“the psalter of Saint Louis, out of which he learned in his childhood.” How curiously the spheres of imagination of chivalrous romance, and of religious veneration, blend here with the coming spirit of the Renaissance!
About 1300 the sword of Sir Tristram, with an inscription in French verse, was said to have been discovered in Lombardy, in an ancient tomb.[1] Here we are only a step from Pope Leo X, who accepted solemnly, as though it were a relic, a humerus of Livy, offered him by the Venetians.
This hero-worship of the declining Middle Ages finds its literary expression in the biography of the perfect knight. In this genre the figures of recent history gradually superseded the legendary ones like that of Gillon de Trazegnies. Three of these lives of contemporary and illustrious knights are characteristic, although very different from each other: those of Marshal Boucicaut, of Jean de Bueil, and of Jacques de Lalaing.
The military career of Jean le Meingre, surnamed the Marshal Boucicaut, had led him from the defeat of Nicopolis to that of Agincourt, where he was taken prisoner, to die in captivity, six years later. As early as 1409 one of his admirers wrote his biography from reliable information, but with the intention of producing, not a book of contemporary history, but a mirror of chivalrous life. The real facts of this hard life of a captain and statesman disappear beneath the appearances of ideal heroism. The marshal is depicted as the type of a frugal and pious knight, at once courtly and well read. He is not rich. His father would neither augment nor diminish his possessions, saying: “If my children are honest and brave, they will have enough; if they are worthless, it would be a pity to leave them much.” Boucicaut's piety has a Puritan flavour. He rises early and remains in prayer for three hours. However occupied or hurried he may be, he hears, on his knees, two masses a day. On Fridays he dresses in black. On Sundays and festal days he makes pilgrimages on foot, discourses of holy matters, or has some life of a saint read out to him or some story of “the valiant dead—Roman or other.” He lives soberly, he speaks little, and when he speaks it is of
- ↑ A sword of Tristram figures also among King John's jewels lost in the Wash in 1216.
