Springtime, Solitude, and Society in the Dit de Poissy

 

Kittye Delle Robbins-Herring

Mississippi State University

 

    Le Livre du Dit de Poissy recounts a visit Christine de Pizan made to the royal nunnery of Poissy in 1400, in order to see “une fille que j’ay, a dire voir, / belle et gente, joenne et de bon savoir” (lines 42-3).[1]  Her daughter Marie had probably entered the Dominican community in 1397 at the same time as Charles VI’s own daughter Marie, since it was customary for the king to provide dowries for several other worthy young candidates when a princess took the veil, and such generosity would have permitted Christine to offer her daughter a secure future the family could not otherwise afford.  The dit has three clearly marked narrative sequences:  it covers the ride of about twenty miles from Paris to Poissy which Christine makes with a cheerful band of young companions, the activities at Poissy (both the convent and the town), and the company’s return trip to Paris the following day.  Within this structure of aller et retour the poet devotes almost half (nearly 900 lines) of her narrative to a finely-detailed description of traveling to Poissy and viewing its splendors; the remainder of the poem she dedicates to a lively love debate which takes place on the ride back to Paris.

    The round trip encompasses a series of meetings and partings—highlighted by Christine’s joyous reunion with her daughter at Poissy but darkened by their tearful good-byes when it is time for the poet to leave—in which separation and reunion in space and time function as ambivalent metaphors for separation and reconciliation in heart and mind.  The love debate offers two ironic variations on the theme:  Christine’s account of her conversation with two members of her party poses, in terms amusing at times yet still sympathetic, an irresolvable problem.  Who is unhappier, Christine asks:  a young woman who must live apart from the knight she loves and who loves her, or a young man who can find no favor with the lady he serves and adores?

    The way Christine appears to divide her attention, during the course of the poem, between courtly love and the cloister has troubled modern scholars.  Charity Cannon Willard notes that “both its form and subject matter have seemed to elude interpretation” (“Visit” 1).  An early commentator, A. R. Pugh, concentrated on the love debate’s parallels with Machaut’s jugements, while another scholar of the time, P. Pougin, finding no unity between the two parts, valued the poem only as a historical record of the convent at Poissy.  He published large extracts of the first part of the Dit de Poissy, but merely summarized the second part, omitting the actual text, which he thought tedious.  More recent students of Christine’s works have also felt the need to emphasize one part of the dit over the other:  for Willard the poem “preserves an idea of the abbey and its inhabitants at the height of its importance” and, furthermore, demonstrates Christine’s loving care for her daughter (“Visit” 5-10; cf. Christine 43; 64-8).  Enid McLeod, too, in her popular biography of Christine, The Order of the Rose, clearly prefers the personal note of the first part to the “literary artifice” of the lovers’ debate (57).  Even Barbara Altmann, who stresses the symmetry of the two parts, comparing them to the two panels of a medieval diptych, in which “the picture in each panel informs our impression of the other,” scarcely explains why Christine chooses to contrast two such themes (268).  There are, to be sure, a number of medieval works which juxtapose the sacred and the secular, the service of the Christian God with the service of the pagan God of Love—to the detriment of one divinity or the other, as a rule—but something else, something in addition, seems to occur during the poet’s journeying to and from Poissy.

    The two images of the cloistered nuns and the courtly debaters are not simply presented side by side, each in isolation:  the narrative moves back and forth several times between the two, interrupting one descriptive sequence with a reference to the other, intercutting each with references to springtime and nature that comprise a third, competing register of imagery, allied with both yet distinct from either.  The poem proceeds in a complex interweaving of double and triple rhythms that recalls the musical compositions of the day with their varying texts—as well as Christine’s own intricately interconnected ballade cycles.

    To begin at the beginning, as our poet does, with a springtime motif, is to evoke a centuries-old tradition of love poetry:  “Gracieux moys / D’Avril le gay, ou reverdissent bois” (36-7).  The love debate, quite appropriate in this context, has already been introduced in a preliminary appeal to an as-yet-unspecified noble to judge the as-yet-unrecounted debate.  In her prefatory lines Christine speaks to a good, wise, and valiant knight who had earlier expressed an interest in her poetry, wishing particularly (it would seem) to judge some love problem.  She has accordingly chosen him desur tous (25) to pronounce on the lovers’ dilemmas she is about to recount.  Before coming to the debate itself, however, she wants to explain the circumstances in which it came to pass, i.e., the trip to Poissy.

    Thus, from the initial verses of the poem, Christine intermingles references to the beauties of nature with the amorous games of courtly society, balancing both off against the innocence of the nuns of the royal convent at Poissy—young women whose status as consecrated virgins of exalted birth incarnates its own contradictions.  The nuns, as we shall see, live like feudal lords in an earthly paradise, but at the cost of the consolations of love, whether conjugal, maternal, or courtly.  They possess a paradise which they are never permitted to enjoy to the full.  One sign of this paradoxical wealth is the banquet of delicious foods which they serve their visitors on golden dishes, but which they are not allowed to taste themselves.

    With characteristic cleverness Christine pretends to present the visit to the convent as itself a kind of preamble to the debate.  McLeod, in analyzing the dit, seems to take the poet at her word when Christine asserts her intention to give only a brief account of the matter:  “Je vous diray le cas pour abrigier” (30).  Then, seeing that Christine in fact takes the time to paint a leisurely portrait of Poissy, McLeod expresses somewhat bemused satisfaction that “fortunately, [Christine] did not after all find herself able to ‘abridge’” (57).  The abbreviation motif seems to me to be a rhetorical device which Christine uses to justify inserting the convent into the context of the love debate, just as, reciprocally, she will later use a discussion at supper during the visit to recall the love debate and prepare for its much-heralded appearance during the return ride to Paris.

    The autobiographical element is so evident in Christine’s writing that readers are often tempted to believe they are seeing her very life pass before their eyes—rather than an artful transposition of that life into poetry.  Daniel Poirion, indeed, finds that her originality lies in the inseparability of her personality and her literary work (206).  Nevertheless, the sense of authenticity her writing conveys is itself an effect of her art (however genuinely sincere the writer may have been), and the piquant details which ornament her life story as she tells it must have been carefully chosen for that effect.  The portion of the dit devoted to her daughter and Poissy is undoubtedly as thoughtfully composed, its images as deliberately selected, its writing, in sum, as literary, as the portion setting forth the love debate.  Though twentieth-century scholars tend to treat the first as fact, the second as fiction, Christine presents them both on the same plane of narrative reality, within the storyteller’s charmed circle.2  In part this is an authorial game akin to the jeux de société from which so much of her poetry springs.  More significantly, Christine intuits the essential ambiguity of any autobiographical enterprise.  As Wallace Fowlie notes, every life is mysterious, unfathomable unless written about:

 

But when it is being written about and then possibly read later, it turns into allegory, into some form of figurative plausibility.  It is not quite fiction, but it is not very far from it (165).

 

In 1400, even before the allegorical self-disclosures of Le Chemin de Long Estude and L’Avision-Christine, Christine’s attention to the structure of her life experiences reveals a search for meaning that encompasses yet transcends factual documentation.  Whereas several other courtly dits (by Machaut or Froissart, for example, or Christine’s own later poem, the Dit de la Rose) mix explicitly allegorical figures with historical persons, Venus with Péronne d’Armentières, Christine offers us no dream-vision here, rather a narrative that invites allegorization by its readers.  Instead of Amant, a particular young lover whose plight exempifies an aspect of courtly love.  Instead of Faith or Reason, a particular community of nuns.  The Dit de Poissy is like the Dit de la Rose in that it presents events which, as Roy said of the latter dit, could perhaps be imaginary but which we feel convinced are real (2:305).  Christine’s colorful, dramatic presentation of these events nonetheless imbues them with symbolic significance.  We are led to reflect on the merits of the activities and attitudes described.  Every reader is placed in the privileged but difficult position of the unnamed knight to whom the poem is addressed, its first reader and judge.

    The trip to Poissy begins on the sweetest morning of the year, says Christine, while the dew is still sparkling on the grass.  She specifies the month, April, and the day of the week, Monday.  McLeod comments that the precision of the date “gives a wonderful actuality to the whole expedition” (54).  Ann Wiltrout adds that choosing the second day of the week for the trip suggests Christine’s maternal eagerness to see her child:  after Sunday, the day symbolically set aside for the Lord, the first day available for the week’s activities is devoted to visiting the daughter she cherishes.3  Making the trip so early in the new spring season also indicates the great yet tempered intensity of the mother’s desire to be reunited with her daughter:  she goes as soon as it is both practical and pleasurable to do so.  Christine’s “vouloir / D’aler jouer” merges into her desire to “aler veoir” her girl (40-41); the sweet fresh clement weather of frolicsome April—she calls the month itself l’esbatans (35)—enables her to find companions willing to go along for the pleasure, without pay, like the young squires who keep her company “Pour esbatre, non pour autre loier” (59).  Their benevolence is in harmony with that of the earth at this season, and Christine’s text is as spangled with terms denoting joy and pleasure as the earth she describes is with flowers.

    Christine and her friends, young ladies and gentlemen of leisure, take the road at a rare moment of perfection, when all are enjoying themselves and the sunny day as well.  Courtly refinement here meets natural delight, in a world ruled by a kindly Nature and an idealized Amours.  There is nothing ugly in sight; rather, everything is beautiful so as to embolden lovers to love well:  “Tout estoit bel pour amans enhardir / A bien aimer” (95-6).  Christine’s misgivings about courtly love are muted, at least temporarily, and she allows us to indulge in the fantasy of perfect bliss, even if it is presented somewhat abstractly, in a series of aphorisms and atmospheric notations, not in concrete situations with clearly defined characters, like the later debaters and the cloistered nuns.  In a dit which celebrates family affection and comfortable piety we are still encouraged to imagine happy lovers.  Our poet refers more frequently in this poem to Nature, the beauties of the earth, and the erotic feelings the season inspires than to God or even her beloved daughter Marie.

    Willard notes that Christine’s lyric poetry often associates the joys of young love with the spring season, always emphasizing “the rewards of loyal love” (“Punishment” 171).  A May Day ballade of hers exhorts vrais amoureux in terms similar to those of the dit:  “pensez de bien amer.”  Amours and the springtime together command or demand love from voz doulz cuers:  “Amours le veult et la saison le doit” (Autres Balades, 9:1-8, in Roy 1:217).  Another May Day poem of hers uses much the same associations for a different purpose.  The month is gracious and gay, offering the bountiful delights of fields and woods to all; and all rejoice, save the speaker, who feels ‘the grievous hurts of love’ more strongly than ever, by contrast with others’ joy (cited Willard, Christine 55).  A fugitive note of melancholy also sounds in the dit, but it quickly fades; Christine assures us that the doulz bruire of the river Seine so much delights the hearts of the travelers that there is no sorrow it does not make flee (144-48).

    The courtiers who accompany Christine are on their best behavior, conversing amicably.  No one is silent; no one speaks sharply.  We talked mainly, says Christine, of love:  “Lors liement devisions des nouvelles / Et des estours / Qui moult souvent aviennent en amours “ (67-9).  The ride through the flowery meadows has the same jewel-toned realism as the miniatures which illustrate the story in two manuscripts of the dit, pictures in the style of the French translations of Boccaccio or the Très Riches Heures of the Duke of Berry.4  Both pictures and poetry capture the fragile beauty of the passing moment.  Christine points out the diverse colors of the blossoms, evoking the custom of lovers’ exchange of flower wreaths and rings par druerie (112):  “. . . verdes, rouges et perses / Jaunes, indes . . . / . . . vermeille, dont amant et amie / Font chappellez” (102-8).  As the tapestry unfolds, we see the shepherds with their flocks along the Seine, the royal château of Saint-Germain-en-Laye, the neighboring forest.  The shepherds, too, are making garlands of wildflowers; the travelers amuse themselves by playing games and singing.  Their songs join with those of the birds, especially the nightingales (123-6, 143, 176-84) they hear repeatedly along the way.

    When a cool breeze lifts the riders’ mantles and refreshes them during their journey, Christine attributes it to the good graces of Amours:  “Ce fist Amours, ce croy je, de sa grace / Qui l’envoya ainsi en tel espace” (162-3).  When they come to a lovely shady spot in the forest, she praises it as the most beautiful place one could find, perfect for a lovers’ meeting:  “ . . . et qui peut face a face / La ses amours veoir ou les embrace / Je ne cuide mie que pou li place” (197-99).  In her own words, she and her companions truly believe that Amours prepared “A cellui jour toute gaye honnesté” (206).

    The talk of love which so preoccupies the travelers ceases abruptly after line 211 (“deviser d’aucun parti d’amour”), just as they ride out of the forest and up to the gates of Poissy.  Christine stresses that they neither dance nor talk of love (“N’y parlames d’amours ne ne dançames,” 665) while with the nuns—as well as that they resume both activities as soon as they leave the convent grounds and retire to their lodgings in the evening.  The next morning, when the visitors depart after hearing mass in the convent church and taking leave of the nuns, they are no sooner on the road than they return to picking flowers and parlant d’amoretes (899).

    On first arriving at Poissy the travelers change into their finest garments before entering the gates of the priory (or abbey as it was usually called, though governed by a prioress).  While Christine’s step-by-step description of the grounds can be corroborated in its general outlines by later documents, she is herself the sole authority for many of the elements of her picture of life at Poissy, including the emotional and spiritual environment of the community.5  She emphasizes the convent as enclosure, both sheltering and shutting in its inhabitants.  Her major focus throughout is on the magnificence of the abbey (“riche et precieuse,” 46; “bel estat royal,” 298; “grans voultes, haultes devers les nues,” 389), the security of the home it offers, the virtuous and deserving nature of the women who live there.  Though she reports on various religious observances, principally ceremonies in the beautiful abbey church, as on the austerity of the nuns’ lives, there is little religious fervor in the portrait.  We learn more of habits made of fine black cloth and trimmed with white rabbit fur than of vocations, more of barred windows, beatings, and fasting than of prayers.

    Not that the life of the community is portrayed as unremittingly bleak:  Christine’s insistence on the strictness of the Dominican rule seems designed mainly to assure the reader of the purity of the religieuses.  She stresses that they are rarely allowed visitors and that their conversation is completely unworldly.  Poissy is not a convent in name only, as some of the less well-regulated establishments apparently were; the wall which encloses this abbey is both physical and mental.  In a poem full of the sights and sounds of the natural world, as of the pleasures of mixed company, the nuns’ isolation is ambiguous.  It certainly protects them, but it has a high price:  after observing that the nuns are never permitted male visitors, except for family, and then not in private, she wonders if it ever pains them that they cannot go out of the convent, at any time or in any weather, and that they seldom see any outsiders (300-312).

    Having raised the issue, Christine refuses to consider it further (openly), returning—after praising the nuns’ beauty (“comme angelz” 313)—to the mild martyrdom that characterizes their cloistered lives, in the striking image of their beds:  these ladies do not sleep on featherbeds but rather on hard pallets covered with precious tapestry, “biaulx tapis d’Arras” (317).  Their religious duty requires that they mortify themselves for their souls’ sake, but, as is consonant with their high social status, they suffer in a setting of great beauty.  They are not spared pains, however.  They are beaten if they do not get up for matins, and, we learn later, they forfeit their dinner if they come late to the refectory at mealtime.

    The severity of the rules governing their daily life contrasts both with the splendor of their surroundings, the buildings and parklands, and the warm hospitality they lavish on their visitors.  Christine’s daughter, who has come to kneel before her mother and receive her kiss, accompanies the poet on a grand tour of the grounds.  They go hand in hand to church, to the gardens, to the handsome chamber where Marie de Bourbon, the prioress, greets the poet and her other guests, then to an elegant lunch served on gold and silver dishes.  Later they visit the dormitory, the refectory, the chapter house. . . .  Everywhere they go Christine finds much to admire. The whole place seems more beautiful than anything since the time of Abel, she declares, riming bel and Abel (384-5); it was “fait de bon maistre / Car se semble droit paradis terrestre” (381-2).  A majestic pine tree catches her attention:  “un trés hault pin, / Ne fut veü plus bel depuis Pepin” (401-2).  The convent is thus epitomized as the best in terms of Biblical and secular French history, at once.

    Though she speaks of everything from ovens and wine barrels to altar ornaments, Christine seems most impressed, after the church, by the fountain that supplies fresh clean water to all parts of the compound and by the extensive gardens, orchards, and parks.  When she visits these natural beauty spots she repeats the idea of a paradise, “un trés doulz paradis” (557), and goes on to describe a landscape of wonderful abundance that pleases all who come there, the fruit trees, the birds, the deer and rabbits, the ponds full of fishes, a place one could never tire of, in any season.

    Anderson and Zinsser suggest that the trip out to Poissy and the stroll around the grounds all offer Christine and her courtier companions a needed “rest from the routine and pressure of the court” (23).  Quite true, no doubt, but there is more:  this walled garden with a “wilder area where deer and other animals roamed” (Willard, “Visit” 4) encloses nature as the outer walls enclose the nuns themselves.  This wilderness inside the walls reveals by opposites the artificiality of both court and cloister.

    When the convent’s dinner bell sounds the nuns must say good-bye to their guests and hurry to the refectory, lest they miss their meal.  Christine’s daughter, who is still holding her mother’s hand, begs her mother not to go back to Paris yet, but to come back to the abbey after dinner.  The visitors accordingly leave the convent to dine in town, before returning to continue their visit.  They eat lightly, amidst blooming lavender, roses, and cherry trees, and then go back to the convent, where they receive the special privilege of entering twice in one day.  Christine observes rather curiously that all of her party wanted to be there, particularly the men, who found only too pleasing the sweet graces of the nuns, plump and lily-white, and the prioress was reluctant to allow any more time to the visitors, for fear of gossip, though she was finally persuaded to let them stay a while longer.

    Perhaps it is because of this fear of scandal that Christine is so careful to specify that the conversation they have with the nuns in the garden by the fountains is almost entirely concerned with religious matters, prayers and the Passion and serving God with devotion and good intentions.  The rosy-fresh young nuns, “Qui moult joennes furent ou lieu encloses” (674), know nothing else, and it would be a great sin, our poet declares, to take away their innocence.

    At the moment of parting for the night Christine begins to weep, it is so hard for her to separate from the daughter “in whom is my desire” (703), and her friends even reproach her for the excess of her amistié (709).  They talk of other things to draw her from her melancholy, and soon, in another garden, at their lodgings for the evening, everyone begins to sing and dance and discuss questions of love and honor over supper.  The prioress sends them wine in gilded pots, and the rest of the nuns send a sugary dessert with apples and pears.

    It is during this evening that the implied patron, the nobleman to whom Christine is sending the poem, is mentioned, though, mysteriously or perhaps coquettishly, she does not actually say his name, only that he was named—and named as a paragon of courtly graces, “Vray fin amant comme Palamedès” (826), and the best knight in the world.  Christine praises his wisdom and prowess.  She tells of her “vow and promise” (855) to write to him, and one of her group volunteers to take her poem to him.  At the end of the meal, after washing and saying grace, Christine and her friends go out into the fields to delight once more in the song of the nightingales and to watch the fish being caught along the Seine.  They stroll and sing and play until time to retire for the night.

    When the company departs the next morning the tone at first seems little changed.  After a few words of praise for their horses (Christine describes them with good-humored affection in terms much like those she uses for her lady companions or the nuns), our poet again speaks of flowers and love, forest and birds, but this time the birdsong evokes poignant memories of love.  Soon Christine spies the most beautiful girl of her band, who is riding alone and looking pensive.  A gently-bred young squire, whose sighs make the poet suspect his own maladies of desire, is near by.  Christine calls him to her, and they go to the side of the despondent damsel, entreating her to tell them her troubles.  What follows is the promised love debate; it is rather conventional in its overall form, but Christine enlivens it by creating a mixture of rivalry and flirtatiousness in the dialogue between the two unhappy lovers.  They are both determined to remain loyal to their absent beloveds, despite the despair each feels as to the possibility of a happy outcome to his or her love affair, yet they play games with each other that involve the same sort of ornate language, the oath-swearing and extravagant compliments that courtly lovers traditionally exchange.  The squire implores the damsel “par grant amour” (973) to reveal the reasons for her sadness, and he vows by the Virgin Mary that he will cure her of her grief.

    Throughout the lengthy debate Christine presents herself as a sympathetic audience for their complaints, allowing them to indulge in detailed, rather sensual descriptions of the persons they love, and encouraging them to express the extremes of remembered joy and present sorrow.  Whereas, in the ride out to Poissy everything conspired to cause pleasure, now everything increases the lovers’ pains.  The very enumeration of the charms of the absent beloved serves, Roy observes (2:xvii), to accentuate the lover’s regrets at losing such a paragon of ideal beauty.  In other times, says the young girl, she and her sweetheart had no other thought than how to love well.  Now she is full of rage and tears.  The vocabulary Christine lends the girl for her lament echoes Christine’s own lyric lamentations on her widowhood, and the poet even uses the same phrase for the damsel’s imprisoned beloved, taken away from her by an ill-fated expedition against the Turks, that figures in a poem about death taking away Christine’s husband:  “le bel et bon et sage” (1263, 1318; cf. Cent Ballades 9:13).  Douglas Kelly, in discussing Christine’s lyrics, has observed that the language of courtly love is essentially identical to that of conjugal love in her work and in the work of certain of her contemporaries; Kelly sees her, moreover, as a defender of courtly love:  “the language of courtly conventions was the only one she knew to communicate the reality and depth of her feelings” (192-3).

    Indeed, despite the criticism of courtly love as fraud or illusion in much of her writing, despite her acute awareness of the misery any lovers must experience when Fortune frowns on them, Christine in the Dit de Poissy continues to cherish the ideal of couples united in mutual loyal affection, even if that ideal is present only in absence during the love debate itself (cf. Dulac, “Malheur,” and Willard, “Punishment”).

    Like the nuns at Poissy the sad damsel’s absent beloved resembles an angel in beauty, and the young woman would give all she has, even her life, to ransom him (as his family is reluctant to do).  She calls on God for help in her extremity, and seems to see no contradiction between her love and her piety, though, again like Christine, she is concerned about the power of Fortune in human events.  Like a Louise Labé of the fifteenth century this young woman tries to conceal her grief when in company, but she is alone in her sorrow in the midst of the bonne chiere en commun (1349).

    When the debonair squire gets his turn to talk, he discounts the young woman’s grief and concentrates on his own.  He too is a victim of Fortune; his particular problem is loving too much a woman who seems unwilling or unable to love him in return.  Christine allows him to paint a pretty picture of his downfall, his happy ignorance of love until the day he is caught unawares in a place where Amours exercized his authority over young people (“Amours sa droitture / Vouloit avoir / Des joennes gens,” 1415--7).  He falls in love when he hears a lady sing so well that she outdoes all others.

    The portrait of her that he gives has all the expected features, golden-blond curls, skin like ivory, etc., with attention given even to her dainty little ears and her dimples.  “Toute parfaitte / En grant beaulté” (1568-69) all the way to her fashionably shod foot, this lady is not inexperienced in anything “Qui a valable / Dame d’onneur soit faire raisonable” (1580-81), and for a long time her young admirer is content simply to enjoy her presence, her conversation and her laughter.  This time of admiration from afar, i.e., from a safe psychological and often physical distance, for he is frequently so absorbed in his thoughts and dreams that he does not even need to see her except in his imagination, is the happiest moment of his one-sided love affair.  “Si jouoye et dançoie et chantoie / Par grant revel / Moult liement comme amoreux nouvel, / Et du gay temps le trés doulx renouvel / Lié me tenoit   . . .” (1655-59).  When he eventually tries to elicit some response from the lady, telling her of his love, he is soon disillusioned.  Christine is careful to have him assert the honorable nature of his passion; a smile or a glance would satisfy him:  “aultre plaisir / Ne sceüsse en ce monde choisir” (1709-10).

    Nonetheless, after a period in which the lady does show him bonne chiere and accept his love service, she apparently tires of him or becomes disgruntled for some unknown reason—his thrice repeated “Ne sçay pour quoy” (1765, 1772, and, in a variant, 1782) expresses his puzzled pain—and refuses to show him any more favor.  For him this is a real exile for, though he still gets to see her, he has no hope of softening a heart “plus dur / Encontre moy que de marbre un gros mur” (1868-9).

    Shut out of his mistress’s heart, the lover suffers agonies of grief and jealousy, fearing she may give some rival the love she refuses him.  The squire concludes, speaking to the other debater:  “J’ay plus de mal que vous, si nous taison, / Atant souffise, / Car bien savez qu’en vous est toute assise / De vostre ami la vraye amour et mise” (1943-46).  The damsel, then, is in possession of her sweetheart’s love, however far away he may be from her, however harsh his imprisonment may be for both of them.  She replies tartly that her knowledge of her lover’s love for her increases the love she herself bears him and, thus, her own suffering, while the fellonne behavior of the squire’s lady love gives him reason to regret her less (1997-2001).

    The debate having reached its predictable and predicted impasse, both debaters turn to Christine to find them a wise and loyal judge, who could hear their arguments and decide the right par raison and by experience in love (2014-17).  She proposes the chier Sire to whom, we know, she is addressing the dit, and her proposal is enthusiastically accepted by both parties in the dispute.

    At this point Christine and her two young friends rejoin the others in their company, and they all ride happily the rest of the way back to Paris, ending at her house, where they dine “a grant joye et a festes” (2059).  As her guests depart, the two lovers remind her of her promise to write up their affair, and she begins her composition shortly thereafter, “Ce present dit, si com l’oiez retraire” (2066).  In the final lines Christine turns away from her reader(s) even as she presents herself to him/them/us:  she names herself by anagram in the last line, acting—she assures us—de cuer loyal et fin (2069) and praying God for us all.  Here Christine depicts herself as exemplar, through her writing, of courteous behavior and adopts an almost abstract stance of love service, toward the knight to whom she is writing, toward her other implied readers, towards love itself.

    Alone, except for her writing, her readers, and her memories, she names herself as one of those creintis who fear and obey true love’s laws (2075).  Jacqueline Cerquiglini analyzes the suggestive power of the various anagrams Christine chooses to use to sign her works, cri, Christ, en escrit, escrinet, as well as creintis, and notes that this last wordplay marks both the Epistre au Dieu d’Amours and Poissy.  Christine’s poetics, Cerquiglini sees, exists in a sublime tension between authenticity and service (22-3).  Solitary in her chamber, as so often portrayed in the manuscripts of her works, Christine is also solitary in her narrative of Poissy, for all that she is continually entering into communication with her courtier friends, with her daughter and the other nuns, with her readers and all true courtly lovers, and with the God she sees as ultimately favorable to them.

    Charity Cannon Willard is quite right to emphasize the contrast Christine makes between the turbulent emotions of the two unhappy lovers, each yearning for what he or she cannot have, and “the tranquility of the cloistered sisters” (“Visit” 9), apparently exempt from such human sorrows.  The dit does evolve into a debate over the respective merits of the secular and the religious life (though it does not, in my reading, end there).  By the juxtaposition of two such contrasting ways of life, two opposing states of mind, the poet makes clear that her dear daughter has found in the convent an enviable haven from the vicissitudes of ordinary life, a haven to which Christine herself, we know, would later return.  Yet the dit is more complicated than that in its assessment of our human possibilities, more a triptych than a diptych; the complexity of Christine’s thought shows in her awareness of the price one must pay, whether for peace of mind or the excitements of passion.  The parallels and paradoxes upon which the poem is built act to qualify its conclusions, or, rather, our conclusions about it, since we readers are left with the seemingly impossible task of choosing whom to pity.

    The abbey of Poissy, home to princesses, filled with nobility and humility, is a Cité des Dames on earth, foreshadowing Christine’s approach in her later work, where the third and culminating book is devoted to welcoming the host of women saints—and all women of good will, past, present, or future, who might seek shelter there.  The idealized vision of a perfect community at Poissy has some interesting analogies with the picture Rabelais was to paint of his counter-monastery, the abbaye de Thélème.  Christine is as quick as Rabelais to specify that none of the inhabitants were deformed or ugly—evidently she wished to deny that convents could or should serve as dumping grounds for unwanted females, or at least to make clear that Poissy was not such a place.

    The consecrated virgins of Poissy serve God with a sober elegance and good order which both preserves them from danger, sin, and change, and refutes by example the calumnies against women Christine often combats in her other writings.  I can see why many medieval women thought the contemplative life preferable to women’s usual lot.  The innocence, the very ignorance, of the young nuns protects them—they do not seem to regret the loss of lovers or husbands or children of their own.  It is a familiar paradox that these young women, living behind walls and barred windows, could achieve a freedom of spirit and serenity difficult to find outside their gates.  Christine, however, seems to be as impressed by their material security as by their peace of mind.  A struggling widow or an unhappy wife, one of those with a husband of the type Christine labels in one of her letters as maris rudes et malamoreux, might well wish for the quiet safety of the cloister.  The 16th-century moralist Jean Bouchet, who shares many of Christine’s views, rimes proverbial wisdom when he reminds “toutes dévotes Religieuses cloistrières” that women with good husbands worry constantly about losing them:  “Femmes qui ont bons et sages mariz / Ont si grant peur de les rendre marriz / Ou de leur mort, que toute leur pensée / Mettent en eulx, dont souvent est laissée / L’amour de Dieu . . .” (Cited in Screech, 9). 

    Still, there is something disquieting in Christine’s pretty picture of convent life:  for one thing, the very vernal freshness of the setting recalls to the reader, if not necessarily to the sisters, the sensual joys they have foresworn, the fleshly fertility they have disavowed (nor does Christine here make the claims for the supernatural power of virginity or chastity that we find in the story of Claudia Quinta in the Cité des Dames [City 205-6] or in the tale of Joan of Arc, cf. Reno).  Not only on the journey but at Poissy itself flowers and birds abound, especially the lovelorn nightingale, while the convent’s denizens include those animal icons of fertility, deer, rabbits, and fish.  Natura naturans, nature naturing, lives in a harmony that frequently eludes the humans in the tale.  And the visitors to the convent, admiring as they are of the nuns, are glad to get back to worldly concerns, except perhaps for Christine herself, once more parted from her child.

    The whole poem is structured in separations, mother from child, child from world, man from woman, lover from lover, separations that are punctuated by temporary or provisional reconciliations in which opposites meet, only to part again.  The joy is real, but, in this sublunary world, it can only be an interlude between sorrows.  In that context the love debate which fills the return journey, like the nature description and social games which predominate on the way out to Poissy, like the visit to the convent itself, constitutes a phase of an ongoing argument over the best way to cope with our situation as men and women in an uncertain world.  While the poem combines a qualified celebration of convent life with a critique-and-defense of courtly love, two extremes of the relationship between the sexes, it turns in yearning toward a third ideal of freedom and mutual affection available only in a heaven where Christian and courtly merge, where we can all be truly happy together.  Thus, with Christine, we are led to a final prayer, that God may grant us good lives here below and in the end His paradise, for us and for “tous les gentilz / Vrais fins amans loiaulz” (2073-74).  Like Saint Alexis and his bride, like Tristan and Iseut, like all true loyal lovers now and to come.

 

Works Cited

Altmann, Barbara K.  “Diversity and Coherence in Christine de Pizan’s Dit de Poissy.”  French Forum 12 (1987):  261-71.

Anderson, Bonnie S., and Judith P. Zinsser.  A History of Their Own:  Women in Europe from Prehistory to the Present.  Vol. 2.  New York:  Harper & Row, 1988.

Brownlee, Kevin.  “Discourses of the Self:  Christine de Pizan and the Rose.”  Romanic Review 79 (1988):  199-221.

Christine de Pizan.  The Book of the City of Ladies.  Trans. Earl Jeffrey Richards.  Foreword, Marina Warner.  New York:  Persea Books, 1982.

___.  Cent Ballades d’Amant et de Dame.  Ed. Jacqueline Cerquiglini.  Paris:  Union Générale d’Editions, 1982.

___.  Œuvres poétiques.  Ed. Maurice Roy. SATF.  3 vols.  Paris:  Firmin Didot, 1886-96.  New York:  Johnson Reprint, 1965.

Dulac, Liliane.  “Christine de Pisan et le Malheur des Vrais Amans.”  Mélanges de Langue et de Littérature Médiévales offerts à Pierre Le Gentil.  Paris, 1973. 223-33.

___.  “Un Mythe Didactique chez Christine de Pisan:  Sémiramis ou la Veuve héroique [Du De Mulieribus Claris de Boccace à la Cité des Dames].”  Mélanges de Philologie romane offerts à Charles Camproux.  Montpellier, 1978. 315-43.

Fowlie, Wallace.  “On Writing Autobiography.”  Studies in Autobiography.  Ed. James Olney.  New York:  Oxford UP, 1988. 163-70. [Reprint of Southern Review 22 (1986):  273-79.]

Kelly, Douglas.  Medieval Imagination:  Rhetoric and the Poetry of Courtly Love.  Madison:  The U of Wisconsin P, 1978.

Margolis, Nadia.  “Christine de Pizan:  The Poetess as Historian.”  Journal of the History of Ideas 47 (1986):  361-75.

McLeod, Enid.  The Order of the Rose:  The Life and Ideas of Christine de Pizan.  Totowa, NJ:  Rowman and Littlefield, 1976.

Poirion, Daniel.  Littérature Française:  Le Moyen Age, 1300-1480.  Paris:  Arthaud, 1971.

Pougin, Paul.  “Le Dit de Poissy de Christine de Pisan:  Description du prieuré de Poissy en 1400.”  Bibl. de l’École des Chartes 18 (1857):  535-55.

Pugh, Annie Reese. “Le Jugement du roy de Behaigne de Guilliaume de Machaut et le Dit de Poissy de Christine de Pisan.”  Romania 23 (1894):  581-86.

Quilligan, Maureen.  “Allegory and the Textual Body:  Female Authority in Christine de Pizan’s Livre de la Cité des Dames.” Romanic Review 79 (1988):  222-48.

Reno, Christine.  “Virginity as an Ideal in Christine de Pizan’s Cité des Dames.”  Ideals for Women in the Works of Christine de Pizan.  Ed. Diane Bornstein.  The Michigan Consortium for Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 1981. 69-90.

Screech, M. A.  The Rabelaisian Marriage:  Aspects of Rabelais’s Religion, Ethics & Comic Philosophy.  London:  Edward Arnold, 1958.

Willard, Charity Cannon.  Christine de Pizan:  Her Life and Works.  New York:  Persea Books, 1984.

___.  “Punishment and Reward in Christine de Pizan’s Lyric Poetry.” Rewards and Punishments in the Arthurian Romance and Lyric Poetry of Medieval France.  Eds. P. V. Davies and A. J. Kennedy.  D. S. Brewer, 1987.  165-174.

___.  “A Visit to the Dominican Abbey of Poissy in 1400,”  Sewanee Medieval Symposium, April 1988.

 


[1]Roy 2: 159-222.  I want to express my appreciation to Charity Cannon Willard, for encouraging my interest in Christine’s Dit de Poissy, and especially to Jacqueline Schaeffer of the University of the South, for inviting me to be the respondent to the paper Charity presented at the Sewanee Medieval Symposium in 1988; while this current study uses a different approach to the poem, my interpretation of the dit grows out of Charity’s presentation there and my own response to it, as well as the ensuing conversation with others at the Symposium.

2 Much of Christine’s unique charm as a narrator derives from her ability to manipulate narrative distances, abolishing the separation between history and legend, classical and medieval, personal and political, even, at times, masculine and feminine styles of discourse.  See Liliane Dulac’s analysis of Christine’s treatment of Semiramis, as well as Marina Warner’s Foreword to The Book of the City of Ladies, and the articles by Brownlee, Margolis, and Quilligan on Christine’s narrative style.

3 I am indebted to Ann, my colleague at Mississippi State University and a specialist in Spanish Golden Age, for this psychological insight into calendarial symbolism, as for her invaluable service as a sounding board during our discussions of Christine’s work while I’ve been working on the Dit de Poissy.

4 For the illustrations of the Dit de Poissy see Paris, BN ms. fr. 835, fol. 74 and London, BM Harley 443l, fol 81, cited by Willard (“Visit” 11).

5 Willard does note, as evidence of the attractiveness of life at Poissy, that the royal princess mentioned in Christine’s poem, Marie de France, absolutely refused to leave the cloister when, in 1405, her parents came there to try to persuade her to leave the convent to marry a duke’s son (“Visit” 10).