(as Spanish courtesy demands to this day). The company excuse themselves politely, upon which it becomes requisite to accompany them part of the way, in spite of their repeated protestations.
These futile forms become touching, and their moral and civilizing value is better understood, on remembering they emanated from the passionate soul of a savage race, struggling to tame its pride and its anger. Quarrels and acts of violence go hand in hand with the ceremonious abdication of all pride, of which they are the reverse. Noble families disputed fiercely for that same precedence in church by which they courteously pretended to set little store.
Often enough native rudeness pierces through the thin veneer of politeness. Duke John of Bavaria, the elect of Liège, is a guest at Paris. At the festivities given in his honour by the great nobles, he wins all their money from them in gaming. One of the princes cannot restrain himself any longer, and exclaims: “What devil of a priest have we got here?” (It is the chronicler of Liège, Jean de Stavelot, who reports the fact.) “What, is he to win all our money? Whereupon my lord of Liège rose from the table and said angrily: I am not a priest and I do not want your money. And he took it and threw it all about the room; and many marvelled greatly at his liberality.”
The magnificent order maintained at the court of Burgundy, praised by Christine de Pisan, by Chastellain, and by the Bohemian nobleman Leon of Rozmital, acquires its full significance only when compared with the disorder which reigned at the court of France, Burgundy’s older and more illustrious model. In a number of his ballads Eustache Deschamps complains of the misery at court, and these complaints are not merely variations on the familiar theme of disparagement of court life. Bad fare and poor lodgings; continual noise and disorder; swearing and quarrels; jealousies and injuries; in short, the court is an abyss of sins, the gate of hell.
Neither the sacred respect for royalty, nor the almost sacramental value attaching to ceremonies, could prevent decorum from being occasionally ignominiously thrust aside on the most solemn occasions. At the coronation banquet of Charles VI, in 1380, the duke of Burgundy seeks, by force,
