Demons and marvels
winds and tides
the sea has receded far away
and you
like algae softly
caressed by the wind
in the sands of our bed you stir while
dreaming
Demons and marvels
winds and tides
the sea has receded far away
but in your half-opened eyes
there remain two little waves
Demons and marvels
winds and tides
two little waves to drown me.[1]
To die of love. If Stendhals crystallization theory of love is true, then my vision of love and my finding my beloved were guided by the legends of medieval heroines. When I was a child, almost an adolescent, I read, or heard aloud, the Stories and Legends from the Middle Ages. [2] From that book I can remember only the first two beautiful love stories and the half page on the Death of Aude, Rolands fiance—that makes forty-two and a half pages out of two hundred fifty-four. Memory is very selective. I was twelve years old and he eighteen, and without knowing each other, we were communing across the ocean through Aucassin and Nicolette. [3] Its a typical medieval story of a love that runs up against parental opposition, as Nicolette is only a poor captive ransomed from the Sarrasins while Aucassin is of noble birth. The couple is ready to die rather than face separation. Floire and Blancheflore (the hero and heroine of the second story) had lived in perfect symbiosis like two twins before they were kept apart by parents who were worried about societal conventions (Stories and Legends, p. 30). Thus I was not surprised when a colleague friend of Erics sent me these verses in January, 2004: Remembering always the one through whose being and no other I lived in joy. Our love and our two hearts, much closer than brother and sister, in a single united will, in joyful times and sad.[4] But if it is true that many of our friends found our symbiotic relationship a bit intimidating, for me it was not a product of literature. What fascinated me and continues to fascinate me in medieval literature and Shakespeare, more than symbiosis, is the ease with which heroines die. Take the death of Isolde : She embraces him and lies down beside him, she kisses his mouth and his face, she holds him tightly, body against body, lips pressing lips, and thus gives up her spirit : she dies beside him, a victim of her mortal mourning.[5] Everyone remembers the lovers from Verona, but Aude remains my favorite: The emperor has returned from Spain. He arrives in Aix, the fairest place in France. He goes to the palace and enters the hall. Aude, a beautiful young maid, comes up to him. She asks the king: Where is Captain Roland, who promised to take me as his companion? Charles feels pain and grief, tears flow from his eyes, he pulls at his white beard. Sister, dear friend, you are asking me about a dead man. But I will give you in his stead an even nobler fianc; its Louis; I can say nothing better. He is my son and will one day inherit my kingdom. Aude replies : Those words have no meaning for me. May it not please God, his saints or his angels if I live on after Roland! She grows pale, falls at Charlemagnes feet, and dies in an instant.[6] Later, through Eric, I discovered Christine de Pizan and medieval literature, and learned that the Dame de Fayel was not unique; --she was the one who, after her husband served her the heart of her lover, declared that no other food would ever pass her lips-- there were also Dido; Thisbe; Hero; Ghismonda, the daughter of the king of Salerno; Lisabetta;[7] the chatelaine of Vergi...
But it is not given to everyone to die of love. Medieval heroines are usually around Juliets age. Their only ties are a mother and a tyrannical father. Love for them is a form of emancipation, a liberation. Like Heloise, they believe that love is superior to marriage, and that if the name of the spouse can seem more proper and more sacred, that of lover has always seemed sweeter.[8] Like Nicolette, they have lips redder than cherries or summer roses and a waist so small you can encircle it with your two hands (Stories and Legends, p. 13.) And then, even in novels, some heroines need artefacts : Dido throws herself on the pyre, Juliet stabs herself. Its only the youngest and fairest who grow pale and die in an instant. To want to emulate Aude or Ghismonda and to end up worse off than Emma Bovary! Literature is cruel for the overweight, the unattractive, and those over thirty...
To die of love at sixty! Ridiculous! Ludicrous! And not at all feminist! Nonetheless, I have known a few women, among them feminists, who wanted to die after having been abandoned like Ariadne. And in Lausanne, there was a couple who chose to die together...
But can it really be said that one person missing to you and all life goes away[9]? Isnt it cheating to kill yourself ? My heroines die of natural causes. For me, like Isolde, it was a matter of dying by his side or perhaps lying down on the ground like an animal and ceasing to breathe; if not, I had to live.
His Middle Ages, clearly less romantic than mine, included both didactic texts and philosophical ideas. Thus as soon as he was diagnosed, and during his eighteen-month struggle against cancer, we spoke of the imperative of my surviving. Death, he said, will be less cruel if I know youre going to live on and keep my memory alive for our grandchildren. Remember Heloise and Christine; reread Montaigne.
Strangely, those discussions rarely took place during our translation sessions. Translating was a high-risk enterprise. We would fight over the placement of a comma; a mistranslation was grounds for divorce. No symbiosis, no harmony there. It was rather in hallways or entrances that our discussions took place. It was there, on the doorstep, in the kitchen, that we spoke about the time after, I in tears, saying I didnt want him to die, he saying that he loved me and didnt want to leave me, but that he felt his life ebbing away. He would recite a verse from Rutebeuf or Villon and say that we had to remind ourselves, unfortunately, of the physical crudity of the fabliaux and the manure of the common man rather than courtly love. I gladly left him that Middle Ages: I had no taste for Audigier and Trubert, even if male and female friends we enjoyed spending time with relished these incursions into farce and the topsy-turvy. If I didnt want to fall into derisive mode, I had to return to Christine, but not to Christine the apologist for women, rather to the Christine many medievalists find tedious.
My guide would be Christine the wise, Christine the tireless worker. Eric had spoken to me so often about her widowhood, about the lawsuits she had to endure and her financial difficulties. I had to prevent that from happening to me. His romanticism was that of the bohemian, of the artist unconcerned about tomorrow. If I had read too many romantic stories, he loved Les Misrables. In fact, money was the only area in which he didnt entirely trust me. According to him, I could not be counted on when it came to finances, and he was afraid I would end up a bag lady in the Paris mtro. And since Christine had complained bitterly that her beloved spouse had kept her in the dark over their financial affairs, the first thing Eric did after learning the inevitable outcome of his illness was to bring me up to date on our finances and show me where he kept all the papers.
Christine wrote a good deal about her widowhood and her financial difficulties, but I much preferred recalling the despair to which Etiennes death brought her: I lay on the ground, longing for death: crying out for it to come with all my might; I shouted so loudly that it seemed that my voice, that I could no longer control, would pierce the clouds. I was so stricken with grief that I was inconsolable. For a long time I remained in that state, renouncing the possibility of pleasure, despairing of ever finding consolation or happiness. Our ship was buffeted two and fro by raging winds, and was at great risk since there was no one on board who could take the helm. I thought I was doomed to drift forever in that sea that separated joy from sadness; I would have to spend the rest of my days failing to find Happiness, who had now become my enemy.[10] But Eric reminded me that Christine had changed if not her sex at least her gender in assuming the moral and financial responsibility for her family, and that it was this fact that had sparked my interest in her. I had to forget stories for fear of tilting at windmills, and accept what our friend F calls the necessary solidarity between generations. Dont discourage the young, dont set a bad example; show them that life is worth choosing, cherishing and sharing, and that no, when one person is missing to you , no all life does not go away..
Not being Aude, and having rewritten Isoldes story,[11] I am forced to live on alone. But literature never speaks about the energy thats required to breathe, to get up, put one foot in front of the other and walk. Only those like S, P or M who have experienced the premature death of a loved one realize how on certain days, brushing your teeth or combing your hair are difficult tasks. Part of me stopped living on January 3, 2004, and the rest is in chaos. There is a lack of understanding between those whose one shining star has died[12] and the others. Solitude is not a source of unhappiness or unease; no, solitude is not terrible, as it provides an opportunity to read, to write, to create. What makes you feel powerless is absence. Knowing that never again will he or she be there, never again will he or she speak with you. Thats the real black sun of melancholy. Never again will I be able to put my head on his shoulder, or hear his voice, or discuss music, the meaning of life or politics while shelling peas or peeling vegetables for soup, never again do the post mortem[13] after a meal or a lecture. The Heloise and Abelard translation was finished in silence and tears rather than in sound and fury, and I return from trips without finding him waiting for me at the station. Until the end, we shared the innumerable small details of life, and it is in those small details and ordinary moments that I feel the emptiest.
Unlike Christine, I do not claim Alone am I and alone I wish to be or even less alone has everyone left me, since I am surrounded by family and friends, and complaining often seems an indecent response to all that love and solidarity. I nonetheless feel a bond with Christine, who cried out: Alone he has left me in great suffering, in this empty world full of sadness. my sweet friend who held my heart in joy and delight, with no anger. He is dead now, and I am burdened by such deep mourning and by such a great sadness weighing on my unhappy heart, that I will mourn his death forever. I cannot stop weeping and missing my dead friend; that is not an astonishment. (Poets of the Middle Ages, p. 138). Time weighs heavily on me, and I have to live from day to day in order to stay together. Im not a religious person, and since I dont read Boethius or Seneca, philosophy will be no consolation, nor, Im afraid, will literature. Christine doesnt seem to have found the consolation she sought in literature either, since her voice remained silent for a number of years. Im not tempted to turn to certain works of hers like the Epistle of the Prison of Human Life, written to console widows and mothers who had lost their sons in the battle of Agincourt. But I believe her when she says that sadness lasts forever: This sadness has not left me for a single day, even though thirteen years have gone by. The loss is not recent and yet my grief is renewed every day; I feel it as if it happened less than a year ago, for the great love that bound our two hearts together does not allow me to forget it, even if my body is weakened and my strength diminished because of great past sorrows, even if I wear a smile in public and always act as though my pain has been forgotten (The Long Road of Study, pp. 95-96).
I too shall have to learn to pretend to sing, and to laugh when I would rather cry, in order not to lose heart.
Thrse Moreau
[1] Jacques Prvert,Sables mouvants [Quicksand] in Paroles [Words].
[2] Marcelle and Georges Huisman, Contes et lgendes du Moyen Age [Stories and Legends from the Middle Ages], Paris: Fernand Nathan, 1977, henceforth referred to as Stories and Legends. Eric and I bought this book for our children, but ended up not reading much of it to them since we didnt like its exaggerated patriotism and militarism.
[3] On his initial encounter with this work, see Eric Hicks, LՎtrange proximit des choses lointaines [The Strange Proximity of Distant Things], Geneva, Slatkine, 2005.
[4] Christine de Pizan, Le chemin de longue tude [The Long Road of Learning], ed. and trans. Andrea Tarnowski, Paris, Livre de poche (Lettres gothiques), 2000. The work was composed in 1402.
[5] Thomas of England, Tristan, in Les Tristan en vers [Tristans in Verse], ed. J.-C. Payen, Paris, Garnier, 1974.
[6] La Chanson de Roland [The Song of Roland], laisse 268 in Potes du Moyen Age; chants de guerre, damour et de mort [Poets of the Middle Ages, Songs of War, Love and Death], ed. and trans. Jacqueline Cerquiglini, Paris, Livre de poche (Lettres gothiques), 1987. Henceforth referred to as Poets of the Middle Ages.
[7] Readers of the City of Ladies will recognize here the familiar litany of women faithful in love; see La Cit des dames, tr. Thrse Moreau and Eric Hicks, Paris, Stock/Moyen Age, 1986. Two English versions of the work are in print: Earl Jeffrey Richardss translation for Persea Books and the Penguin translation by Rosalind Brown Grant. The work was composed ca. 1405.
[8] Les lettres dAblard et Hlose [The Letters of Abelard and Heloise], trans. Eric Hicks and Thrse Moreau, Paris, Livre de poche (Lettres gothiques), in press (2005).
[9] Alphonse de Lamartine, Isolation from Poetic Meditations, Geoffrey Barto, 2002
[10] Christine de Pizan, Le Livre de la Mutacion de Fortune [The Vicissitudes of Fortune]; modern French translation published in the Patrimoine littraire europen [The European Literary Patrimony],vol. 6 (Les prmices de lhumanisme) [The Beginnings of Humanism], Brussels, De Boeck, 1995, pp. 135-137.
[11] Thrse Moreau, LElixir damour, [The Elixir of Love], Geneva, Mtropolis, 1998.
[12] Cf. Grard de Nerval, El desdichado.
[13] Thats what we called our discussions of whether our dinner party had been a success, if our guests had gotten along, if our lecture had gone well, and what we could do better the next time.