Christine de Pizan and the Fight for France. Tracy Adams

developed in her political allegories: the ship of Fortune sailing without a captain on the open seas, the lying that characterizes court life.

       Le livre du debat de deux amans

      A series of narrative poems follows the poetic cycles in the Livre de Christine, further developing the theme of obligation created by love and encouraging adherence to the principle of hierarchy. The first, the Debat de deux amans, invoking Louis of Orleans in the first lines and requesting that he decide the debate, asks whether love awakens a desire that, even when unreciprocated, calls forth the lover’s best qualities and should thus be embraced, or whether it only arouses the lover’s cupidity and should therefore be quashed. As we have seen, Louis was associated with love verse as a spokesman for fidelity in Jean le Seneschal’s Cent ballades, and Christine draws on this association here. Requests for judgment seem to have been calculated to confer or acknowledge status; we see similar requests for verdicts on chivalric enterprises, as when Jean de Werchin, in the context of the war with the English, asked Louis to judge a joust between Jean and anyone who wanted to challenge him.⁹⁷ To emphasize Louis’s qualities as judge, in the first lines of this debate poem Christine highlights his relationship with his father, the “sage roi Charles V”: Louis is a “Prince royal, renommé de sagece” (84, line 1).⁹⁸

      The poem’s setting is a harmonious group, firmly united (86, line 108) and assembled for a festival. The proponent of love in this work is a handsome squire; not only is he beautiful, but his grace is such that he seems to possess a greater store of complete joy than anyone else in the place (88, lines 165–69). As we have seen, Louis’s attractive appearance and affability are well attested, as is his defense of faithful love even in the face of envious slanderers in Jean le Seneschal’s Cent ballades. His detractor is a knight detached from the crowd who assumes the classical gesture of melancholy, resting his head on his left hand. He is not joyous or disorderly, although he isn’t ugly or old (89, lines 215–18). The narrator Christine, here in her “former lover” persona, is the only one who notices the knight’s pain. She watches him follow a certain young lady with his eyes, trembling. He then asks Christine why she isn’t dancing. When the squire appears, laughing, to speak of this and that, the talk turns to whether love brings joy to true lovers (93, lines 359–61). The question is so interesting that they decide to take it outdoors where they can debate it joyfully (93, lines 379–81).

      The knight begins, disparaging love as a desire that can never be satisfied (95, line 439); on the contrary, he says, it overwhelms reason (95, lines 447–51). This terrible longing brings no good, even when the lover is loved in return, for when that happens, gossips ruin everything, causing rumors and fights (“murmures et guerres”) (97, line 550). The envious steal the lover’s sweet goods. Love leads only to jealousy, and it fills a man’s heart with the rage to do evil and destroy (98, lines 589–90).

      The squire, however, is no victim of love. Rather, he accepts the emotion and becomes a better person for it. Those who die from love should blame their own crazy manner (“fole maniere”) (118, line 1378). As for the jealousy that so torments the knight, bad husbands are jealous, not true lovers (116, lines 1294–96). According to the squire, jealousy arises not from love but from cowardice (117, line 1341). When a coward encounters attractive and happy young men, he is troubled because he believes himself to be the ugliest of all (117, lines 1342–50). The squire presents examples to support his case of which Christine is sure to approve: Guesclin (123, lines 1573–74, 1579–80), Boucicaut (123, lines 1586–87), Othon de Grandson, and Hutin de Vermeilles (124, lines 1615–22).

      The debate reveals that the knight is a mean and jealous man, both covetous and violent. The squire, by contrast, is wise, eloquent, and loving. A woman brought along to observe the debate speaks out against the knight, doubting that the pain of love of which he complains is really so terrible (106, line 957) and recalling the Roman de la rose: she dismisses love, like Reason (the name of the character) in that work, as something that “is worth little and passes quickly” (108, line 967). The knight is indulging in “fole amour” (118, line 1378). The squire, too, deplores this emotion, but he handles love as something that induces virtue.

      It has been written of this poem that it concludes that “love is definitely not the ennobling force that callow youth and most preceding poetry would hold it to be,” and that this is “no surprise for Christine’s readers, who can discern this attitude in many of her poetic works.”⁹⁹ But why? The knight is the intruder, his speech a dissonant note in the discourse. Love in this poem, as in Christine’s others, is a force to which the lover must conform and that entails obligations. Those who expect compensation and refuse to suffer for it, like the knight, are undone by the emotion, while those who act in accordance with what hierarchy demands, like the squire, increase their own virtue. The debate seems to have been envisioned as a hybrid manuscript-performative event of the sort noted above, for Christine sends the same poem to Charles d’Albret along with a New Year’s poem, explaining that although the textual lovers had asked that Louis of Orleans judge their case, they also sought the opinion of d’Albret, if he would agree to read or listen to their story (21, lines 231–32).

       Epistre au dieu d’amours

      Presenting a set of arguments that presuppose an already existing debate over male versus female deception, the narrative poem Epistre au dieu d’amours is sometimes considered the first recorded remnant of the querelle des femmes. In this brief discussion, I situate this quarrel in the context of court politics. But first I consider how the poem reflects on the disorder at the royal court caused by Charles VI’s madness through the figure of Cupid, the helpless god of love. This befuddled Cupid draws on the familiar trope that equates political disorder with the inability to maintain order in one’s love life. He claims to be all-powerful and yet has no control over the love relationships of his courtiers. Surely, the one thing that Cupid should be able to do is make his subjects fall in love when and with whom he pleases. But this Cupid admits that he exercises no such control.