By the time the narrator reiterates in poem 97 that “sense and discretion, / intelligence and consideration” protect against Fortune, noting that “Aristotle much approves memory” (97, 21–23), consolation will have taken place in the sensitive reader. These qualities, to which Christine will return in slightly differing variations throughout her career, seem to refer to the parts of the soul or brain popular made popular by theologians like William of Conches, the powers of intelligence, discernment, and memory, which Julia Sims Holderness argues Christine encountered in William’s gloss of Boethius.92 On how the consolation takes place in the cycle more specifically, Holderness sees an Augustinian influence in Christine’s emphasis on memory, explaining that the readers are consoled as they progressively work through the material in the theater of their own memories.93 Also important, Lori Walters suggests that in this cycle Christine reads Boethius through Aristotle (or, more specifically, I would add, through Aquinas’s commentary on Aristotle’s Metaphysics).94 Poem 98 begins with a reference to the Metaphysics (“All men desire knowledge”), which itself begins with a discussion of memory as the seat of experience, in that it is through memories that one establishes the basis for “experience.” Experience is practical, but it gives rise to art, that is, theory induced by the experience. Walters explains that poem 98 justifies Christine’s use of memories of love in the cycle: the readers derive universal ideas about the dangers of Fortune from the individual details of the poetry. Poem 99, with its Christian perspective, then gathers the previous two poems beneath its umbrella, foreshadowing the climax of the Advision, as we will see.
The hundred poems of the Cent balades can be visualized as a series of concentric rings. The outermost contains the first and last poems. In the first, the narrator explains that although she did not wish to compose this cycle, when asked to do so by “some people” she agreed to do their will (1, 1). In the last, she announces that she has fulfilled her promise and gives her name in an anagram. Moving inward, the next ring includes poems on the loss of the narrator’s head or boss (“chief”), the malevolence of Fortune, and the degradation of chivalry. Numerous relationships can be seen, for example, between poem 5, lamenting the death of “the head or leader of all my good and of my sustenance” (chief de tous mes biens et de ma nourriture) (5, 6), and poem 95, on the madness of Charles VI. The object of the narrator’s sorrow in poem 5 is vague (husband? king?), effecting a symbiosis of personal and communal sorrow occasioned by the king’s situation. These poems in turn embrace a core of two series of love poems. The first, running from 21 to 49, recounts a passionate love affair from the perspective of a woman. The second, running from 66 to 88, brings her lover into a dialogue with her. This structure invites reflection on the loss of leadership as manifested at the individual, communal, and universal levels.
Exploring the connections among the cycle’s poems in more detail, we see that in the opening balade, the narrator shows herself to be a model subject, submitting her will (“voulenté”) to those more highly placed than she in the social hierarchy. In so doing, Christine establishes one pole of the binary that will structure not only this cycle but her love writings in general: the emotion common to those who humbly accept their position, loving those whom they are bound to love, as opposed to the self-serving simulation of love. Asked to write some lovely words, “beaulz diz,” she emphasizes that she is acting to please others rather than herself. She further shows her virtue in her fidelity to a man whom readers take to be her husband—“he who had all of my good” (2, 20)—although she never specifies this. Love is both an act of will, the fulfilment of an obligation to a higher power, and a naturally occurring, or innate, emotion. Presupposing humility and loyalty, it binds spouses and lovers, the people and the king. This emotion is missing from the current noble ethos, as Christine laments throughout the cycle. Also established in this first poem is Christine’s pose as a “stranger to love,” her distance from love in the present (although she has loved in the past), which guarantees her sympathy while assuring the reader of her ability to judge from an objective position beyond the prison house of love. The significance of this stance is revealed near the end of the cycle.
Christine engages with difficulties particular to late fourteenth-century France in the second ring of poems, which deplore the widespread neglect of the reciprocity upon which the healthy body politic is based. Absent its center, the court cannot properly reward the deserving. The second poem of the cycle attributes contemporary moral decline to this failure. In Rome, people were honored for their prowess; at Charles VI’s court, the system of reward is out of kilter, with too much emphasis placed on “grant heritage.” The third poem reinforces passionate love as a figure for genuine emotion with its description of the tragic drowning of Leander during one of his nightly visits to Hero. This great love, like the devotion of the cycle’s narrator, serves as a standard against which to measure the false and dangerous versions of love that the poet sees at court. The emotion is one to celebrate, even though it is inevitably touched by loss. The fourth poem turns once again to court life, lamenting the devastating envy that reigns there. As envy led the Greeks to destroy Troy through treachery, so it will ruin the French kingdom.
Set against the backdrop of the ducal rivalry, the poems of the second ring reflect concrete experiences of daily court life: envy, rumor, treachery, and attempts to exclude the relatively low born from reward. The third ring, the love poems at the center of the cycle, serves as the affective substratum or microcosmic version of Christine’s analysis of the court. Offering a vision of what is wrong with the realm, the cycle construes relationships, including love relationships, as hierarchical carriers of reciprocal obligations. Amour is the lady’s superior, and thus her submission is positive. And yet it brings her pain because she cannot ascertain whether her love is fully reciprocated. Although Amour demands submission, he is fatally incapable of giving lovers the assurances they deserve. The distress of the lovers of the Cent balades reflects that of the good people of the realm, obediently loving their ruler, Charles VI, who, like Amour, is unable to appease his people’s anguish. Poem 95, lamenting the madness of Charles VI, reads France’s sorry state as the result of “our sins.” Christine’s response is to urge restoration of the values of the classical past: poems 93–97, surrounding the Charles poem, exhort the powerful to be less covetous of worldly goods and to demonstrate loyalty, and they mourn Charles’s deception by disloyal, duplicitous courtiers, who upset hierarchies for their own gain.
Despite the distress to which it gives voice, the cycle as a whole is a consolation. Christine’s suffering narrator goes through several emotional phases, rehearsing and mastering woe under Fortune’s regime but always exemplifying the virtue necessary to achieve consolation. When Poem 97 explicitly brings Boethius into the discussion of Fortune, the problems of the kingdom are turned over to Philosophy through the figure of the narrator, who is consoled, along with the court, analogically. For many of the characters of the poems, their troubled private history is the work of Fortune and the unethical courtiers who torment them. But in evoking Boethius, and in the Christian-themed poem 99 especially, Christine suggests that history, both personal and communal, is governed by Providence. Certain apparently futile acts, like loving naturally, have the power to redeem, even though the ultimate significance of what happens on earth is incomprehensible to humans. From her narrative position as a former lover, Christine fully sympathizes with the terrifying uncertainty of her characters. At the same time, however, she is removed, having found consolation.
The message that submission to higher authority is good, even if painful, resounds throughout the cycle, and in delivering this message to a court public involved in a contentious discussion of hierarchy, Christine offers a form of political commentary, all the more pointed given the debate culture animating the royal court. The Cent balades are followed in the Livre de Christine by several groups of lyric poems in a variety of forms that offer further evidence of Christine’s engagement with contemporary issues. For example, Christine dedicates many poems written as New Year’s gifts, étrennes, to members of the court, among them Charles d’Albret (208–11, 225–26), Isabeau of Bavaria (227–28), Louis of Orleans (228–29), Anne de Montpensier