The Report Committee for Rachel Lynne Roepke
Certifies that this is the approved version of the following report:
Young and in Love: Poetic Production through Allegorical Age in
Charles D’Orléans
APPROVED BY
SUPERVISING COMMITTEE:
Supervisor:
Elizabeth Scala
Daniel Birkholz
Young and in Love: Poetic Production through Allegorical Age in
Charles D’Orléans
by
Rachel Lynne Roepke, A.B.
Report
Presented to the Faculty of the Graduate School of
The University of Texas at Austin
in Partial Fulfillment
of the Requirements
for the Degree of
Master of Arts
The University of Texas at Austin
December 2016
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Elizabeth Scala and Daniel Birkholz for their invaluable feedback,
Emily Harring, Melissa Heide, and John Fry for being a receptive audience while I
worked on articulating the nuances of my project and helped refine my writing, Coleman
Hutchison for the institutional support and motivation when it was most sorely needed,
and lastly, as always, Demi Marshall, for everything.
iii
Abstract
Young and in Love: Poetic Production through Allegorical Age in
Charles D’Orléans
Rachel Lynne Roepke, MA
The University of Texas at Austin, 2016
Supervisor: Elizabeth Scala
Charles d’Orléans (1394-1465) had a long and extensive history with poetry, both
collecting and writing, that began in childhood and carried through his imprisonment to
the end of his life. Charles’s familiarity with poetry and the allegorical mode specifically
provides Charles with forms to manipulate as the questions the veracity of the genre’s
strengths in revealing hidden truths. For a writer whose own youth was cut short by the
early assumption of adult aristocratic responsibilities, Charles d’Orléans’s poems dwell
upon the figures of the four ages and the workings of time. Dislocated from his native
France and held in England as a prisoner, Charles is owned by neither critical tradition
despite writing in both languages. Charles’s poetry, and even his life, can be
characterized by the word ‘between’: he spoke between languages, lived between nations,
and wrote between ages. Fortunes Stabilnes manipulates the allegorical genre by
introducing this state of ‘between’ and allowing introspection where previously there had
been none. This report argues that the poet-persona in Fortunes Stabilnes moves between
the established allegorical ages to gain inspiration for his poetic endeavors.
iv
Table of Contents
TEXT ...............................................................................................................1
Works Cited ..................................................................................................45
v
Young and in Love: Poetic Production through Allegorical Age in
Charles D’Orléans
While Shakespeare’s Henry V spends a sleepless night before the battle of
Agincourt masquerading as a common foot soldier, the Dauphin and his cousin, the Duke
of Orléans, banter the night away with erudite poetry and wordplay. More so than any
other officer, Orléans mocks both his cousin and the Constable of France by turning their
barbs against them. Orléans, the overly-intellectual and arrogant French nobleman, cares
more for his next turn of phrase than the morale of his men on the same night English
King Henry walks in disguise among his men to ascertain their loyalty. England’s
eventual capture of Orléans in the play metes out ‘poetic’ justice—the triumph of the
English over the French in the play shows the better of the crafty, common Englishmen
than the gallant, noble Frenchmen. This is true at least of the battlefield; in lovemaking,
language is the more valuable skill. If only King Henry V had Orléans with him at the
close of the play when he tries to woo Princess Catherine, Hal may not have had to rely
on “his false French” to win her (V.2.222)1. Shakespeare’s character of Orléans has some
measure of talent in wordplay, and he never loses a battle of wits even as he loses the
more important battle, Agincourt. Lest this victory be heartening, once in captivity,
Orléans never has the opportunity to speak. The real Charles d’Orléans spent his captivity
1
It is unknown whether Shakespeare had read Charles’s poetry—Holinshed, one of
Shakespeare’s sources for the history plays, only mentions his captivity and his prowess
in spoken English⁠. Mentioned in Steele’s introduction of Charles’s English poems in the
1941 EETS edition.
1
writing a poem some 6,000 lines long on battling the inevitability of time only to have his
work dismissed, intentionally or otherwise, by Shakespeare himself. Orléans’ success in
reconciling his poetry into old age ironically becomes a loss in only 200 years.
The real Charles d’Orléans led quite an exemplary life both as a politician and a
poet from an early age until his death at age seventy-five. He became Duke of Orléans at
the age of thirteen in 1407 after the murder of his father, Louis. He led an army in the
French civil war against the Burgundians and eventually took Paris. He was captured at
the Battle of Agincourt at age twenty-five and kept prisoner in England for the next
twenty-five years. His only son, born only a few years before his death, eventually
became King Louis XII of France. His large corpus of poetry is equally as noteworthy as
his life; the earliest extant poem of his was written at age ten, and he continued to write in
a variety of forms and traditions, some of which respond directly to other poets of his era,
until his death2.3 Charles likely would have known of, read, or even translated many of
the exemplary works in these genres. Charles had a long and extensive history with
poetry, both collecting and writing, that began in childhood and carried through his
imprisonment to the end of his life4. Charles’s familiarity with poetry and the allegorical
2
Some 6,000 lines in Middle English, primarily in longer narrative and ballade forms,
and over 400 rondeaux, 150 ballades, 60 chansons, and a thousand or so lines of other
lyric forms in Old French.
3
The Duke, after returning to France, retired to Orléans and became a well-known patron
of the arts; poets would travel from all over to take part is his poetic games, some of
which are preserved in his autograph manuscript.
4
Charles’s relationship with poetry defines most of his life. The Duke of Orléans avidly
collected books during his captivity. This practice of his began as a child. He was
immersed in the world of poetry at a young age - his parents were patrons of the arts and
frequently invited famous poets, such as Eustache Deschamps - to visit the household
(Fein 14). His tutor, Nicholas Garbet, was a master of theology and a fantastic Latin
2
mode specifically provides Charles with forms to manipulate as the questions the veracity
of the genre’s strengths in revealing hidden truths. For a writer whose own youth was cut
short by the early assumption of adult aristocratic responsibilities, Charles d’Orléans’s
poems dwell upon the figures of the four ages and the workings of time. Dislocated from
his native France and held in England as a prisoner, Charles is owned by neither critical
tradition despite writing in both languages. Charles’s poetry, and even his life, can be
scholar and passed much of his knowledge on to Charles d’Orléans in his early school
years (Arn, “A Need…” 78). His family’s library was so extensive that the combined
collections of his grandfather, parents, and son made up the beginning of France’s
Bibliotheque Nationale (Cholakian, “Charles…” 123). His brother, though the dates are
uncertain, owned at one point the Paris Chaucer manuscript and an Italian copy of the
The Decameron (Crow 87 & Harrison, “Charles d’Orléans and the Renaissance” 28).
Charles's early life can be characterized by the written word; through his own studies, his
family’s patronage of the arts, and the large collection he had available to him at all
times. The Duke returned to collecting poetry during his imprisonment, during the same
years he wrote Fortunes Stabilnes. His English library, which travelled with him as he
moved from captor to captor, was quite extensive, and due to his status as a prisoner, we
know quite a bit about the contents. He owned several Latin books — including as many
as seven copies of the Consolation of Philosophy — and medical and scientific treatises.
He also owned classical works such as Virgil, Sallust, Cicero, Ovid, and Petrarch, the
standard books he would have read under his Latin tutor at home (Fox, xxxviii). He also
owned many vernacular texts — works by Christine de Pizan, Jean Froissart, and
Eustache Deschamps, ones that he likely used in writing Fortunes Stabilnes. Though we
have been unable to attribute any specific English books to his collection⁠, there is also
good evidence he was at least familiar with Chaucer’s works, even outside his brother’s
possession of a manuscript. One of his captors, Henry, Earl of Suffolk, was a poet
himself and husband to Alice Chaucer, the grand-daughter of Geoffrey Chaucer himself;
they owned a copy that Charles would likely have had access to. In fact, Suffolk and
Charles appear to have become friends while Charles remained in captivity. In Charles’
own personal manuscript of poetry in the Bibliothèque Nationale, containing both his
own work and that he personally transcribed of others, there are eight or so⁠ poems sewn
in, written in English by an English hand. Henry Noble MacCracken argues these poems
were in fact by Suffolk himself, sent to Charles after his release (MacCracken 145).
When Charles was released at the age of 45 in 1440, the only thing we know he brought
back to France with him was a small book embossed with his coat of arms, containing
poetry he had composed while imprisoned (Fein 18). Poetry may have been the most
familiar aspect of his imprisonment to his life before in France.
3
characterized by the word ‘between’: he spoke between languages, lived between nations,
and wrote between ages. Fortunes Stabilnes manipulates the allegorical genre by
introducing this state of ‘between’ and allowing introspection where previously there had
been none. I argue that the poet-persona in Fortunes Stabilnes moves between the
established allegorical ages to gain inspiration for his poetic endeavors.
While in captivity in England during the Hundred Years’ War, Charles wrote a
collection of courtly love poems connected through an allegorical narrative frame. This
allegorical poem survives in both Middle English and Old French in two different
manuscripts—the BL Harley 682, and BnF MS. fr. 25458, an Old French version in
Charles’s hand. The Middle English version of the allegory, most recently published as
Fortunes Stabilnes, languished in obscurity for many years.5 Scholars focused on his
French poetry and dismissed the English as a poor translation by some unwitting scribe6.
Perhaps this linguistic derivativeness, its status as mere translation, is what kept Charles's
English poetry off the radar of Middle English studies for so long. Instead of being truly a
Middle English poetic endeavor, Fortunes Stabilnes was a failed attempt at language
5
Charles left the manuscript in England when he returned to France in 1440. It did not
see print until 400 years later when George Watson Taylor published an edition in 1827
and was not reprinted until the Early English Text Society edition issued in 1940, five
hundred years after Charles’s release. Access for Middle English scholars was negligible,
excepting, of course, those with access to the British Library on a regular basis.
6
Since BnF MS. fr. 25458 contains many poems in Charles’s own hand, and this hand
does not match that of BL Harley 682, many agreed that Fortunes Stabilnes was by a
translator interested in French courtly love poetry, but not the Duke himself. The Middle
English of Fortunes Stabilnes has irregularities to the Middle English of the time; this
supported the belief that Fortunes Stabilnes was a translator’s practice in Middle English
rather than composed in the language initially.⁠For more information on this theory,
though now generally thought to be false, see William Calin’s “Will the Real Charles
d’Orléans Please Stand Up?”
4
studies. In the last thirty years since the acceptance of Fortunes Stabilnes as Charles’s
own work, mostly due to the efforts of Mary Jo Arn, study of Charles d’Orléans as a
Middle English poet has begun to rise7. According to Susan Stakel writing in 1988,
research on Charles d’Orléans has, “…exhibited a bent for the biographical and that the
poet’s literary reputation has long suffered from his association with a historical period
characterized as either the waning of a preceding more illustrious Middle Age, or the predawn obscurity of the Renaissance’s new day” (161). Even as Stakel bemoans the
position of Charles’s work as either not medieval enough or not early modern enough for
most academics, she argues that Charles's literary reputation has been tested by these
same dismissive scholars and, in most cases, deemed worthy of closer evaluation.
However, following Arn’s new edition of Harley 682 in 1994, only a few scholars have
dedicated Charles the time he is finally due, especially given his innovative take on the
possibilities of allegory.
7
In an article in 1983 titled “Fortunes Stabilnes: The English Poems of Charles d’Orléans
in their English Context,” Mary Jo Arn argued that Charles was the author of the English
poems and that they were one collection framed by an allegorical narrative. A.E.B.
Coldiron agrees ten years later in a detailed comparison between the English and French
poetry: “I will assume on the weight of the evidence to date Charles d’Orléans is
probably the author of both French and English versions” (170). Arn followed up this
scholarly acceptance of Charles as the poet of Harley 682 with a new edition of the text
in 1994 - Fortunes Stabilnes: Charles of Charles English Book of Love, a Critical
Edition. Arn herself coined the title of the collection in this edition as ‘fortunes stabilnes,’
drawing the phrase from a moment toward the end of the poem where a friend asks the
narrator-poet to write a poem on the stability of fortune. These articles — first Arn’s and
then confirmation by Coldiron through her philological study — turned over a new leaf in
the study of Charles d’Orléans. Medieval English scholars could examine the English text
on its own; no longer did Charles remain under the purview of only those well-versed in
Old French. Since the publication of Arn’s scholarly edition, more has been published on
Charles than before, though he is more often referenced in comparative studies than on
his own.
5
Well-schooled in the classical and French literary tradition, Charles d’Orléans
challenges the stasis of the courtly love allegory in Fortunes Stabilnes. Much of the
scholarship on Fortunes Stabilnes compares its allegorical mode firstly with Le Roman de
la Rose and secondly with other French or English allegorical poems such as Confessio
Amantis, shorter works by Jean Froissart, or De Consolatione Philosophiae, revealing the
sources of and influences on Charles d’Orléans. Acknowledging the huge debt Charles
pays to the allegorical tradition, this essay examines how he introduces the concept of
time to the allegory through the figure of Age and the four stages of man. Fortunes
Stabilnes attempts to reconcile the ideal courtly love seen through allegory with transitory
human life and its consequences. Unconventionally, Charles’s first beloved, Bewte,
passes away due to illness a third of the way through the poem; he spends the rest of the
text wrestling with the identity of a courtly lover when time has stolen his love and his
youth from him. Charles finds a compromise between the perfection of courtly love and
the dissatisfaction of life through the written word itself. Poetry and its writing allows the
poet to escape the confinement of an aging body and act like a youthful courtly lover. In
Fortunes Stabilnes, writing provides an escape from the harsher reality of human
existence.
The captivity metaphor of the poet to Age structures the narrative portions of
Fortunes Stabilnes. Three major sections separate ballads and roundels on the typical
themes of courtly love: the beauty of the beloved, the pain of unrequited love, and the
grief for the deceased lover. The four stages of man define the formula for Charles’s
allegory; each narrative section describes a transition from one stage to the next and the
6
complications and realities of aging. Fortunes Stabilnes develops the four ages of man as
more than elements of Charles’s personality, but also the structure of the allegory itself.
Typically in an allegory, action of the mind and senses is anatomized as an overwhelming
narrative instant, and plays with an expansion of a moment or temporal event such as
falling in love. On the other hand, Charles stitches these actions back together and allows
time the space it needs to work. These stitches reveal the poem’s main occupation of
describing what it means to be between—in this case, between times. By the end of the
poem, Charles may be past the age of lovers, but he plays the role of lover through
writing. In the poems in Fortunes Stabilnes, Charles moves from court to court and
allegiance to allegiance, as he defines his role as courtly lover amongst these allegorical
figures. Mariana Neilly writes, “The poetry of Charles d’Orléans…depicts the convention
of the courtly lover but to a somewhat more subtle and complex extent, through the
device of allegory” (Neilly 130). Charles uses the allegorical model he learned as a boy
and read as a prisoner to provide a frame to the struggles of the passing of time.
“Charles’s allegory presents a witty, melancholy, and essentially secular version” of the
old man’s farewell to love, John Burrow writes in The Ages of Man about the French
version of the text (184). But Charles’s relationship with Love in the English version
does not end with a farewell—it anticipates the sight of his beloved again even after the
final ballade closes with its refrain. The allegorical mode of Fortunes Stabilnes never
leaves love completely behind despite the passing of time. Love is, after all, the reason
Charles is a poet in the first place. Charles moves through and around the allegorical ages
to represent the poet’s changing state of mind. His aging body cannot keep his youthful
7
inspiration contained—the poetry keeps Charles’s soul young, even as he gets older. The
friction between the allegory and the temporal movement represents Charles’s own
subjectivity in a world of overly fictive figures.
The allegory of Charles d’Orléans seems traditional at first glance and builds
upon some of the most significant works of the genre, but upon further examination,
Fortunes Stabilnes is more nuanced than its predecessors and situates itself between
multiple traditions. He manipulates the generic form of allegory and introduces the
concerns of temporality to a genre that typically operates outside of time’s purview.
While Le Roman de la Rose narrates an entire love affair on a single day in May,
Fortunes Stabilnes stretches the length of the poet-persona’s life, from birth well into
middle age. Clearly well read in the French literary tradition as well as familiar with the
Latin classics, Charles d’Orléans incorporated much of his knowledge of these genredefining allegories into his own work—in particular, the position of the poet as lover in
the allegory of Le Roman de la Rose8. Studies tracing his sources and allusions from the
8
Of any text in the French tradition, Fortunes Stabilnes manipulates Le Roman de la
Rose more than any other. Though Charles was likely familiar with Jean de Meun’s
completion of the work, nearly all the connections to Rose in Fortunes Stabilnes
reference the first part by Guillaume de Lorris. Part of Charles's interest in Le Roman de
la Rose likely came from the possibilities it offered for personal expression and
philosophical debate within a courtly poetic tradition. According to Kelly, “Lorris
invented a new kind of poem, the allegorical love poem, which was to survive and
flourish down to the close of the Middle Ages,” thereby offering the opportunity for
mixed form in narrative and lyric as well as mixed theme in allegorical philosophical
thought and courtly love. This blend of erudite scholastic thought and courtly vernacular
lyric seems to have appealed to the poet who later wrote of Fortune’s immutability using
the words of Boethius. Much has been made of Charles’s use of thematic elements from
Le Roman de la Rose, usually in a way that diminishes Charles's own work: “…the
greater parts of his traits are borrowed from the Lorris Roman de la Rose…” and “…his
themes are nearly always taken from the allegorical tradition popularized by the Roman
8
allegorical tradition are one of the most prevalent types of criticism on Charles’s poetry9.
Fortunes Stabilnes, on the other hand, should be characterized by the composite nature of
its tradition and innovation. The form combines both personal allegory with the emerging
popularity of lyric poetry in France. Norma Goodrich calls his allegorical frame a
“recurrent but not sustained narrative,” a form that was beginning to emerge on the
de la Rose,” are only two of many examples of criticism that value his work on simply
the basic similarities and differences to Lorris (Goodrich 77 & Watson 4). Goodrich
deftly examines the specificities of the two allegories and notes the differences that might
be of some significance. A few major ones include: Charles challenges Daunger for his
lady but the narrator of the Rose instead placates him; Charles personifies Loyalty while
Guillaume does not; and in both the narrator first arrives before the God of Love with the
intent to serve him, though it is in May in Rose and St. Valentine’s Day in Charles
(Goodrich 78, 82, 83 respectively).⁠ His deliberate manipulation of Rose builds upon the
form rather than merely replicating it. For more on Le Roman de la Rose, see John
Fleming’s The Roman de la Rose: A Study in Allegory and Iconography. Charles also
worked from other contemporary French poems, in some cases with poets he knew
personally. Machaut in particular (Le Jugement de roy de Behainge, Remede de Fortune,
Le Voir-Dit, and La Fonteinne amoureuse), and Froissart’s dix amoreaux likely
influenced the humor of his narrator-persona (Arn, Fortunes 46). The form of longer
narrative segments with dream visions interspersed with shorter lyrical poems,
particularly in texts that contain love poetry, allegorical debate, pseudo-autobiography,
preoccupation with Fortune and Danger, and the use of legal documents as a poetic
device, is found in a large number of French poets that reads like the table of contents in
a 14th century French anthology: Machaut again, Froissart, Grandson, Christine de Pizan,
and François Villon. For more information, see Spearing’s Medieval Dream-Poetry,
Quillian’s Language of Allegory.
9
Charles's use of allegory, particularly in comparison with other French and English
allegorical poems such as Confessio Amantis, has been at the forefront of scholarship on
Charles d’Orléans. Some of these studies have traced the lineage of either French poetry
or English poetry, including Charles in one or the other. Charles does borrow much from
the French allegorical tradition, sharing similar elements with Guillaume’s Le Roman de
la Rose, Villon’s and Machaut’s dits amoreaux, and Christine de Pizan. Parallels have
also been drawn between his English cycle and several English works, such as James I’s
Kingis Quair, noting the peculiarities of prison poetry, and Chaucer’s Book of the
Duchess and The Parliament of the Fowls, as exempla of dream vision poetry, and the
allegorical mode in Confessio Amantis. These comparisons often discuss Charles's use of
allegory and rhetorical traditions—of particular note, Ann Turkey Harrison’s Charles
d’Orléans and the Allegorical Mode from 1973, and a chapter in Douglas Kelly’s The
Medieval Imagination focus on the specifics of Charles's poetics.
9
Continent and in England at the time (Goodrich 67). The allegory connects the ballades
and roundels to one another but allows a single ballade or roundel to stand on its own
merit, if necessary (68). To build on Goodrich’s analysis of Charles’s allegorical frame,
we should consider his form alongside other frame narratives such as The Canterbury
Tales or Confessio Amantis. Though Fortunes Stabilnes is not a narrative within a larger
one, like The Canterbury Tales, the ability to separate a ballade or a roundel from the
larger work as a whole without losing comprehension speaks to its careful consideration
of the genre with which Charles would have been familiar10. The text contains both the
narrative portions that describe Charles’s interactions with the allegorical figures and the
lyrical portions written by the Charles poet-persona himself. Cleverly crafted, each
section can stand individually but when stitched together provide both the interior and
omniscient perspectives as Charles passes through the stages of life. The accounting for
both a personal perspective and an omniscient one comes from Charles’s English
forbears—the most apparent being Chaucer’s The Canterbury Tales. The use of frame
narrative within an allegory provides a unique perspective on either form separately by
10
Charles's knowledge and use of English poetry has been understandably of more
interest to Middle English scholars. Charles certainly read and spoke English, as he was
only allowed one French servant for the twenty-five years of his imprisonment (Marks
249). Holinshed wrote in his 16th-century Chronicles describing the Hundred Years’ War
that Charles, at his release in 1440, spoke “…better English than French” (quoted in
Steele xiv). Many have sought a direct connection to Chaucer, and have found a few in
Fortunes Stabilnes. He uses the ‘double sorow’ phrase from the Troilus and “sorow is I
and I am he” from “The Book of the Duchess” (Arn, “Fortunes…” 5). Many have pointed
to Chaucer’s presentation of Venus in dream visions as a source for Fortunes Stabilnes.
Looking at the French poems of Charles, John Burrow notes a similarity to the end of
Confessio Amantis (Burrow 186). Even with this textual evidence, these critics struggle
with a lack of external proof that Charles ever read Chaucer or Gower despite his large
library.
10
allowing a pause in the larger narrative for Charles’s own reaction to his situations.
Goodrich writes, “…the poet’s concurrent need to define himself more intimately…[was]
the general current perceivable throughout the century [in France]” (35). Charles
expresses these definitions of character though his allegorical narrative frame and the
poems in between. Instead of clouding his position, his bastardization of the two genres
“enables him to explore the emotional and psychological distress discussed in these
poems from a variety of perspectives, while the recurring allegorical figures act as a
thematic link [between these explorations]…” (Neilly 130). The poet’s interactions with
each allegorical figure give Charles the language with which to articulate his grievances.
He is able to express his dissatisfaction with intangible concepts the way a vassal might
complain about his lord. Allegory, as Douglas Kelly argues, is an ideal rhetorical method
to ask and answer these types of philosophical questions:
Guillaume de Lorris showed the way with personifications and setting adapted to
the idealization of courtly love. In doing so, he carried to its conclusion the
tendency of romance to move from history toward Imaginary dream worlds…
(Kelly 24).
Imagination, for Kelly, is “invention, retention, and expression” of true poetic inspiration
(Kelly xii). For Guillaume’s dream vision of Le Roman de la Rose, Imagination
“provide[s] the figures and actions that show forth the truth of the dream” — in
Guillaume’s case, his Art d’Amors (Kelly 58). An allegory sets the scene and provides
participants for a philosophical journey for hidden truth; Charles uses his Imagination to
allegorize the truth of Age and time. With Lorris, the allegory has moved from the
11
classroom to the court, from Latin to the vernacular, and sets out to determine worldly
truths, rather than religious ones. Once a genre defined by its scholasticism, the allegory
now brings academic rhetorical methods into the secular world. Fortunes Stabilnes takes
this path a step forward through the introduction of the frame narrative and questions its
place in secular thought at all. The passing of time complicates these relationships, as
there is potential for things to improve, or become much worse.
The allegorical figures in Fortunes Stabilnes open and close the narrative portions
of the poem. The entire work begins with a letter patent that states Charles’s service to
“the god Cupide and Venus the goddes / Whiche power han on all worldly gladnes”
(lines 1-2).11 From the outset the allegorical characters demand a presence in the poem;
Cupid and Venus are named before Charles is. The French version depends more heavily
on the allegorical figures; it opens with a longer narrative portion not extant in the
English version of describing his birth up to his arrival at Cupid’s court—a narrative
section we will have reason to return to later. The letter that opens the English version of
the poem follows this narrative section in the French poem, almost nearly word for
word12. The French introduction can provide a more nuanced look at the English allegory.
The poem was—and always had been—structured around its allegorical frame.
11
All quotations from the Middle English text come from Mary-Jo Arn’s edition,
Fortunes Stabilnes, and use her line numbering.
12
Even though there are several moments that only appear in one or the other, I argue that
we can refer to the French text to better explain the English allegory in this particular
case. The English version may be a better text overall, particularly when it comes to
allegory; the English version of the poem, on the whole, contains a fuller frame narrative
both in length and coherency than its French counterpart (Arn, Fortunes 3). The only
narrative portion in the French poem that is missing from the English poem is the
opening material referenced above; this section’s absence from the English version is
12
Most of the major allegorical figures suffer from the combining of allegory and
frame narrative. When Charles introduces the passing of time into his allegory, the
traditional or classical conceptions of these figures are called into question. Before I
discuss the more complicated representations of Age, I will look at a more concise
example in Dame Fortune to thoroughly examine how the conversation between tradition
and experience makes way for the individual. The figure of Fortune exposes the
contradictions of Charles’s combination of allegory and frame narrative. In an early
ballade after the first narrative section, Charles directly references a figure he has not yet
met: Fortune. In ballades 39-43 Charles bemoans the woes that Fortune brings him,
though the lady has not appeared in person. Charles writes:
[Hope] saith that Fortune that hir newe bithought
And hath hir silf a bettir avisyng
Forto amende in euery maner thyng
That she hath doon me in displesere falle,
likely due to the missing first quire of Harley 682, not an authorial omission (Arn,
Fortunes 101). The letter of homage that directly follows this portion in the French and
opens the English match one another almost entirely phrase for phrase, though word
order varies within phrases due to differences in the two languages’ grammar; this letter,
in both versions, refers back to instances in the introductory narrative in both languages,
indicating that the introduction likely existed or was intended to exist in both versions at
the point of composition. Our last piece of evidence that the English text contained this
opening narrative portion at one point is a set of mysterious marginal numbers in the
Harley manuscript. They do not mark scribal payment nor printers’ casting-off marks.
They do not number the ballades or roundels. Steele, however, astutely noticed that by
assuming the pattern of the marks began at the beginning of the missing quire, the first
quire likely contained approximately 394 lines (Steele xvi-xvii), only six lines short of
the French material of the same presumed content. In that case, I feel it safe to assume
that Fortunes Stabilnes opened with some introductory narrative portion that more or less
follows the similar portion in the French material.
13
So that hir wheel shall take a new turnyng—
But Ihesu graunt that hit may sone bifalle. (lines 1446-51)
In this segment Fortune has some personified elements: her characteristics follow the
model from Machaut and Villon.13 She and her wheel actively make men’s lives worse.
However, the recitation of tradition limits Fortune as an actual figure; she only acts as the
books claim she acts. Since Charles has not yet met her, all he knows of Fortune is that
which comes from others—Hope, within the poem; the literary tradition, outside of it.
The idea of Fortune has more potency than Fortune as an actual figure. Finishing the
stanza with a prayer to Jesus only emphasizes his understanding of Fortune as an idea,
not a person. Jesus can make the wheel spin faster, not Fortune herself. This mention of
Fortune depends on her allegorical tradition and fictiveness. In the above stanza, it
matters not to Charles whether Fortune is a real woman or an idea dressed in pretty
clothes; the outcome for him is the same regardless. In practice, and at this point in the
narrative, there is no difference between the tradition of Fortune and her performance in
the poem itself. It is not until her appearance that these two versions contradict one
another, leaving Charles room to explore his personal relationship with Fortune.
Fortune’s contradictory elements reveal how allegorical figures can never be truly
whole in the real world. One of the most famous ballades in this collection, that which
provides the title for Arn’s version, shows this explicitly. In his double ballade composed
at the request of a friend on ‘fortunes stabilnes’ toward the end of the work, Charles
writes that slander against Fortune relies on false reasons. He calls out to her:
13
See Goodrich for detailed analysis of his sources for Dame Fortune.
14
Thou Fortune, that causist pepill playne
Upon thi chaunge and mutabilite
Ded y thee so, y blamyd wrong, certayne,
For stabill yet herto as fynde y the
Withouten chaunge forto prevaylen me,
But whereas first thou fond me in symplesse,
Thou holdist me in myn aduersite
So that y may bewayle thi stabilnes. (lines 4680-7)
Addressed directly by Charles, Fortune becomes less of a tradition and more of an
experience. She can affect change (or not) in others when before, this power belonged
only to Jesus. Charles identifies Fortune through her mutability—she is the Fortune “that
causist pepill playne / Upon thi chaunge and mutabilite”—even as he is composing
poetry to her stability. The tradition of Fortune weighs heavily on Charles’s lament as he
recognizes his own beleaguered state. If Fortune is that which “pepill playne,” then
Charles should have had experienced her goodwill by now14. Charles, on the other hand,
makes his complaint about Fortune’s stability; he has found her lack of mobility
“prevaylen me”—for Charles, this is her dominant trait. Ever since he was “in
symplesse” he has been an enemy to Fortune. “Symplesse” here may mean “foolishness”
14
The complaints of other men on the inconstancy of Fortune that Charles references in
his double ballade comes from De Consolatione Philosophiae; Philosophy as Fortune
defends her changing nature via the image of a wheel. After this double ballade, during
his conversation with Lady Fortune, Charles directly references Boethius when Fortune
chides him: “Remembre must ye that ye ar a man” (line 4869, connection noted in
Goodrich 191). This is not the first time Charles had worked with De Consolatione;
Glynnis Cropp notes he had translated for personal use book II, prose ii of Boethius’s
work, just as François Villon and Eustache Deschamps had done before him (Cropp 126).
15
or “lowliness,” in terms of rank, but I propose that here it references a state of innocence,
specifically childhood. Given the text’s preoccupation with the four stages of life—we
will return to this posthaste—this idiom reminds the reader of the beginning of the poem
and everything in between. As Charles has changed and grown older, Fortune has not; the
opposite of a typical allegory, in which the lover remains young, and Fortune’s wheel
turns. In this double ballade, Charles draws attention to the contradictions between his
experience and the tradition allegorical concept of Fortune. Experience and allegory are
at odds. This debate, and similar philosophical concerns, are the core of Charles’
allegory. His personal expression of frustration relies on his experience before a typical
presentation of Fortune. Known for her changeability, Fortune, according to Charles, is
the most stable of all figures. Charles d’Orléans was a poet steeped in this literary
tradition of allegory, and the contradiction in his depiction of Fortune marks one of the
preoccupations of the text: the space between theory and practice, where the poet himself
resides.
By providing personal experience in the allegory, Charles can explore the holes
allegory leaves behind—when does it work, and, more importantly, when does it not
work? In her study of Charles's allegorical mode, Harrison argues that his figures
“…represent psychological postures or feelings; they serve to situate the poet in an
intellectual world” (40). This poem acts as a thought experiment of Charles’s; as in the
case with Fortune, he challenges the literary tradition of allegorical figures in light of
Charles’s own experiences in the poem. ‘Fortunes stabilnes’, despite being a recently
added title for the work, highlights the focal point of this poem’s allegory: when does
16
allegory fail? Though most allegorical figures in the poem contain some contradictions,
the figures with the most slippage between these two versions are those related to time.
Charles allegorizes each of the four stages of life as well as time itself. Charles wrote the
English version of this poem during his twenty-five year imprisonment in England, and
as such, the prison of time is one of the central themes of the poem. These themes of loss,
displacement, and imprisonment show up in Fortunes Stabilnes through the loss of
Charles’s heart to the God of Love and his eventual departure. In La Roman de la Rose,
Guillaume de Lorris centralized the feeling of loss and displacement to courtly poetry and
made it a concern of the allegory, including it as a major component of “…literary games
of love talk and pseudo-autobiography,” according to Rivkah Zim (83). However, La
Roman de la Rose fails where Fortunes Stabiles succeeds, particularly in terms of
pseudo-autobiography. While the lover in Rose does not grow older, Charles in Fortunes
Stabilnes becomes a prisoner of his own aging body. Nadia Margolis notes that Charles
sees his body as a type of prison for his soul—so did Villon and Pizan—especially as he
grows older and moves further away from his youth (Margolis 186). The tradition of the
body as a prison for the soul as the body ages goes back to antiquity, and is found in both
Cicero and Ovid, texts Charles would have read as a schoolboy. Charles sees time as a
jailor; Fortunes Stabilnes destabilizes understandings of age the same way that Charles
challenges the traditional image of Fortune as I have just shown. In his double ballade,
Charles notes the inescapability of Fortune’s adversity from his ‘symplesse’ through his
Jewbile. No matter the choices Charles makes, he remains a prisoner to Fortune and her
wheel: “In Charles’s poetry, the prison functions as the dominant symbol of Fortune’s
17
capriciousness and its effects on human events” (Margolis 188). Fortune and her
demands of Charles contradict the poet’s age; both Fortune and his age imprison the lover
in Fortunes Stabilnes, but Fortune controls his heart and mind while age controls his
body. Charles uses allegorical ages in Fortunes Stabilnes to reconcile the contradictions
between the mind and the body as time passes and one grows older.
The late Middle Ages understood age and schematized it as a series of stages
rather than a steady process that developed over time. A person was a child until they
were a youth, a youth until they were an adult, and so forth. Three major theories
dominated scientific, philosophical, and religious thought; there were three stages in a
man’s life, four stages, or seven stages. Each of these theories found its basis in one
aspect of nature: biology, physiology, or astronomy. In Burrow’s comprehensive study of
competing medieval conceptions of the ages of man, he explains the science behind these
three models. The three stages of man — birth, stasis, and death — mimic the life cycle
of plants, supposedly put forth by Aristotle (Burrow 5). Theorized by Pythagoras and first
mentioned in English by Bede, the four humours rule four stages of life. An excess of
blood governs the temperament of childhood, red choler of youth, black choler of
maturity, and phlegm of old age (12). A third model from Ptolemy follows the seven
known planets and was the latest to develop in Western Europe. From the Moon in
infancy to Saturn in old age, each stage of a person’s life—infancy, childhood, youth,
mastery, unhappiness, dignified age, and cooling old age—follows the properties of a
corresponding planet (37-8). In all three theories, natural changes that cannot be
controlled or manipulated govern human transition from one stage of life to the next.
18
In Fortunes Stabilnes, Charles d’Orléans allegorizes the stages of life to
determine his own position amongst them. To do so, he puts them in conversation with
Nature, Reason, and the God of Love. Fortunes Stabilnes follows the four stages of life
model; we meet or hear about Childhood, Youth and Old Age (Maturity is conspicuously
absent, though referenced at one point in the Castle of No Care). The four stages of life,
typically associated with the four humours, also have corresponding elements and
seasons as well. Each of the four stages align with a humour, a season, and an element:
childhood is ruled by the blood and represented by spring and air; youth by red choler,
summer, and fire; maturity by black choler, autumn, and earth; and old age by phlegm,
winter, and water (Bede, De Temporum, chap. 35). Just as an imbalance of the humours
was believed to cause illnesses to both the body and mind, an overabundance of one
humour could affect the actions of the individual. As a person moved through the four
stages of life, their humours would rebalance and provide a temperament that matched
their physical age. Children, delightful and merry, must have more blood than those older
than them, as blood is the humour that keeps the spirits up. Red choler produces
impulsivity and restlessness, the characteristics of a youth falling in love for the first
time. Black choler causes melancholy in middle age, and phlegm is associated with
apathy or decrepitude of old age. Burrow writes that the rebalancing of humours
“…offered an immediate physiological explanation for age characteristics…and matched
observable facts about young and old so well that it might have been invented for the
purpose (though it was not)” (Burrow 13). The physiology of the body determines the
characteristics of each stage of life. As a physiological reason for ages, this theory defines
19
age through the body and temperament at the same time. The physical age determines the
emotional age. According to this model, natural processes determine an individual’s
desires.
The allegorical character of Age as a separate figure than Childhoode, Yowthe,
and Elde emphasizes Fortunes Stabilnes’s preoccupation with temporality, and in
particular, the passing of time. Female in the French version and male in the English
version, the figure of Age in the beginning of the poem has no personality or physical
description. She is merely “ung messagier, qui Age s’appella,…de par Dame Nature”
(lines 13-15). Age has no will of her own; she acts only as a messenger of Nature herself.
When Charles is a child, the allegorical figure that represents the passing of time does not
bother him; Age does not even merit a description. When Age comes to him again in the
dream, Charles does not recognize him and merely comments on his “lokkis gray” (line
2551). Until this moment, Charles has not acknowledged the allegorical figure for the
passing of time or even the actual passing of time itself. While in Love’s service, he plays
the courtly lover-poet too well to notice that the seasons have changed. Now that he has
gotten older, Age, an “ominous” presence in a courtly love allegory, cannot escape his
notice (Kelly 205). Le Roman de la Rose displays no movement of time; actions occur
and the story progresses, but the characters do not age and the rose does not wither. But
Fortunes Stabilnes introduces this more realistic concept into an idealized world. Even
worse, Age has the ability to dismantle the ideal of the courtly lover. Because of Age,
every lover will eventually grow old and either retire or become a senex amans. “The
appearance of Age,” Fein says, discussing the French version in which Charles’s
20
encounter with Age is very similar to the English, “indicates a pre-occupation with time
as well as the poet’s need to locate his true position in the trajectory of life” (Fein 69).
This courtly love allegory introduces Age to the form in order to ask how courtly love
can exist past the prime of youth. Age may be an allegorical figure in the poem, but for
Charles, marking the passing of time likely became a part of his daily routine for twentyfive imprisoned years.
It is no wonder, then, that Age appears in Fortunes Stabilnes cautioning Charles’s
poet-persona to grow older before it is too late. The historical Charles spent his
adolescent years15 in prison and his childhood on the battlefield.16 As Zim observes,
15
There are extremely varied numbers, but in the four stages of man, adolescence/youth
typically began around 15-20 and ended around 30-40.
16
This aspect of Age is compelling next to his biography of his childhood years. When
Charles d’Orléans’s father was murdered by his political rival, Charles was only thirteen
years old. He inherited the dukedom and the responsibilities therein (his father was one of
the main advisors to the mad king); he wed less than a year later to produce an heir,
though his first wife died in childbirth. If that was not enough pressure for a fourteenyear-old boy, Charles also inherited the responsibility of seeking retribution for his
father’s murder. Charles’s mother gathered her children around her at her deathbed and
begged them to “never to cease their pursuit of their father’s murderer” (Monstrelet,
1.131, translated by Jager, 216). His father, mother, and new wife all died within two
years, and Charles had only his younger brother for support. Even so, he led the
Armagnacs into war with the Burgundians, the men responsible for his father’s murder.
The civil war raged on for nearly a year in 1411 and 1412, with countless deaths from all
three estates. The Burgundians managed to play to the king’s madness, forcing the
Orleanists to surrender in August of 1412. The next year, Charles struck out against
Burgundy again and when Charles and his allies rode into Paris in the summer of 1413,
they found that Charles's libel against Burgundy had swayed the people in the Charles’
favor; they entered the city to the sound of cheers. One Parisian observer wrote about the
summer: “Fortune kept chopping and changing in this kingdom,” (A Parisian Journal, 80,
trans. Jager 234). Charles d’Orléans, at the age of eighteen, had taken control of his
dukedom and avenged his father’s murder within five years. He would be captured at
Agincourt less than two years later. The apocryphal story claims that Charles, twenty
years old, was knighted on the eve of the Battle of Agincourt. On that infamous October
25th, Charles d’Orléans, along with a number of other nobles, was captured by Henry V
21
Charles also might have believed he would rot in prison and never see France again (85).
For a poet with a tumultuous history, Charles asks what it means to love with an aging
body that does not correspond to its youthful heart and mind. Charles exists between
these two ages, some aspects of one and some of the other. Throughout the poem, Charles
attempts to reconcile this state of “between” and find a way he can effectively live in this
interstitial state. At least in the poem, Charles can return to the castle of his childhood
years, even if it means giving up courtly love. The editor of the most recent edition of the
French manuscript, John Fox, argues that Charles imagines himself as a prisoner of love
just as he is a prisoner of old age later in the text (74). If love characterizes the emotional
state of youth, then we can take Fox’s assessment one step further: every age is some
form of prison, whether of the body, the mind, the senses, or the emotions. Cicero, in De
Senectute writes: “Cursus est certus aetatis et una via naturae, eaque simplex” [The
course of life is fixed, the path of nature runs but once… ] (Cicero, section 33).17 Nature
and natural processes cannot be escaped in childhood, in old age, or in any time between;
only the adult Charles in Fortunes Stabilnes actually notices the prison.
Charles’s movement through the allegorical representations of the four ages
structures the narrative portions of the poem. Within these sections, Charles begins in
childhood and grows up through youth through middle age into old age, the four stages of
man of Pythagoras and Bede. Nature, Fortune, and the God of Love, these four stages of
man are written as allegorical personas that represent an ideal state, in this case, the ideal
and taken back to the Tower of London as prisoners of war without ransom. Charles
remained prisoner in England for the next twenty-five years.
17
Translation mine.
22
temperament of their age. As he does with Fortune, Charles presents contradictory views
of these allegories that fit within the supposed ideal. Given his extensive library
containing numerous medical texts, Charles would have been familiar with humourial
theory. Burrow claims that by the 14th century there were over a thousand Middle
English medical manuscripts that contained learned medicine from classical and Arabic
sources, and that would not include the number of manuscripts that might be in French,
Italian, and Latin that Charles would also have been able to read (27). Given how widely
read Charles had been, it seems possible, if not probable, that he knew of these biological
and physiological reasons for age. He uses the scientific transitions between the ages to
frame the path of the allegory. In the first two thirds of the poem, Charles follows the
predetermined path; each narrative section shows a transition from one stage of life to the
next. These narrative portions define childhood, youth, and old age through Charles’s
initial experience of each of them. As he grows older, Charles lives each age as it was
meant to be according to the laws of Nature. These definitions of the ages become
integral to understanding the last third of the poem, in which Charles challenges these
defined characteristics of the ages. First I will show how Fortunes Stabilnes defines these
stages of man before moving on to my final point, the later deconstruction of these
definitions that keeps Charles’s poetic inspiration past his youth.
The timeline of the poem confirms the influence that the stages of man had on the
narrative allegory of Fortunes Stabilnes. The English poetic sequence, as I explained
briefly earlier, opens with a letter patent explaining how the youthful Charles has
submitted his heart willingly to Cupid, the God of Love, and Venus, the Goddess of
23
Love. The God of Love describes Charles’s age as “yeris small / Of yowthe yit spent”
(lines 7-8); he has lived a few years of his youth before he became Love’s servant. The
God of Love explains that Charles has pledged his servitude “not only now but his lyue
euyrmore” (line 34). Charles has already been described as the Duke of Orléans; here he
has entered a contract as the vassal to the God and Goddess of Love for the remainder of
his life, no matter how long that may be. Even though Charles is young, this patent seems
not to be concerned with the older ages, either out of willful ignorance or simple
indifference. The patent that legally binds Charles to Cupid is signed “on the day of Seynt
Valentyn the marter” (line 53). According to the four stages of man, spring belongs to the
child. Both Cupid’s language and the date on which the patent is written identify Charles
as a child still. When Charles approaches the God of Love, demanding why Love
withholds Charles’s heart from him, he asks Love in a direct address:
Wherfore as this beseche y yow licence
Me forto graunt, as of yowre nobill grace,
To sewe, aftir my childisshe ynnocense.
As for myn hert an othir to purchase,
Whereas ye haue betake myn for a space. (lines 91-95)
The high register of the language in Charles’s complaint to the God of Love indicates the
significance of courtliness to Charles’s STATUS. Many of the verbs in these lines are
overly formal: “licence,” for instance, is an allowance from a lord to a servant; as is
“graunt.” Similarly, “to sewe” is to make an application before court. Charles addresses
Cupid as “yowre nobill grace,” placing himself subservient to the lord. The adherence to
24
the courtly register reinforces Charles’s youthful obeisance to Love. Charles reinforces
his subservience, citing his young age as a reason to relinquish his heart. Charles asks
him “aftir my childisshe ynnocense” (line 93). Here, according to similar examples in the
Middle English Dictionary referencing ages and qualities of certain ages, ‘aftir my’
means ‘in accordance with my’ or ‘appropriately to my.’ ‘Ynnocense,’ on the other hand,
can be defined a few different ways: purity, sinlessness, and naiveté are a few of the
possible translations of the word. Though these definitions of innocence have nuanced
differences that may allow for slightly different connotations for Charles’s ‘childisshe
ynnocense,’ they all point toward the same conclusion. Sinlessness, purity, and naiveté all
indicate the lack of something that mars or destroys, whether it be fault, guilt, or
knowledge.. This state of innocence matches Charles’s ‘childisshe’ nature - once Charles
is no longer a child, he will no longer have the innocence he once had. At this early point
in the poem, Charles believes he still has these qualities specific to childhood—in this
particular case, the prelapsarian state of childhood—and this childlike state is why he
should be allowed to retrieve his heart from the God of Love. Charles claims he is still
too innocent properly to give up his heart to Cupid and Venus, despite the pangs of love
he is already feeling for his beloved. Charles does not yet see himself as a youth but a
child, merry and joyful. Despite Charles’s physical aging past childhood, his
temperament is that of a child, or so he believes.
In this early transition from childhood to youth, the poem reinforces the
traditional elements associated with youth. Just as Charles’s body ages, his attitude
reflects that of a youth. The loss of Charles’s heart allegorizes the emotional transition
25
between childhood and youth. Despite Charles’s protests, Cupid refuses to return his
heart and instructs him how to win the lady Bewte. As soon as Charles sees Bewte after
this brief conversation, he knows he is in the presence of Daungere and decides it is safer
to appeal to Bewte through the written word; Daungere cannot stop him from writing.
Charles hopes that “Mi poore hert that she not suffir spill / But forto kepe as for a tymys
space” (lines 177-78). Despite his assurances to Cupid that he is not a youthful lover, his
immediate reaction to seeing Bewte is an emotional one, a pained reaction common in
courtly love poetry. Without recognizing it, Charles shows a temperament of a youth, not
the innocence of his prior childhood. In fewer than a hundred lines, Charles moves
between one stage of life to the next through the loss of his heart. This brief segment
creates a framework in which to understand traditional notions of childhood and youth.
The child is innocent; the youth is in love. Even as the poem sets up these categories, it
also provides a space between them. Charles during this segment exhibits qualities of
both stages simultaneously. Similar to Charles’s description of Fortune, his movement
from childhood to youth acknowledges the traditional ideas as well as accounts for
differing experiences.
Charles’s transition from childhood to youth in the French version expresses
similar considerations. A moment in the narrative that appears only in French explains
how Dame Nature first created Charles. She gave him to the care of the lady Enfance, a
word which Le Trésor de la Langue Française (or the TLF18) defines as the first years of
life before adolescence; this allegorical figure’s name can easily be translated as Lady
18
The French equivalent of the Oxford English Dictionary, tracing the shifting definitions
of words back to the Middle Ages.
26
Childhood. Then “un temps [some time]” later “quant je fu enforcy [when Charles had
grown stronger or more virile],” a messenger named Aage brings Enfance a letter from
Dame Nature that takes Charles out of her care (l1-12). The letter goes on to explain:
…que Dame Jennesse
Me nourriroit et seroit ma maistresse.
Ainsi du tout Enfance delaissay
Et avecques Jennesse m’en alay. (lines 17-20)19
[…that Dame Jennesse
Would care for me and become my mistress.
Therefore I completely left Enfance
And went my way with that Jennesse.]
In the French version of the poem, jennesse, a variant of the more common jeunesse and
translated as ‘youth’, comes after enfance or childhood. Phyllis Gaffney provides more
detail on the word, and explains that, “jovant can be synonymous with strength,
youthfulness in the broad sense, even life itself” (Gaffney 573). Charles tells us little
about the transition from one to another, only that he had grown stronger or more virile
after some time. After Aage’s appearance, he leaves Enfance completely to go with
Jennesse. Instead of characterizing the transition by a loss of something, here it is defined
through an increase in virility or strength. If we combine the two, the transition from
childhood to youth entails both losses and gains as it provides the material for his
19
When quoting the French version, I refer to Fox and Arn’s edition of Charles’s
autograph manuscript and follows their line numbering. The translations, included in the
edition, are by R. Barton Palmer.
27
allegorical narrative. Charles now possesses the traits for a lover, though he is not yet
become one. Charles is physically a youth: his body has grown older, and he serves
Dame Jennesse. There is little allegorical tradition for Dame Jennesse, yet an allegorical
Youth appears briefly in Roman de la Rose in the company of Courtesy. Perhaps the most
interesting use of jennesse is in Froissart’s Le Joli Buisson. Froissart defined jennesse as
the age for Venus and lovers, that is, from fourteen to twenty-four (Le Joli Buisson de
jonece, lines 1616-45).20 Eustache Deschamps, whom Charles met as a young boy prior
to becoming the Duke of Orléans, writes that the age for lovers, jeunesce, begins at
fifteen and ends at thirty (Lay du desert d’amours, 25 & 165-8).21 In these two examples,
jennesse comprises approximately the same amount of time. It begins in the mid-teens
and is over by thirty, during the time a man acts like a lover. This type of jennesse
matches Charles’s description of the moment that Aage approached him while in the care
of Enfance. No longer a child, Charles cannot help but to grow up physically and
mentally, following Jennesse and leaving Enfance behind. Charles is between childhood
and youth—physically one and emotionally the other.
Before Charles can become a youth entirely, he most devote himself to the
practice of love. Just as in the definitions from Froissart and Deschamps, love is a
necessary quality of jennesse. Jennesse serves le Dieu d’Amors (line 43), and Love
controls Youth, both the allegorical figure and those who belong to her. As soon as
20
For more, see L’Espinette amoureuse, 522-36, and Marianne Wack’s work on ages and
lovesickness in Froissart.
21
For more discussion of these distinctions between the ages, see Burrow’s The Ages of
Man. He outlines the different systems that divided the stages of a man’s life - in each of
these different systems, however, the age associated with love seems to end around the
thirtieth year.
28
Charles is in her service, she demands that he pledge himself to the God of Love. Here,
the French and English poems combine Charles’s service to Cupid with to the
performance of courtly love as an adolescent act. Love’s captivity of Charles’s heart
causes Charles physical pain, the poem’s explanation for the pangs of love. Fein argues
that Fortunes Stabilnes is inherently adolescent: “Beneath the thin courtly disguise a
genuine adolescent awkwardness and sensitivity to ridicule are readily discernible” (Fein
64). The overall frame allows for the poem to languish in this “genuine adolescent
awkwardness”; here the narrative breaks for the longest ballade sequence in the work.
Throughout these ballades, Charles exhibits both the physical and emotional state of
being a youthful lover. He longs for Bewte from both near and far; he spends one entire
ballade describing her eyes; he bemoans his suffering and his missing heart. A few
ballades in the middle of this section reorient the setting of the narrative; ballades 48 and
53 are Maying poems, placing these courtly affections directly in the summer — the
season of youth. One stanza from ballade 53 directly associates May with the pleasures of
love:
Allas, y have sene May so glad and gay,
So full of pleasance and felicite
That in a yere y koude not to yow say
The gret pleseris and the fresshe iolyte
That to eche wight, that tyme, was full rede,
For with the God of Loue, the lord souerayne,
Ther was no monthe myght do so moche as <he>
29
In tyme that y afore this day haue sayne. (lines 1860-72)
This Maying ballade elaborates on many elements of youth that Fortunes Stabilnes has
already defined. Charles tries to describe how wonderful Maying can be, full of joy and
pleasure, according to Cupid’s counsel. The word “full” appears twice as does “so” to
modify the positive adjectives; the mirth is to such an extent that even Charles’s words
cannot do it justice, even with a whole year to describe it all. The joyfulness of May and
her love games pushes Charles to write and write, even when he cannot do it properly.
Just the act of writing is enough for Charles. Here all the attributes of youth merge in this
one ballade: Charles as a suffering and woeful courtly lover; the summer months; the
sovereign of youth, the God of Love; and excess of excitement and celebration. Charles
has become the epitome of youth.
The concerns of age continue and are further elaborated in the next narrative
section of Fortunes Stabilnes. In this section, Charles moves from youth to adulthood—
but not without tribulation. Shortly after these ballades, Charles receives terrible news
that Bewte has fallen ill and died. Charles’s first dream vision appears after he falls
asleep from overwhelming grief. In his dream, Age returns to Charles to suggest he
leaves Love’s service. He explains further that Youthe, the English Jennesse, “hath thee
gouernyd longe in nycete / Nought havyng Resoun hit forto mesure” (lines 2562-3). Age
blames Youthe for Charles’s long stay in her care —in this case, Charles’s long love
affair—because she has not let Reason guide him as she should. This lack of reason
becomes a new characteristic of the allegorical figure of Youthe as well as an excuse for
Charles’s actions. Age explains that Charles is still ruled by youth even though he is past
30
the typical number of years that Resoun allows. Age says that Resoun “doth eche wrong
redresse / And passith them” (lines 2564-5) and that is why she makes a complaint
against Charles and the God of Love to lady Nature, the figure who has the physical
power to move Charles from one age to another. As his humours presumably change
from an excess of red choler to an excess of black choler, Charles is characterized by
melancholia and potentially a physiological reason for the depth of his grief. He acts
against Resoun and Nature by remaining in the court of Cupid and Venus past the age of
lovers. Cupid is also culpable in this act, keeping Charles as his vassal. Even though
Charles’s grief indicates the melancholia of middle age, he does not physically leave the
court of Love. Once again, Charles navigates between two ages of life and attempts to
find a compromise.
In this narrative section, Age’s complaint to Charles defines middle and old age in
contrast to childhood and youth. These definitions correspond to Bede’s four stages of
man and reinforce traditional scientific understandings of life. Age provides two reasons
why Charles should leave the God of Love’s court now that he is no longer youthful.
Elde, or Old Age, the “modir of vnweldynes” seeks to take Charles from Love’s court
and his mistress Yowthe and place him into her care (line 2569). Charles does not expect
to avoid Elde forever; Age emphatically tells him that "hir to fle thee betith not, no, no!"
(lines 2572). He cannot run from her forever; from Age's exclamations, doing such a
thing would result in equally bad consequences. Old Age stands as inescapable but still
avoidable for a middle-aged Charles. Remaining in the court of Love past the appointed
time would call Elde and her infirmities to him more quickly "for Loue and Elde are falle
31
at gret debate" (line 2576). Love and Old Age cannot—or will not, perhaps—coexist
peacefully. Charles’s only solution is to depart honorably from Cupid and live "as yet in
myddil age," as he should be (line 2603). Age also warns Charles that if he stays with
Cupid, he may become the object of ridicule. The figure of the senex amans, an old man
“whose amatory activities are prolonged beyond the term of them set by Nature,” comes
up again and again in medieval literature, particularly in the fabliaux (Burrow 156-7).
Within the allegorical genre, Confessio Amantis concludes with a senex amans and his
final farewell to love. Age warns Charles not to become one of those men who are the
laughingstock of the court: "Bothe yong and olde thus goon thei lo mokkyng / When they
se elde right as a colt to rage" (lines 2586-7). When old men act like infatuated youth,
both the old and the young do nothing but mock them. Old age is primarily characterized
by what it is not—it is a lack of health and a lack of love, but a state of decrepitude.
Middle age exists somewhere between youth and old age, a lonely age that helps ease the
transition from all-encompassing love to the end of life. In this speech, Age deftly
illustrates the last two stages of life as tradition would have them. The following moment
of introspection demonstrates Charles’s dissatisfaction with these traditional ages and
begins the search for alternatives.
When Charles awakes later, he struggles with the decision he has to make,
beginning to question the strength of the Ages’ hold on him. Fein writes about this
passage in the French version: “Although [Charles] feels closer to Old Age than Youth,
the poet cannot squarely situate himself in the domain of either one” (Fein 69). Charles,
not a youth, not middle-aged, and not old, falls somewhere among the three. Though the
32
allegorical figures of the ages represent static Pythagorean stages, the reality of aging
moves differently. After much deliberation, he decides to follow Age's advice; he
rationalizes that resting his heart will "the lesse hir [Elde's] greven" (line 1658). Sickness
and death will hurt him less if he does not love as he did in his youth. Charles may
struggle with the contradiction between his internal desires to love and the age he should
act based on his physical body, but he travels to the Castle of No Care regardless after
petitioning Cupid for a release from his service. Cupid and Venus, reluctant at first,
suggest that he find a new lady to love instead, but finally they allow him to take his
leave from their court—in the first week of November, as winter, the season of old age,
begins to take over the skies. The seasons deftly follow Charles as he ages from a child
on St. Valentine’s Day to his adolescence in May to his retirement and arrival at the
Castle of No Care on the thirteenth of November.22 Charles, now utterly middle-aged,
composes a second sequence of lyric poetry. Similar to the previous set of ballades, these
lyrics demonstrate Charles’s emotional age—in this case, melancholy.
In the first two thirds of the poem, Charles transitions through multiple stages of
life, and in doing so defines the scientific understanding of each age. The final third of
the poem destabilizes these definitions of age to show the fallibility of the traditional
understanding in light of personal experience. Earlier in this essay, I examined how
Charles fashions Fortune differently than the allegorical tradition developed by
Guillaume de Lorris in La Roman de la Rose. Unlike her French counterpart, the lady
22
In the French, Charles travels on November second, All Souls’ Day. A specific day is
not referenced in the English poem for the date of his departure.
33
Fortune controls the fate of Charles despite his actions or age. The double ballade
dedicated to her, which begins the third section of the poem, asks how much experience
and allegory truly overlap. Fortune cannot be as mutable as everyone complains, Charles
writes, because he has always suffered. Charles’s personal knowledge of Fortune does
not match his allegorical knowledge of her. Similarly, Charles’s love affairs in the final
third of the poem contradict the allegorical definitions of age that the other figures have
dictated to him. Charles begins a second love affair in the last third of the poem, despite
Age’s warning that he is too old, and in doing so, reveals the contradictory nature of the
Ages. The lady Fortune shows Charles that he can love again, regardless of his age.
When Age visits Charles to caution him to move from Yowthe, the last thing Age
counsels Charles is to:
Truste not Fortune, with hir chere covert,
Which woll flatir to brynge thee fresshe in smert,
Saiyng she hath the sokoure to ben lent
And that she dayde not—though thi lady went;
Wherfore, beware, and hir dissayt avert! (lines 2615-19)
Fortune herself should not be trusted; she is deceit and concealment personified,
according to Age, and will make promises she cannot fulfill. Other than his few ballades
earlier in the traditional courtly love section mentioning the fickleness of Fortune, this is
the first time an allegorical figure mentions Fortune directly. With no context other than
the literary tradition espoused by Age, Charles believes that Fortune will say she can help
ease his woes and grant him succor though she cannot. Age specifically mentions her
34
“chere covert” and “dissayt” as her defining qualities. When we meet her, however,
Fortune’s face is described as the opposite of concealing: “And then sumwhile she lowrid
sore, / And even a soune she lokid glad” (lines 5038-9). Fortune does not disguise herself
or her emotions as Age warned she would, but instead makes it all plain on her face
through all the changes; she is a figure of true honesty, not deceit. Fortune may not
always bring good news, but at least in Fortunes Stabilnes, she does not lie. Through his
interaction with Fortune, Charles begins a love affair and rededicates himself to Love.
Through this newfound love, Charles is once again able to be youthful despite his
actual age. Upon Fortune’s wheel sits a woman that Charles immediately believes is the
deceased Bewte; her face and mannerisms are too familiar to be anyone else. Venus tells
Charles that the woman he spies is not Bewte and chides him playfully for not being able
to tell the difference between the two women. When he sees the lady on Fortune’s wheel,
Charles describes his heart leaping as it did when he first saw Bewte and explains to
Venus that, “I am not lijk to sett myn hert at rest” (line 5141). Charles experiences a
physical condition of youthfulness when he sees the second lady. He then puts his love
into Venus’s hands and asks her forgiveness for leaving her court after Bewte’s death. In
this dream vision, Charles goes from reluctant old man, clothed all in mourning black, to
a lover once again. His heart leads him to make impulsive choices to seek the woman at
the top of the wheel, and Venus as the goddess of Love expresses her delight that Charles
is once again a lover. Despite his physical age, his temperament is once again youthful to
such an extent that Venus does not see any difference between now and when he was a
youth in both body and temperament. The possibility of love is enough to transform
35
Charles into a youthful person even when his body, by definition, is too old to be young.
Finally, Charles has accepted being between ages, rather than forcing himself to conform
to only one.
In late medieval religious writing, there is literary precedent for individuals whose
mental and spiritual age do not match that of their body. The puer-senex, or boy-old man,
often appears in hagiography and other similar works; this boy is characterized as having
the wisdom and intelligence of an old man with the innocence of a child. This child, male
or female, “could be spiritually old…” (Burrow 95). On the other hand, adults who
maintained their child-like innocence, as Christ preaches one should do, were considered
to have spiritual infantia, an equally positive trait. Despite the fact that these two
character tropes reverse each other in terms of body and mind, they function the same in
religious thought — both keep the positive qualities of two ages, the innocence of
childhood and wisdom of old age, in one body. Of course, this ability to maintain
characteristics of multiple ages at once was thought to be impossible without divine
blessing from God. This ‘transcendence ideal’ always connoted God’s presence in the
lives of those who performed it. Often, these puer senex were martyrs; the spiritual
infantia were religious scholars. Though God’s intervention, they could more effectively
spread the gospel of Christ, either through their death or their writings and teachings.
Transcendence came with a price: the obligation to witness.
Charles, as neither of these religious tropes, performs a secular form of
transcendence and witnesses his experiences through his love poetry. With the body of a
middle-aged man and the heart of a young lover, Charles acts between two ages
36
simultaneously. Similar to puer-senex and spiritual infantia, Charles has divine
blessing—only his blessing comes from Venus, not God. This divine intervention allows
him to “win a victory over time” and his own body by keeping his heart youthful (Burrow
105). Time no longer worries Charles as it had done previously; he only cares for love as
he did in his youth. After he wakes, Charles wanders through a green wood to attempt to
sort out the dream and stumbles upon a game of Posts and Pillars, a game he used to play
in the court of Cupid. Amongst the courtly host is the lady he spotted at the top of
Fortune’s wheel. He seeks her out during the game and explains his affections. He asks
only one thing of her: “O what, dere hert, though fer from yow y dwel / Yet wil ye graunt
me writ to yow, parde?” (lines 5312-3). He does not ask for her presence, or even a kiss;
he only asks the permission to write ballades to her. “Writ on!” she exclaims back, before
they part (line 5317). For Charles, his obligation to witness comes through the writing of
courtly love poetry. His youthful acts as a courtly lover center around writing, more so
than any other aspect of courtly love.
Within the French tradition from which Charles draws, love and poetic inspiration
are often linked. By the fifteenth century, courtly love, allegorical or otherwise, was the
pinnacle of subjects for poets. In an essay on the nature of the Duke’s imprisonment,
Spearing claims that writing is the medium of courtly love. Passions are always conveyed
through poetry, and “even love poetry is made out of words” (Spearing 98). To perform
courtly love properly means becoming a poet; the profession conveys both the poet’s
nobility as a participant at court the poet’s youth as one who has the temperament of the
lover. Machaut and Froissart take this further; love poetry is the only poetry worth
37
writing, and to be in love means to have inspiration: “For Machaut and Froissart, the
notion of Imagination is fundamental to the allegory of love and the invention of figures
suitable for its expression” (Kelly 25). To write poetry cleverly and effectively, they
believed they must have poetic inspiration from love itself. Machaut understood his
ability to write poetry as a gift from Nature and from Love: “Machaut places his work
under the aegis of Nature and Love. Natured provides him with the poetic skills….Love
furnishes the subject matter….He considered love to be the only worthy subject matter of
his poetry” (Kelly 4). Without love, Machaut’s poetry would be missing an integral part
of its composition; a romance, or at least the imagination of one, allowed him to write the
kind of poetry that was most regarded at the time. In Froissart’s 1373 dit amoreux “Le
Joli Buisson de jonece,” Froissart describes himself greying old man of the age of thirtyfive and struggles to write poetry as he did in his youth.23 He falls asleep and Youth
comes to him in a dream to “reassure him, maintaining that the spirit of true love can rise
above Nature” (Burrow 42). Youth claims he can still find inspiration even if his nature is
past that of a lover, but Froissart wakes up frustrated and finishes the poem with “il fait
son cours Nature avoir” [Nature does follow its course] (line 2049). For Froissart, he
cannot seem to find a love that can help him regain his poetic inspiration past his youthful
prime. Charles, in Fortunes Stabilnes, is able to fall in love again, with the help of Lady
Fortune and Venus, and pick up his pen and ink.
23
To be fair to Froissart, Le Joli follows the theory with seven stages of man, not four, so
the age of thirty-five would have been beyond that of a lover. The greying part, that I
cannot explain.
38
Fortunes Stabilnes links the act of writing with the act of loving throughout the
entire sequence. In the very beginning — in the French version, missing in the Harley
manuscript — when Charles first pledges himself to the God of Love, he promises to ten
commandments; the final one requires “Est qu’il sera diligent escolier / En aprenant tous
les gracieux tours / … Faire chançons et ballades rimer…” [That he should be a diligent
scholar / Learning all the graceful accomplishments / … Composing songs and rhyming
ballades…] (lines 372-6). Charles must become a poet to serve the God of Love,
regardless of his ability. Just as much as faithfulness and humility define courtly love, so
too is poetry a necessary skill of the courtly lover. Love explains this duty more fully
after Charles’s asks for his heart, “For to nobles longith sewte of curteys speche / As he
fynt tyme bi mouth or writyng seche” (lines 145-6). The only way to love nobly, Cupid
explains, is through courteous speech, whether spoken aloud or in writing. Charles from
then on tends toward writing than speaking, as seen in the next scene with Bewte. When
he attempts to approach her and realizes Pity is asleep, he instead decides to write to her
to gain her favor. Nervous about his ability, Charles calls on Hope; Hope urges him on
“for penne and papir had he found anoon” and tells Charles that to write “as thou kanst”
(lines 197-200). Before Charles has said any courtly words to Bewte, he already
considers his affections as poetry. The first ballade sequence that immediately follows
this scene implies that all the following ballades were inspired by Charles’ love of Bewte.
The inspiration dries up accordingly when Charles leaves the court of the God of Love;
as he leaves the court, Love tells him to ask for anything he needs in ever anything comes
up. Charles tries to reply but “to him oon word koude speke agayne / —Oon word? No
39
nor half oon, verily” (lines 2924-5). Words literally leave Charles as he leaves the
presence of Love. Once he arrives at the Castle of No Care and settles to remain there
until he goes into Old Age, he tries to write as he did before:
Baladis, songis, and complayntis—
God wot they are forgote in my party,
Forwhi ennoy and thought so forfayntis
Me that y in slouthe aslepe so ly.
…
All plesaunt wordis in me disyoentis;
So am y all forsotid in foly
That all such art in me now detayntis.
…
For when that y was in ther company
I for my silf gan fast seche wordis gay—
And fond them well—that now ly in decay
(So haue y them forspent), y wot not whare.
(excerpts from ballade 83, lines 3071-3109)
No matter how hard Charles tries to find the words that he had while in the company of
Love and Youth, all the words have abandoned him. They are forgotten, dislocated,
detained, decayed. He can no longer write as he once did, now that he has left Love and
Youth behind. His poetry has failed him, or he has failed his poetry. Remember, the
composition of a poem about Fortune brings the dream of Venus and Fortune in the first
40
place. Charles, attempting to write poetry again, is given another opportunity for love; he
is not seeking a new beloved but inspiration. Love happens to the inspiration he needs to
continue writing poetry as he once did.
The actual love affair, then, seems to be second in importance to the composition
of poetry in Fortunes Stabilnes. Written by Charles, a persona of the actual author, we
never forget that we are reading something that was composed deliberately. The form of
the poem highlights the importance of the written word; the narrative portions reveal the
persona of the poet, and then the ballades and roundels demonstrate his skill. Other forms
of the writing are central themes to the poem as well: letters, patents, contracts. Charles,
through the creation of his persona, can write a courtly love allegory — the only subject
worth writing about, according to Machaut — to display his poetic prowess as “a vehicle
for more interesting artistry” (Harrison 33). For Charles, the poetry matters more than the
subject itself; the subject merely provides an opportunity for Charles to write in the
popular mode. One aspect of courtly love poetry that may have appealed to Charles
specifically is the solace that a lover finds in writing his pain. Kelly connects the act of
writing to love through hope — love provides hope, and that is when the courtly lover is
able to write (Kelly 221). Charles in exile may have found consolation in the writing of
courtly love poetry. In discussing the pains of love, Charles writes “Honure and prays as
mot to him habound / That first did fynde the wayes of writing, / For comfort gret
ordeynyd he that stound…” (lines 824-6). Though the persona Charles is talking about
the pains of love, his praise of poetry applies to Charles as well. The writing of poetry
provides comfort when no comfort is to be found elsewhere.
41
To be young means to be in love, and to be in love means being a poet. In
Fortunes Stabilnes, Charles depicts the importance of artistic creation, even into old age.
The allegory form allows him to make the abstract ideas of the passing of time and
isolation comprehensible. The allegory also provides space for Charles to maintain his
identity when everything else has been stripped from him. Harrison, in her discussion of
Charles's allegories, writes that Charles uses “allegory as an introspective genre”
(Harrison 67). He is able to articulate his lost childhood and his adolescent imprisonment
through the allegorical form to draw attention to emotional stakes. In his poetry, Charles
never discusses his physical imprisonment outright: “He depicts himself as allegorically
besieged and imprisoned, but does not admit to actual imprisonment or deprivation of
liberty” (Marks 253). Rather than being a mechanism for privacy, I see Charles's use of
allegory as a means to explore the different aspects of himself. Just as Charles is able to
be youthful and middle-aged at the same time within the poem, Charles takes the
multiplicities of himself and presents them as different figures in the poem. Fortunes
Stabilnes “is a poet’s voyage of exploration, but the exploration of his ‘moi’ as
manifested in the galaxy of personified abstractions” (Stakel 165). Through the courtly
love allegorical form, Charles explores himself and his history — and he has the time and
space to do so while in exile.
Charles d’Orléans had a long love affair with poetry. He grew up surrounded by
poets and scholars, he spent his time in exile writing his own poetry, and once he returned
to France after his exile, he spent the rest of his days holding court with poets and
fashioning poetry games, leaving all responsibility of rule to those who were his stewards
42
while he was abroad. The seven years after his father’s death that Charles ruled as Duke
are the only years there are no extant compositions of his. Poetry and especially courtly
love poetry, as a youthful activity, would have likely been one of the main occupations of
Charles in those seven years, given his love for the written word. Instead, he had to lead
his family and his army into war, both against the Burgundians and the English. He had
to fashion complicated political maneuverings to maintain his holdings, particularly since
the king would often go into fugue states and be unable to rule. He had to find his father’s
murder and avenge his death. He had to marry - twice - and produce an heir. His
adolescent years were spent full of adult responsibilities, ones that he knew were an
eventuality but did not expect would be his so soon. Charles's preoccupation with time in
Fortunes Stabilnes seems to align with concerns he may have had about his own stages of
life and possible death in prison. Just as Charles found poetry as the source of solace, so
did Charles. While in prison, and indeed for the rest of his life, he continued to write
about the pains of imprisonment, whether of love or depression or of his body in old age.
In one of his last poems before his death, Charles asks:
Suy je bein payé maintenant
De mes jennes jours cy devant?
Nennil, nul n’est qui le redresse:
Temps et temps m’ont emblé Jennesse!”
[Am I well rewarded for
My younger days gone past?
43
Not at all, no one can remedy this:
Time and tide have stolen my Youth!]
(R442, lines 12-15)
Despite his claims in Fortunes Stabilnes that poetry and the act of writing poetry could
keep him youthful even into old age, he never completely regains his abbreviated
childhood and exiled adolescence through his poetry. He may be able to feel young but
his body keeps him prisoner.
44
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