name of Sebastian Brandt, the famous author of the Ship of Fools,
and made changes in the text as well, a manoeuvre which Bouchet remem-
bered with resentment over forty years later. 2 But to find Verard taking such
liberties with the duke of Orleans, who was the father of the reigning king,
Louis XII, is another matter, especially as the publisher had close connections
with the court. I do not know what the explanation is, and can only draw
attention to the problem.
A minor classic of fifteenth-century poetry, Les fortunes et adversitez de Jean
Regnier, came out under privilege in 1526 in quite different circumstances
(PR 1 524, i ) . Regnier was a humbler contemporary
of Charles d'Orleans. He
had been the Bailli of Auxerre for the duke of Burgundy, and found his
vocation for verse when in 1432, as he was returning from Rouen, he had the
misfortune to be seized by brigands claiming allegiance to Charles VII and
1
2
Marie-Josephe Pinet, Christine de Pisan 1364-1430 (1927), pp. 358-62. The standard work is now
Charity C. Willard, Christine de Pizan, her life and works (New York, 1985).
Jean Bouchet, Epistres morales etfamilieres (Poitiers, 1545), Ep. xi. (fol. 47 V
). For another such
case see M. B. Winn 'Publisher vs. author: Antoine Verard, Jean Bouchet and 1'Amoureux
transy', Bibliotheque d'Humanisme et Renaissance, L (1988) pp. 39-55.
I8 3