Poetry as French Song in Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole
Jean Renart’s Guillaume de Dole, also known as the Roman de la rose, boasts the innovation that within it are included numerous lyric pieces.1 The Introduction compared this practice of lyric insertion, typical of Northern French romance, with that of lyric quotation found among Occitania’s Mediterranean neighbors. The comparison is important, because lyric insertion is the point where the nightingales’ way comes closest to the use of quotation on that of the parrots. This chapter exploits their proximity to bring out their difference.
In the nightingales’ mode of lyric reception, the desire to repeat the first person of troubadour poetry operates above all at the level of affect and musical performance; troubadour song is adapted by poets into their native language and integrated to evolving indigenous traditions; in northern French contexts, Occitan linguistic features are assimilated to the langue d’oïl. The previous four chapters have illustrated the very different procedures of the parrots’ way, which is characterized by philological mastery and by the intersubjective interactions that are generated by knowingly modulated repetition. We have seen quotations act to map logic, test memory and recognition, inaugurate forms of writing, and redeploy authorities; even slight linguistic differences (for example, between Catalan and Occitan) are scrupulously observed; there is an endless play with supposed knowledge and the subject positions supposed to possess it.
Many critics have written about lyric insertion, but obviously they could not consider it from the viewpoint of its divergence from troubadour quotation because this has not previously been studied as a practice in its own right. I propose reading Guillaume de Dole less as innovating lyric insertion than as reacting to lyric quotation; in mapping the nightingales’ way, I suggest, Jean Renart offers his perspective on the parrots’ way. This chapter consequently differs from others in that it describes the path not followed by the texts that they discuss. It argues that Jean Renart’s promotion of poetry as song embraces practices that are the obverse of the scholastic validation of the troubadours, except that he succumbs to the lure of substituting French for Occitan as a cultural monolangue, thereby offering the parrots a kind of backdoor return. Focusing on northern France and Germany, it is intended to be read in tandem with the next chapter, which traces the parrots’ way through the Mediterranean regions contiguous with Occitania.
As his pseudonym “foxy one” suggests, Jean Renart is a slippery writer, and describing the verse insertions in Guillaume de Dole poses a number of difficulties that are exacerbated by the fact that it survives in only one manuscript (Vatican, Reg. Lat. 1725). Apart from the excerpt from a chanson de geste all the insertions appear to be either short self-contained lyric pieces or else the opening stanza or stanzas of longer songs; at the most generous count they total forty-eight; they represent a wide range of forms and probably also of distinct genres; many of them are narrative in cast, most obviously the epic excerpt, but also several of the lyrics such as pastourelles; some are used as dance tunes; and three (##16, 41, and 45) are extracts from the troubadours (see Appendix 6).2 All the insertions are represented as being sung within the fiction and perhaps were also intended actually to be sung when the romance was performed, but that is less certain since the manuscript contains neither musical notation nor spaces in which it might have been copied.3 Since the romance itself is in rhyming couplets, the whole ensemble is something of a showcase for the French verse of its period.
The plot centers on the relationship between Conrad, emperor of Germany, and Guillaume de Dole, his favorite knight. Conrad hosts great parties and, with Guillaume, organizes a spectacular tournament, but noblesse oblige; his position demands that he marry and have heirs. Who better to wed than his best friend’s sister, whom he has heard praised even though he has never met her? This seemingly heaven-sent solution is derailed, however, by the unscrupulous scheming of Conrad’s seneschal, the very person entrusted with the administration of justice at his court. The seneschal visits Guillaume’s home in Dole, worms his way into his mother’s favor, and discovers that the promised sister, Lienor, has a rose-colored, rose-shaped birthmark on her thigh. Although he has not seen her any more than Conrad has, the seneschal uses this intimate secret about Lienor’s body as evidence that he has taken her virginity. The sexual experience that mention of the rose purportedly represents passes from mouth to mouth in what amounts to a process of social rape, and the wedding is abandoned.4 But resourceful Lienor brilliantly regains her reputation, purity, and desirability as Conrad’s bride by publicly acting out the role of rape victim and planting evidence to incriminate the seneschal. When he protests his innocence, and proves it by ordeal, she is correspondingly exculpated; and the romance concludes with wedding bells. Thanks to Lienor, Conrad and Guillaume de Dole can live together happily ever after. The characters keep breaking into song throughout; if the songs actually were performed when the romance was read, it would sound something like a modern musical.
Most scholars date the romance somewhere between about 1210 and 1230,5 later than Raimon Vidal’s grammar and Abril issia, and probably also after the composition of So fo and Uc’s earliest razos and vidas. Its inclusion of troubadour quotations acquires additional resonance from the fact that its probable date range coincides with that of the Albigensian Crusade (1209–ca. 1229). This campaign, initially proclaimed against the Cathars, gradually became less a holy war and more a campaign for the political annexation of the south of France by northern French barons and their English allies. From 1212 some southern courts pass under the control of northern French lords, in 1213 the southern forces are humiliated at the battle of Muret, and from 1229 the Inquisition is established in Toulouse in order to root out the Cathar heresy. Depending whether it was composed earlier or later in the range of 1210 to 1230, Guillaume de Dole coincides either with the early years of the crusade or with the progressive subjection of much of the Midi by the French crown.6
The Albigensian campaign is not the only frontier war that coincides with the romance’s probable period of composition. An exceptionally successful king, Philip Augustus also increased the prestige of the kingdom of France at the expense of England and the Empire (based in modern-day Germany). The decisive battle of Bouvines in 1214 saw the French triumph over both. The English king John Lackland failed in his bid to regain the lands in France he had lost in 1204, and French victory also led eventually to the ending of the Ottonian emperors and their replacement by the Staufer (also called Hohenstaufen). Historian John Baldwin has read Guillaume de Dole as sympathetic to the deposed Otto, whose Welf (or Guelf) family predominated in the territories of Belgium and western Germany represented in the romance.7 But Jean Renart may have been equally interested in the successful Staufer contender for the imperial throne, Frederick II, who, as king of Rome and Sicily, upheld the imperial (or Ghibelline) cause in Italy.8 In any case, it is clear that the French domain was expanding at its neighbors’ expense, and that what was meant by “France” was changing rapidly, during the period when Guillaume de Dole was composed. Caught up in these changes, how does the romance’s treatment of the troubadours respond to their reception by France’s neighbors and her foes?
In contrast to the southern practice of quoting the troubadours as texts, the inset pieces in Guillaume de Dole are almost always explicitly described as sung;9 eleven are performed by (or together with) professional minstrels,10 twenty-three by miscellaneous courtiers,11 and the remainder by the principal actors—Conrad, Guillaume, Lienor, and the mother. Performances by courtiers appear somewhat impromptu, and often overlap or interrupt one another’s, a pattern established as early as the opening four insertions. This superimposition of voices is one reason why Michel Zink casts doubt on the traditional view that performance of the romance included actual singing, not just its representation.12 Although some songs are described as being finished, far more are said to begin than to end. We are also left uncertain how much of a particular song might be thought of as performed: the stanzas contained in the manuscript could be all that is intended to be sung, but they could also be prompts that readers or performers could extend ad lib.
The romance appears, then, as a kind of anthology not dissimilar to those examined in Chapter 4.13 But it differs from troubadour florilegia in providing a narrative frame, in the foregrounding of musical performance (none of the florilegia is notated), and in favoring opening stanzas. Occitan anthologies typically select medial coblas in which, as the biography of Ferrarino da Ferrara indicates, the reflective content of lyrics is concentrated. By contrast, the exordia overwhelmingly chosen in Guillaume de Dole are those most likely to highlight songs’ status as song. Its selection of grands chants, the French genre most imitative of the troubadours, obsessively repeats variants of the nature opening, especially birdsong, combined with an irrepressible urge to sing. The first (#11 in Appendix 6), for instance, offers four reiterations of chanter or chanson reinforced by analogy with birds’ singing:
en l’onor monsignor gasçon:
“Quant flors et glais et verdure s’esloigne
que cil oisel n’osent un mot soner
por la froidor chascuns crient e resoigne
tresqu’au biau tens qu’il soloient chanter.
E por ce chant, que nel puis oublier . . .”
(Guillaume de Dole, 844–50)
And they sing this song in honor of Gace Brulé: “When blossom and gladiolus and greenery depart, so that birds dare not sing a word on account of the cold that each fears until the good weather when they sing again, yet then I sing: because I can’t forget the good love . . .”
Only eighty lines later, the next grand chant (#12) presents the text’s first literal nightingale, again with repeated chanson/chanter:
A comencié ceste chançon:
“Li noviaus tens et mais (et violete)
et roissignox me semont de chanter;
et mes fins cuers me fet d’une amorete
un doz present que ge n’os refuser . . .”
(Guillaume de Dole, 922–26)
He began this song: “The new season and May [and the violet] and nightingale summon me to sing and my true heart makes a sweet gift for me of a love affair that I dare not refuse . . .”
Trouvère poetry is thus cast as the art of song and compared with nonverbal, nonhuman, natural sound.14
Nancy A. Jones has observed that the songs in Guillaume de Dole function like patches of color against the narrative background, much like the repeated mentions of the rose that stands out on Lienor’s thigh.15 The romance’s plot is insistently marked by the never seen but always imagined imprint of this rose, a visual stain that the characters repeatedly tell one another about in hushed tones. The rose both draws attention to sexual enjoyment and makes it easier not to see it: not in the shameful abyss of Lienor’s feminine sexuality (since in the end we are reassured that it was not sexual, let alone shameful), still less in the rampant eroticism and homoeroticism of Conrad’s court. Jean Renart’s deft, ironic narrative voice weaves around these moments of indecency, highlighting them but also ultimately avoiding them, in a spectacular combination of knowingness with understatement. Lienor’s rose, then, acts as a kind of blot on the imperial landscape of Conrad’s domains: it marks where fantasies of sexuality and femininity have been blotted out, and thus also draws attention to them.
Similarly, Jean’s prologue invites us to see the actual or imagined singing within the romance as the auditory equivalent of a blot or stain. It is described as comparable to a scarlet tincture or dye in a bizarre passage where, as Jones observes, Jean Renart does not say—as one might expect him to—that his text has been dipped in dye so as to be evenly transformed in color, but instead says that dye has been applied to the text. He might mean that the text is uniformly colored, but the wording suggests that the songs are so many blots of color upon it, similar to the patches of embroidery with which the songs are also compared. If we take seriously this analogy between the insistent stain of the rose, the blots of dye, the patches of embroidery, and the coloration effected by the lyrics, we can see the moments of song as points where the text becomes dense with sexual or social affect without necessarily assigning it meaning, just as the rose both stains the text with the scandal of sex and blots it out.16
Many critics have suggested that there are ironic discrepancies between the emotions expressed in the songs and the cruder maneuverings or urges of the characters who sing them, producing what Caroline Jewers calls “a discordant rupture of sound and sense.”17 Just as the rose acts as a visual euphemism for women’s sex, the nightingales’ way of song would then conceal, from the very characters who sing about their desire, its uglier and more compromising aspects. In particular, song disguises these aspects behind the melodious but not necessarily meaningful songs of birds, the sounds of the natural world, or, failing those, behind the formulaic conventions of courtly love and the good life. Indeed, the two forms of blot, Lienor’s rose and song, converge with one another in their parallel patterns of repetition, so that when the rose is finally established as an image of decorous innocuousness, it seems to be freshly plucked from the world of the lyric reverdie.
This effect of meaning being blotted out is especially marked in the three troubadour extracts, where birds are evoked alongside moments that are emotively expressive but semantically opaque.18 Distant and half-heard (or even unheard) birdsong in a heavily Gallicized Jaufre Rudel (#16; 262.2)19 is followed by the nightingale in the linguistically mangled Daude de Pradas (#41; 124.5), and then by Bernart de Ventadorn’s lark in an obscure rendition of his famous “Can vei la lauzeta mover” (#45; 70.43). This last is sung after Lienor has proved her innocence and the plot is being wrapped up. It interrupts, and is then sung concurrently with, a more popular romance (#44); it appears that both are performed through to the end, even though the manuscript contains only the first two stanzas of each. Immediately following, another song is begun, a French grand chant by Gautier de Soignies (#46), in which birdsong also features. Several factors conspire together, then, to make the meaning of Bernart’s text evaporate into pure song. Since Félix Lecoy’s edition emends extensively the way Bernart de Ventadorn’s text appears in the manuscript, I reproduce it here from Regina Psaki’s transcription. The parentheses in my translation mark the points at which it becomes unintelligible; the italics highlight the passages I shall comment on below, contending that they increase the emotivity of Bernart’s original text at the cost of its coherence.20
Q uant voi laloete moder de goi.ses ales
contre el rai.que sobete lesse cader par
la doucor q’el cor li vai.ensi grant en
vie mest pris de ce que voi.a ma grant
miravile est que vis del sens ne coir do[n]t
desier non fou. ha las tant cuidoie savoir
donor et point n’en sai.pas on damar
non pou tenir celi dont ja prou ne nau[ra]i
tol mei lor cor et tol meismes.et soi mees
me et tol le mon.et por tant el ne moste
rent fors desier et cor volon. —0000—
(Guillaume de Dole, 5212–27)
When I see the lark move with joy its wings in the sunbeam, which (?) itself, lets itself fall, because of the sweetness that penetrates its heart, just such envy has seized me for that which I see. It is a marvel that completely out of my mind (I do not burn? Do not run?) from which desire (was not? does not melt?). Alas I imagined I knew so much about honor and I know nothing. I cannot keep (?) from loving her from whom I will never have any benefit. She takes away my heart and she takes herself and myself and she takes the world and then she (?) gives but desire and a longing heart.
The first of the italicized passages represents the last lines of the song’s opening stanza as edited by Lazar: “Meravelh es quar desse / Lo cor desirier no.m fon” (Song 31, 7–8; It is a marvel that, at once, my heart does not melt with desire). The Occitan adverb desse (at once) has no equivalent in French and is replaced by an approximate homonym in the langue d’oïl, del sen in the phrase “vis del sen” (utterly out of one’s mind, beside oneself). This phrase makes sense in itself and raises the emotional stakes of Bernart’s text, but at the cost of a complete collapse in intelligibility in the line following. The second passage coincides with the closing lines of the stanza following: “E qant se.m tolc, no.m laisset re / Mas desirier e cor volon” (Song 31, 15–16; And when she takes me from herself, she leaves me nothing but desire and a longing heart). The version in Guillaume de Dole substitutes for the Occitan noun re the virtually homonymous French verb rent (gives), implying a swirl of emotion but also, as in the earlier passage, precipitating a breakdown of the ensuing grammar. Overall, what remains of Bernart’s text is a series of expressions of intense feeling that are incoherently strung together. Jean Renart may have intended a less corrupt version of the song than that recorded in the manuscript. But what we have is an extreme case of song as blot: high on affect, low on intelligibility.
The insertion is worth comparing with Raimon Vidal’s quotations from the same song. In the Razos de trobar he cites a later line, “totas las dot et las mescre” (I fear and mistrust all women) because it features the verb creire at the rhyme (Appendix 4, RaT #21). Where Guillaume de Dole garbles Bernart’s text, Raimon reproaches it for construing the verb erroneously, taking the first person singular indicative to be cre when it should be crei (Chapter 1). The philological hypercorrectness of the parrots’ way is the total opposite of the nightingales’ grammatical incoherence, just as Raimon’s emphasis on textual knowledge, his and the troubadour’s, is the counterpart to Jean Renart’s emotional hype.
Textual knowledge extends to include amorous understanding in Raimon Vidal’s other quotation from “Can vei,” in the novas So fo. The knight, unhappy with the response he has so far obtained from the lady he has served, quotes stanza VII to his confidante, the young lady (lines 49–56; Appendix 5, #14).21 Unlike in the romance, in the novas the lines are quoted knowledgeably and in their original language, with no indication that they were ever intended to be sung. Whereas Jean Renart quotes the song anonymously, Raimon attributes it to Bernart de Ventadorn, identifying him as an authority on matters of love. The insertion of opening stanzas in the romance emphasizes song, but the knight’s choice of a medial stanza places the emphasis on argument. In fact, it is by means of the quotation that the protagonist understands how he has been treated and how he should react. Even if Jean Renart did not intend the content of the Occitan stanzas that he quotes to be as opaque as it has become, he never seems concerned with using lyric insertion to pinpoint the finer points of a lover’s experience.
Perhaps the most telling difference between these quotations from “Can vei” is that in the French romance the troubadour lyric is sung in competition with another song, but in the novas attention is so focused on “Can vei” that a summary of the stanza that is about to be quoted makes itself heard in the run-up to the actual quotation (see the passage in italics).
Car sel que sos cors fon iratz
Car ab sidons no.l val servir
Ni lonc atendre ni blandir,
Ni ac un jorn no.n valc merces,
Li dis: “Amia, mal m’es pres,
E pieitz aten, e pietz aten
Car on pus ab mi dons m’aten
Ni mays la prec ieu, may y pert,
E mens y truep de bo sufert
E avols ditz e peiorz faitz,
Car son vengutz als mals retraitz,
C’en B[ernartz] de Ventadorn dis,
Que fon tan ves amors aclis,
C’a mans n’a fag mans desplazer:
‘Pus ab mi dons no.m pot valer . . .’ ”
(So fo, R text, 419–33)
For the man whose heart was grief-stricken because his service to his lady did him no good and nor did patient waiting, nor attentiveness, and never on any day did mercy avail him, said to the young lady, “Friend, ill has overcome me, and I expect more ill, and more again, because the longer I wait with my lady, the more I beseech her, the more time I waste, and less reward do I get, but vile words and worse acts, for I have now met with her complete withdrawal, like Bernart de Ventadorn spoke about who was so submissive to love, which causes much displeasure to many: ‘Since of no avail to me with my lady . . .’ “
Where Jean Renart’s narrative drowns out the troubadour’s words, Raimon Vidal opens his to receive them. The effect of solidarity between Raimon and Bernart is strengthened by the metrical integration of the quotation to the surrounding text; the first and last lines of the stanza quoted form rhyming couplets with lines of Raimon’s. This is the opposite of the French romance, where the song is not integrated metrically but stands apart as an extraneous element.22 If the parrots’ way raises questions of knowledge, it does so because it represents poetry as continuous with other forms of love discourse; the nightingales’ way forecloses these questions by perpetuating its origins as song, where song is conceived primarily as vocal expressivity and musical sound.
Jean Renart is concerned not with the Celtic merveilles that preoccupy many other romancers but with France’s current geographical, political, and linguistic frontiers, which he highlights in various ways; for example, the participants at Conrad’s tournament are patently selected to represent different regions and countries. He also plots distinctly the home territories of his protagonists—those who sing the songs in the romance—against the places of origin of the songs themselves. The divergence between the two sets of names draws attention to the frontier(s) between them. Only six of the inserted lyrics are assigned a geographical origin within Guillaume de Dole, but these toponyms form a line that crosses France from the southwest to the northeast, from the Auvergne and Poitou up to Sablé-sur-Sarthe (near Le Mans), then Chartres, Reims, and at its most northern point, Soignies in Hainaut.23 Most of the places along this line fall in the heartland of the French kingdom in the Ile de France and Champagne, while its two most extreme lie on contested frontiers: the northeastern one with the Empire, the southwestern one with Occitania.
The three troubadour songs each receive different treatment. Bernart de Ventadorn’s is said to be anonymous and Poitevin (although Bernart was in fact from the Limousin), one is presented as anonymous and Auvergnac (the song is thought to be by Daude de Pradas, who actually came from the Quercy), and the third (by Jaufre Rudel of Blaye, on the Gironde) is quoted entirely without attribution. This disparate treatment has the effect of dismantling the unity of Occitan culture and implying that, instead of a single language, troubadours composed in various regional dialects of French. Since the other songs that Jean formally attributes to authors are all by poets from Maine northward, the “French” of Poitou and the Auvergne is clearly some way from the imputed center of French poetry. Its marginality is reinforced by the hybridized scripta used to record it.
Jean Renart’s vagueness about the songs’ origins may be strategic, an instance of his slippery ways. In the prologue, the narrator claims both that the songs are included in order to preserve their memory and that they have been inserted so seamlessly as to make one think that he himself composed them. The two claims seem to be at odds with one another: why would one view an original composition as preserving the memory of a previous one, or conversely, why would one view a remembered text as an original composition? These discrepant postulates converge, however, in a bid to put the songs’ authorship in doubt and render authorship itself problematic. Taken together, the claims may imply that Jean Renart is not the author of the inset lyrics, however much their expert integration gives the contrary impression. Alternatively, they may together imply that, although the songs he includes may recall earlier songs, Jean Renart himself is their author, either literally, or by virtue of having so skillfully integrated them to his own work. Given how Jean Renart elsewhere ingeniously dissimulates his authorship,24 we can take this playful equivocation as to whether the songs are by him as deliberate. Of the forty-eight inserted songs, only eight are explicitly conceded to other authors, so Jean Renart could indeed pass himself off as the author of the other forty, at least to a reader ignorant of the lyric tradition. And since only thirty of the inserted pieces are attested elsewhere, he could truly be responsible for nearly half of them (see details in Appendix 6). The staining or embroidering of his text with songs involves, then, yet another kind of opacity: that of their uncertain authorship.
One possible reason for this indeterminacy is to enable Jean Renart to conjure into existence a body of French poetry while at the same time giving the impression that it has authentic roots deep in French culture—in the France, that is, which lies to the west of the German Empire and the north of Occitania, and is lightly traversed by the snaking line of place names acknowledged as having produced French song.25 This conjuring trick is especially effective in regard to the songs scholars call “popularizing” as opposed to those termed “courtly.” Popularizing songs have a strong narrative cast, commonly have refrains, are typically sung at social events, and often involve dance and maybe a chorus in addition to the solo voice. They are generally anonymous when they are found in other manuscripts and all the roughly thirty examples in Guillaume de Dole are inserted without attribution; sometimes they are seemingly improvised by the characters who sing them, and almost half of them are unattested elsewhere (details in Appendix 6). Is Jean Renart the author of these otherwise unknown songs, or at least some of them? He would in that case be the creator of a pseudo-folk literature, a bit like those nineteenth-century forgers who set out to invent an authentic national tradition. Or is he exploiting the convention of anonymity in order to allow his audience to infer, should they so choose, that this body of song preexists his text? This “mirage of sources,” as Dragonetti calls it, would be another way in which Jean Renart dyes or embroiders his text with “Frenchness” as the previously unsymbolized or unrecorded fund of popular song. Refrains, because they are transferrable from song to song, could especially be seen as a popular, French, performed, musical equivalent of quotation.
Such songs populate France (or “France”) with characters with good French names like Gui, Alis, Doe, or Aiglentine. Another of their features is that many are gendered feminine (whether or not they are sung by women). Thirteen feature female protagonists;26 five stage a female voice;27 several imply a female subject position and a female voice.28 In thus boosting the representation of women’s roles, women’s voices, and women’s perspective, Jean Renart may have been less concerned with giving voice to women than with underlining the vernacular character of song, its association with the maternal vernacular, and the female body. French song appears as a “rose on the thigh” of France. Although all of the songs in Guillaume de Dole that are attributed with an author or other origin fall on the courtly side of the courtly-popular divide, at least half of these courtly songs, like the more popular ones, are unattested elsewhere and/or are performed anonymously. The impression is thereby given that most of the grands chants form essentially the same tradition as this body of French vernacular song—with one important exception, the song said to have been composed by Conrad (#31), to which I return.
Consequently, Guillaume de Dole implies a very different literary history from others that were current in Jean Renart’s day. Collectors and commentators of troubadour poetry organize it following a hierarchy of genres that always privileges the canso, almost always classified by author, starting from the troubadours regarded as the most prestigious. Trouvère chansonniers also proceed author by author, giving the place of honor to the grand chant and typically starting with Thibaut de Champagne, who makes no appearance in Guillaume de Dole. Jean Renart is unique, indeed perverse, in making popular and women’s song the determining matrix, both as the implied point of origin of French poetry, and as the frame in which it is to be viewed. An obvious effect of this new maternal origin is to deny to the troubadours any role as originators of the romance lyric. Indeed, what may well be the most contemporary song to be inserted is #41, by the troubadour Daude de Pradas (the so-called Auvergnac), whose known period of activity is from 1214 onward. It is an odd choice of song to quote, and it suggests that Jean Renart is actively interested not only in the cultural subordination and linguistic appropriation of Occitan song but also in representing the annexation of Occitania as current. Poitou and the Auvergne may also be named because they were areas annexed to the royal domain by Philip Augustus.
And what of the text’s northeastern border, that between France and the Empire? Poets’ names count for little in this romance compared with performers’ names: those of the characters and the territories they are associated with, which all fall outside the kingdom of France.29 Some, like Guillaume, Lienor, and their household, are from Dole in Burgundy, an area that speaks a Romance tongue, though one very different from Jean Renart’s Francien. Others are from parts of the Empire that speak what we would now call German or Dutch. Although within the romance’s fiction all the major characters and events take place in French, there are passing references to Dutch being spoken at Conrad’s court (2169, 4664), to typically Flemish names being called out (Boidin, Wautre, 2168) and Germanic greetings exchanged (“ ‘Wilecome!’ et ‘Godehere!’ ” 2595). The line of origin of the songs traverses France from southwest to northeast, with its heartland in the Ile de France and Champagne, but the place names associated with singers describe a crescent just outside France’s eastern periphery, from Dole up to Liège. If Jean Renart had taken a highlighter pen and drawn it up France’s eastern border he could not have made this frontier more evident. Just as evident is the representation of France’s cultural dominance. Now that Occitan has been reclassified as regional French, it becomes evident that everyone in the Empire, whatever language he or she may speak, sings in French.
The paradoxical outcome is that what, from the standpoint of the romancer and his French audience, is a nightingales’ way is, in Jean Renart’s representation of the Welf dynasty, another version of the parrots’ way: one in which the Empire imitates French song, as opposed to Occitan texts. Although Jean Renart negates the Occitan lyric by repositioning it on the margins of France, he also reaffirms it as a model for cultural hegemony.
Conrad’s Germans and Burgundians repeat French songs adeptly, in the way that courts in Catalonia and Italy (including Staufer courts in Italy) repeat the poetry of the troubadours, although Conrad’s entourage exclusively sings them. The widespread impression that there is an ironic distance between the characters’ situation and the songs they sing is not surprising, then: the singers really are distanced from the lyrics because they are texts in a foreign tongue, moreover a mother or female tongue that expresses a mythic “French”Volk.
A prime example of this opacity of song to the singer is the grand chant that is described as being composed by the Welf emperor Conrad himself. He is in Cologne, far from the French border, whether imperial or linguistic. Seemingly inspired by the birdsong that he hears around him, Conrad spontaneously sings a lyric in the first stanza of which all of the features of the grand chant are assembled: reverdie, rose, nightingale, and the torments of love:
Quant de la foelle espoissent li vergier,
que l’erbe est vert et la rose espanie,
et au matin oi le chant conmencier
dou rossignol qui par le bois s’escrie,
lors ne me sai vers amors conseillier,
car oncques n’oi d’autre richece envie
fors que d’amors,
ne riens [fors li] ne m’en puet fere aïe.
(Guillaume de Dole, 3180–87)
When the meadows grow thick with leaves, and the grass is green and the rose in full bloom, and in the morning I hear the nightingale’s song that begins to cry through the woodland, then I don’t know what to do with regard to Love, for I never envied anyone else their wealth except in love, and nothing [but Love] can help me now.
Conrad’s composition in faultless French resembles Occitan imitations of troubadour lyrics by Italians or Catalans and contrasts with the garbling of Occitan in the French manuscript.
To what extent does the emperor know what he is singing? He will later show himself to be motivated by concerns other than love: rank and honor count for more, and when Lienor’s “rose” comes under suspicion he abandons her at once. Conversely his listener, the treacherous seneschal, accepts the lyric at face value, but fails to show any respect for French courtly emotion. His accidentally overhearing it makes him jealous and provokes the visit to Dole that results in Lienor’s being temporarily dishonored. Does the uneasy fit between the song’s words and the practices of Conrad and his court stem from the melodious blotting of the nightingales’ way or unwitting subjection to the monolangue of the parrots? Whatever the answer, the Germans’ plot cannot progress without French song.
This chapter began with the difficulty of dating Guillaume de Dole. Although I have not brought forward new historical evidence, the literary context I have adduced for it is consistent with placing the romance after Raimon Vidal’s Razos de trobar and novas, that is, after 1209 or 1213; and probably after the French humiliated the Occitans at Muret (1213) and the German and English forces at Bouvines (1214), at the time when the known period of activity of Daude de Pradas began (1214).
Situating Guillaume de Dole in this way nuances the traditional view of it as inaugurating French lyric insertion. Jean Renart’s mapping of the nightingales’ way now appears as much a reaction to the parrots’ way as it does a novel treatment of French song. The enthusiastic scholarly attention paid to the troubadours’ texts by their immediate neighbors can be seen as motivating his diametrically opposite promotion of song as song, as color and blot, as emotive if incoherent, as popular and maternal, and as exclusively French. Emulation of the success of literary Occitan at the Italian Staufer courts, however, may be responsible for his imagined imposition of French as a monolangue on the Welfs of the northern Empire where his romance is set.