TRUE LIES: FROM SPEAKING COURTLY TO COURTSPEAK

Odysseus knew that “words . . . full of beguilement” (line 363) are ultimately mightier than the “fire-point-hardened . . . beam of olive” (lines 382, 387) he twirled into the Cyclops’s eye, and so did Lancelot and Lunete and Iseut know that language can be more effective than any knight’s mighty sword. Three twelfth-century instances of particular uses of language invite us to reflect upon the linguistic, social, and literary implications of lying.

When Meleagant accuses Kay of having slept with Guinevere, Lancelot, the morning after having had “quan qu’il vialt” (Roques, Les romans de Chrétien de Troyes 3: line 4669; “his every wish,” Kibler 264) with the queen, offers to fight the accuser in order to prove that “onques ne le se pansa” (Roques 4935; “never so much as conceived of such a deed,” Kibler 268) and “n’i jut ne ne la santi” (Roques 4973; “never slept with her or touched her,” Kibler 268); “de celui qui a manti / praigne Dex, se lui plest, vangence / et face voire demostrance” (Roques 4974–76; [God will] “show His righteousness by taking vengeance on whichever of” the two, Meleagant or Lancelot, “has lied,” Kibler 268).

As Lunete puts it to Laudine, her once bereaved and now quasi-widowed mistress, the knight who has just proven his worth by fighting Gauvain to a draw would be willing to defend her domain if she swears to reconcile him with his lady, whose love he has lost. Laudine agrees and finds herself caught in Lunete’s “geu de la verté” (Roques, Les romans de Chrétien de Troyes 4: line 6624; “game of truth”; see Kelly),^[1] at the conclusion of which she must discover that Gauvain’s opponent, known to most only as the Knight with the Lion, is in fact Yvain, and that she herself must therefore be his lost lady.

After having had Tristan, disguised as a leper, carry her through the mire of the Mal Pas, Iseut can swear

Q’entre mes cuises n’entra home,

Fors le ladre qui fist soi some,

Qui me porta outre les quez,

Et li rois Marc mes esposez

that never did a man come between [her] thighs, except the leper who turned himself into a beast of burden and carried [her] across the ford, and King Mark [her] own wedded lord. (Gregory lines 4205–08)

Iseut’s oath is not extant among the fragments of the story by Thomas d’Angleterre, but Gottfried von Straßburg (lines 15710–23; see Bédier 210) renders it thus:

My lord King [. . ., h]ear the oath which I mean to swear: “That no man in the world had carnal knowledge of me or lay in my arms or beside me but you, always excepting the poor pilgrim whom, with your own eyes, you saw lying in my arms” (Hatto 247–48)

and who is, of course, none other than Tristan, Béroul’s leper.

These examples of ends to which twelfth-century manipulators of French^[2] could put their language have moral implications of varying degrees of seriousness. Lunete tells Laudine the truth: the Knight with the Lion has indeed lost the love of his lady; but she tells her less than the whole truth: that the knight is in fact her husband. Meleagant has lied since Kay truly did not sleep with Guinevere; but his is a half-lie only, for Guinevere has indeed been slept with. Consequently, if Meleagant’s is a half-lie, the truth Lancelot claims is but a half-truth, and God should be hard-pressed to decide on whichever of the two to take vengeance. Finally, Iseut is obviously both right and wrong, out-manipulating both Lunete and Lancelot by means of three little words: “entre mes cuises” (Gregory 4205).

These textual situations remind us that lying, to whatever degree, concerns not only ethics but also, and most fundamentally, language. Without suggesting that no-one in French literature has ever lied before Iseut did (and/or did not), it does seem to me that linguistic deception, to whatever end, requires that language and linguistic consciousness have attained a certain degree of sophistication: language makes lying possible while lying at the same time perfects the linguistic preconditions of its existence and refinement (cf. Sapir 20–21). Why indeed would behavior such as the one championed by Lancelot, Lunete, and Iseut seem rather incongruous in an older world-order, the epic one, for example? Because in that order things, events, and people were what they appeared to be, and words meant what they said. There, the Knight with the Lion would have been the Knight with the Lion, and Yvain would have been Yvain, forever banned from Laudine’s presence; Lancelot might have said: ‘I know that Kay did not sleep with Guinevere, because I did’; and the leper/pilgrim could never have been Tristan in disguise. The great majority of Mark’s and Arthur’s subjects still live in this world of “moral orthodoxy,” religious “legalism” (Hunt 502, 515) and “blind determinism” (Sticca 231) in which God is held to judge men only by their actions, using purely “external signs as the criterion of [His] judgement” (Hunt 505). Appearances, formalism, and literalness safeguard the truth: Meleagant saw blood and was convinced of Kay’s guilt; Laudine saw the Knight with the Lion and could not conceive of him as being Yvain; Mark, the barons, and everyone else saw the leper and knew that Iseut spoke the literal truth. The literal truth alone satisfies not only humans, but it satisfies even God: Lancelot will win his judicial duel with Meleagant, and Iseut would have passed the test of fire had it not been deemed superfluous.

This uncomplicated rigorism had been the ethical norm ever since Augustine who established quite firmly that “mentiri autem nunquam licet” (De mendacio), that “it is never lawful to lie” (Hunt 525). The Augustinian ethical dogma has its sprachphilosophisches corollary in the pre-Aristotelian, pre-Heraclitian or, one might say, “mythical” perception that objects and the words which designate them form indissoluble units (Hennigfeld 143).^[3] If Iseut says “leper,” it is inconceivable that she could thus be designating Tristan. With Aristotle and the Stoics, however, the inseparableness of, on the one hand, “lógos” as a combination of Thinking and Speaking, and of, on the other hand, “ón” or Being, began to unravel, an evolution culminating in Augustine’s recognition (De dialectica, De magistro) that the “verbum” is nothing more than a “signum” (Hennigfeld 143). And signs have always been, from the Stoics to Saussure, ambiguous. Augustine is therefore obliged to soften his initial, Scripture-based dogmatism and admit that, since neither logic nor rhetoric can fully control ambiguity, signs of truth may sometimes designate falsehoods, and that deceitful acts may sometimes, in fact, be beneficent (Contra mendacium; Hunt 527).

The ground has thus been prepared for the great intellectual revolution of the twelfth century whose beneficiaries are Béroul, Chrétien de Troyes, Lunete, Lancelot, Tristan, Iseut, and readers like us, then and now. Political, socio-economic, and cultural events dissolve over time the black-and-white order of old into a new Zeitgeist of many shades of gray, and the manner in which language is perceived and used is a fundamental factor in this evolution from unquestionable and unquestioned certainties to bewildering relativism, from hagiography, early historiography and the epic to romance, fabliaux, the Roman de Renart and the entire culture^[4] of “semiotics of deceit” culminating in “The Pathelin Era” (Maddox). Remarkably, the birth of romance seems to have been made possible much less by the northward-bound ideology of troubadour courtliness than by the ethical thinking and writings of innovative clerics, Abelard (perhaps foremost) among them. According to Abelard (Ethica), God judges not actions but the heart (Hunt 507), He judges not the “signum” but the speaker’s conscience and intention that lie hidden behind it.

If we call certain romances “courtly,” we should do so not because they deal with what nineteenth-century criticism has named “courtly love,” but because the inescapably ambivalent language their creators consciously use and the concomitantly equivocal world they thus depict and, at the same time, address (cf. Ribard), are the speech and the milieu of the court. We know that Chrétien de Troyes wrote for Marie de Champagne, and there is nothing “commune” about the learned Béroul’s intricately dialectic version of the Tristan story. Marie de France put it perfectly at the end of her twenty-fifth fable: “Tant est li munz fals” (Warnke): “The world’s so false” (Spiegel) that only those who understand how deeply contradictory reality is rooted in the ambiguous signs of speech of courtly writers, characters and readers, will succeed in resolving the ethico-linguistic paradoxes of stories as hotly, or at least warmly, debated as Lunete’s and Iseut’s.

As for Lancelot, he hoodwinks King Bademagu and his son Meleagant with consummate skill, knowing full well that the formality of his oath^[5] will make both take his half-truth for the full truth. His is clearly not a pardonable act of beneficent deception, not only because his intention is to conceal his transgression, but also because offering to fight the fierce Meleagant to prove his point is tempting at once his fate and God: indeed, had the duel not been halted, Lancelot may well have lost it, as if God, who was to designate the real liar, had decided that they were both guilty, and devious Lancelot possibly more so than blustering Meleagant who had “merely” jumped to conclusions. But what of Kay, Guinevere, and us? Kay must have been baffled, for once: he knew that he had not slept with Guinevere, but whose was the blood, then, that so upset Meleagant? Did Kay suspect Lancelot? The text does not say. The text does say, however, that Guinevere expressly permitted King Bademagu to stop the judicial duel: who else indeed, besides God, was in a better position to judge Lancelot’s stratagem risky, if not outright reprehensible? As for us readers, do we feel ambiguous about Lancelot’s skillful use of ambiguity? Probably no more than Chrétien de Troyes did, who made it quite clear that he wrote about Lancelot only because he was told to do so. Lancelot may in fact strike us, as he perhaps appeared to Chrétien, too, as a hero whose character is much less ambiguous than his words and deeds, whose words and deeds are not commanded by an Abelardian conscience and intention, but whose intentions are instead strait-jacketed by an absurd code of behavior that precludes narrative and moral development, and redemption.

Narration and redemption: cajoling, reasoning, persuading, staging solemn oaths, reuniting estranged spouses, these are Lunete’s business. In the world of the court, and having manifestly mastered the arts of the trivium, she has perfected the “jeu de la vérité,” an apparent oxymoron designating a strategy by which to “prandre a parole” (Roques 4: 1705), to entrap (Laudine) with words. What is the truth with which Lunete plays? It is a state secret, for she alone knows that Yvain has been disguising himself, and this deep truth she envelops in the surface truth of a knight trying to regain his lady’s favor, because she knows or suspects that Laudine will not willingly take Yvain back, just as she did not readily marry him in the first place. Laudine must therefore be entrapped into reconciliation as she had to be persuaded, by Lunete’s classic syllogism (Kelly, “Le jeu de la vérité” 107), of the benefits of a second marriage: if Yvain was able to kill Laudine’s first husband, who would always have been and who has ever since been the better protector of her realm? Precisely! At the bottom of both Lunete’s indisputable logic and her ingenious truth game lies a raison d’état: for the security of the realm (and of Lunete’s job), Esclados needed to be replaced, and Yvain needs to be reinstated. Are Realpolitik and Lunete’s exploitation of Laudine’s old-order trust in mere words sufficient to qualify the damsel’s actions as beneficent? Probably. Yet compared to Erec et Enide, for example, or even to Lancelot, the nature and thrust of the “courtliness” of this romance have changed, have moved away from the heart, and from love, to logic and rhetoric, and to statecraft. If Laudine ever loved Yvain, it was with a love induced by reasoning (Kelly, “Le jeu de la vérité” 111) and reduced to a litotes: Laudine loves Yvain since she must not hate him (Kelly, “Le jeu de la vérité” 109), as she will always, at the dawn of the age of relativism, not hate whomever protects her lands (Kelly, “Le jeu de la vérité” 112).

She or he who speaks courtly has learned to exploit, for better or for worse, physical appearances and the ambiguity of language. Lunete plays on Yvain’s disguise, and Lancelot experiments with the insight that language can hide at least half the truth. Iseut, however, would seem to go one step further by deliberately and elaborately creating a linguistic construct that may be at once totally true and totally untrue, and that, together with other instances of lying in the text (Cormier, Newstead, Bar), has divided the many interpreters of the romance^[6] into what may be called the Secular and the Religious. Among the former, Barbara N. Sargent-Baur has said of Tristan and Iseut that “[l]ying seems to be for both second nature” (396) and that the purpose of Iseut’s oath is “to hoodwink her audience (and manipulate God, for good measure)” (414).^[7] Sandro Sticca, on the other hand, credits Béroul with having raised

a basically immoral and ignominious adventure to a higher dignity by structurally correlating the thematic tension of the story to the nobler struggle toward personal redemption and Christian salvation. (248)

Is there a pre-romance world or text for which such a discrepancy of interpretation is conceivable? Do we need further proof of the power of the ambiguity of those three little words: “entre mes cuises”?

The secular interpretation is, of course, the literal one, the one which plays to Mark, the barons and the rest of Iseut’s audience, the one which judges her action. But what if we judge her heart? By all appearances, she has committed adultery, but was it not the potion that made her do it, against her will and intention (cf. Hunt 536)? And what is her intention in offering the controversial oath? Far from intending to deceive Mark, she means to rid his court of the “original cause of disharmony” (Sticca 245), the malevolent barons, whom her “legerdelangue” proves wrong, so that, once the potion has fully abated, she may return to Mark and to a reestablished moral (and social, cf. Nichols) order in which she will never be accused again.

In this Iseut succeeds partly by playing, as Lunete does with Yvain, on Tristan’s disguise.^[8] But where Lunete has to shore up her charade by putting on an elaborate swearing ceremony and by admonishing Laudine not to blame her afterwards (Roques 4: 6620–34), Iseut can count on the sole efficacy of her irresistible pun^[9]: holding Tristan in a passionate “enjambement” and pressing him between her legs while being piggybacked across the ford, are both covered by an admirable linguistic invention which may put speaking courtly over the edge and into the realm of courtspeak.

Hints not only to the effect that what one sees is not always what there is, but also to the effect that speaking at court is sometimes more than meets the ear, resonate in Chrétien’s interesting characterization of Lunete’s entrapment of Laudine as “cortois” (Runte): “Lunete qui molt fu cortoise / . . . / Au geu de la verté l’a prise, / . . . molt cortoisemant” (Roques 4: 6620–25) (Chrétien also calls her “brete” [1584], from German “bredan” = entwine, trap). Courtliness, for Lancelot, Lunete and Iseut, is obviously not just traditional “vaillance / prouesse / noblesse / honneur” or “loyauté / largesse / sagesse / amour” or “grâce / beauté / belles manières” (Gorcy, Collins). “Courtly,” for them, may carry connotations of “curialis” for which French, until it took “courtisan” from Italian, had no word. Historically, those destined to serve secular and ecclesiastical courts learned not only to read and write (“litteræ”), but also “elegantiam,” “suavitatem,” and “nobilitatem morum” (Jaeger 113–26, 214); in Cicero’s De officiis, they studied “facetiam,” a quality that

can involve the skillful creation of an unpleasant illusion which is then broken with theatrical effect to reveal a courtly and agreeable state of affairs. Facetia involves [a certain slyness and wordly-wise shrewdness,] a certain magicianship with words . . . deception and sleight of hand, (Jaeger 167)

or courtspeak; in the middle of the twelfth century, the Facetus de moribus et vita advised: “Retain your modest restraint even when speaking falsehoods. / For, always to speak the truth you may take to be wrong. / For the skilled man, it is often praiseworthy to conceal wrongdoing” (Jaeger 167).

The particular instances and circumstances of linguistic and moral behavior discussed here add a hitherto neglected dimension to the world of “politesse recherchée” (FEW 2: 850) of courtly romance. This literary world of love and duty (Erec et Enide) is also the world of court satires and Fürstenspiegel. Indeed, by the late twelfth century, writing against the abuses of court life (Petrus Damiani’s Contra clericos aulicos [c. 1072]) and the topos of “contemptus mundi” already have a long tradition (Jaeger 54–66). And a line may perhaps be drawn from Lancelot, Lunete, and Iseut, especially from Lunete, to the didactic genre of “miroirs des princes” (Etienne de Fougères’s Livre des manières, Egidio Colonna’s Livre du gouvernement des rois, Robert de Blois’s Enseignement des princes) and all the way to Machiavelli. Romances of the court, set in a world and a language which “tant [sont] fals,” would seem to contain the seeds of the slowly evolving discourse of intrigue, politics, and statecraft which culminates in the Florentine’s appropriation or reinterpretation of much pre-modern writing on curiæ and curiales. Courtlife is grounded in moral and linguistic relativism, and basic advice to any courtier is that he (or she) “adapt his (her) words [and actions] to places and times” (Giraldus Cambrensis; qtd. in Gilbert 130). It will be said that those

who accommodate themselves to the times by simulating and dissimulating . . . never fail themselves. . . . O what a good thing it is to be able to cover up and veil your secret thoughts with astute artifice of smooth and false simulations. (Leon Batista Alberti; qtd. in Gilbert 132)

Indeed, sometimes it is better, as Lancelot proved, not to say too much: “He that keepeth his mouth keepeth his life: but he that openeth wide his lips shall have destruction,” it says in Proverbs (Gilbert 130); there are later echoes of this: “Take great care in what you say or do that you may fall into as few errors as possible” (Isocrates; qtd. in Gilbert 130), or,

when time and circumstances require silence about the truth . . . he who prudently keeps still certainly does not seem to be a liar. Or if he uses deception he does not seem straightway to be a liar, since he . . . balances utility and necessity with the true and the false. (Pontanus; qtd. in Gilbert 127)

Jean Frappier called Lunete “brillante, vivace, pétulante, malicieuse, perspicace, prudente, avisée, tireuse de ficelles, et adroite” (Étude sur Yvain ou le Chevalier au lion de Chrétien de Troyes 155–57), in short, not wise (cf. Roques 4: 1006) but astute, a quality much prized at court: “[She] is not to be called wise who proceeds by means of shady schemes and deception, but is to be called astute” (Dante; qtd. in Gilbert 119). And if Lunete acts less disinterestedly than most assume, this maxim may apply as well: “If . . . in making plans . . . one’s intention is dishonest [one’s] ability is called astuteness” (Platina; qtd. in Gilbert 119). And depending, finally, on our interpretation of Iseut’s behavior, we may recall either Xenophon’s experience that “if a prince wishes to do great things it is necessary for him to learn to deceive” (Gilbert 125), or the dictum that “it is proper that by simulating and dissimulating [one] should often show the contrary of the truth” (Patricius; qtd. in Gilbert 126).

It would be surprising if Béroul and Chrétien had not been attuned to the Hofgeistzeit of their times, to the shift from perceiving and expressing the world “curialiter” instead of “courtoisement,” to the infiltration of the art of speaking courtly by the artifice of courtspeak. For this Frank Collins has adduced indirect yet appealing evidence, at least as far as Chrétien is concerned. Chrétien uses “courtois” most frequently in Perceval and Yvain, as if, compared to his other romances, he meant by such overuse to signify the inflated value attributed to the term. To Lunete, however, “courtoise” is applied only twice, first when she was still too young to be so characterized (Roques 4: 1007), and then at the height of her entrapment scheme, as if Chrétien, having found that “courtoise” could no longer fully describe her, had been groping for a new term, in the absence of which he had been reduced to using the old one, limiting by its extremely sparse and strategic use the possible confusion between old “courtoisie” and new “curialitas.”

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^[1]In quite a different though not totally unrelated context, Jeanette Beer entitled her sixth chapter, dealing with Guillaume de Machaut, “The Game of Truth” (73–84).

^[2]Emmanuèle Baumgartner speaks of “le pouvoir équivoque de manipuler les armes du langage” (98).

^[3]On Gottfried von Straßburg’s position on this question, see Schnell.

^[5]On medieval law concerning oaths see Blakey.

^[7]On the manipulative nature of Iseut’s oath cf. Rougemont 24. For a contrary view see Subrenat. For a more moderately “secular” interpretation of lying and swearing see Frappier, “La reine Iseut dans le Tristan de Béroul.”

^[8]Both the Knight with the Lion and the leper, as narrative stratagems, belong to folklore: “le Serment ambigu [d’Iseut] nous vient tout droit d’Orient; il y a peu de recueils de contes indiens où il ne figure et il faisait, au XIIe siècle, partie intégrante du folklore—non seulement en pays d’Islam, mais dans l’Europe chrétienne, de la Grèce à la Scandinavie” (Gallais 132).

^[9]Also called “fraude verbale” (Raynaud de Lage and Braet 163).