GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT, LE JUGEMENT DOU ROY DE BEHAINGNE: EXPLANATORY NOTES

Abbreviations: BD: Chaucer, Book of the Duchess; LGW: Chaucer, Legend of Good Women; Confessio: Gower, Confessio Amantis; JRB: Machaut, Le Jugement dou Roy de Behaingne; JRN: Machaut, Le Jugement dou Roy de Navarre; RR: Roman de la Rose; TC: Chaucer, Troilus and Criseyde.

1–40 Au temps pascour . . . This section draws explicitly on RR, in which the archetypal Lover similarly falls prey to the enticements of springtime. Here, however, Machaut radically transforms the structure by rejecting allegorical personages in favor of a confrontation between two human characters (see Altmann and Palmer, Anthology, pp. 12–13).

27 “Ocy! Ocy!”. “Ocy” is not a sound that birds were, at least conventionally, thought to make in Middle French. The word, however, is the imperative form of the verb kill. Perhaps here the springtime birds sing out “Kill! Kill!” in acknowledgment of Love’s proverbial destructiveness, but it is difficult to pin down the precise meaning of the word in this context.

28ff. In Machaut’s hands, the idealized pastoral landscape familiar from RR becomes, as Butterfield, explains, “a place of carefully defined seclusion” (“Pastoral,” p. 11). As in his other dits, Machaut’s “landscape is an isolated, wild area, difficult of access but placed within a courtly, civilized enclosure. Such a conjunction between the courtly and the wild is a characteristic pastoral relation and one exploited to the full by Spenser, for example, in his Bower of Bliss” or Froissart’s Paradys d’amours (“Pastoral,” p. 11).

41ff. At this point, the narrator is displaced from his role as main character of the developing story and becomes, if only for a time, a clerkly witness not himself of noble birth...to the debate between the two aristocratic figures (Altmann and Palmer, Anthology, p. 13). As part of a wider discussion connecting sight, power, and authorship, Cerquiglini describes the position of clerkly witness as passive, or impotent. She explains that it is the ear of the author that overhears conversations, the mouth of the author that relates them, and the hand of the author that records them, but the poet is denied sight, the most noble of the five senses. For a further discussion of the theme of a clerk listening from a concealed position, see Cerquiglini, “louche,”pp. 25–27. It may be of interest to note that Jean de Luxembourg, himself, was blind.

56ff. This “first confrontation between the sorrowing knight and the equally distraught lady...leads to a second encounter scene between them and the poet, who finally brings about a third between them and the king as judge. In each situation the balance of social decorum subtly alters as the equally matched pair of grieving courtly lovers gives way first to the ingenuity of the clerical poet and then to the superior courtly authority of the king himself” (Butterfield, “Pastoral,” p. 10).

125 The debate proper begins at this point, with the lady’s long account of her experience with love.
125–26 Sire, il a bien .vij. ans ou .viij. entiers. The seven years marks the completion of the lover’s apprenticeship; the eighth year would start a new beginning, this time into rewards. Compare BD, lines 37–38, where the protagonist has suffered sicknesse into “this eight yere” [eighth year], yet his “bote is never the nere” [unfulfilled].

126 sers et rentiers. The lady describes herself as the “serf and vassal,” a theme which frequently recurs in the poem (e.g. the knight’s description of himself as his lady’s “vassal” in 280) and also in other works.

130–32 Cuer, corps, povoir, vie, avoir, et puissance . . . En son servage. Compare Alceone’s vow to sacrifice herself “with good wille, body, herte, and al” to Juno for word with regard to the missing king, Ceys (BD, line 116), a sacrifical pledge to thralldom to Love repeated by the Black Knight in BD, line 768, “with good entente” (line 766).

148–76 Et je l’amoie . . . En nos amours. As William Calin notes, the lady and her lover’s relationship was “successful, honest and genuine . . . [and] could only be destroyed by powers beyond human control.” Compare her story to the description of the knight’s account of his love affair, where we hear mainly of “frustration, anguish and protracted love-service”(Calin, Fountain, p. 44).

154–64 Tous mes confors . . . C’estoit mes murs, mes chastiaus, mes ressors. Compare Chaucer’s TC 3:477–81, he was “a wal / Of stiel and and sheld from every displesaunce,/. . . she was namore afered.”

169–76 Tuit d’un acort. Compare BD, lines 1288–97 on the lovers being so even a pair. They suffered “oo blysse and eke oo sorwe bothe” (line 1293) and were both glad and upset as a single being.

177ff. Here, the sickness and longing for death caused by disappointed love is described in detail. It also recurs elsewhere in the poem (e.g. in line 719) and in other works, such as RR.

220 Qu’elle est pasmee. In this section, the lady faints and the knight sprinkles dew on her face to revive her. Perhaps this implies a courtly “baptism,” especially considering the implications of love capacities of restoration. Such fainting scenes are common in courtly literatures for both women and men. Compare TC 3:1086–92 (Troilus’ swoon) and 4:1150ff. (Criseyde’s swoon).

258 Dont vous diray quels maus j’ay a sentir. Here the lover offers his account of the suffering inflicted by his faithless ladylove. Wimsatt, Chaucer, suggests that “in presenting a perfidious lady and stating that the knight suffered more...than the lady whose gentle lover had died, Machaut evidently stimulated a protest from at least one great lady, perhaps Bonne of Luxembourg” (p. 161), which prompted him to write JRN. The name of Bonneurté from JRN is “particularly suggestive” (p. 323n19). This problem is similar to that which Chaucer had with some noble ladies in his audience’s criticism of his portrayal of Criseyde (p. 161). For another explanation see the introduction to this volume.

As Heinrichs, Myths, remarks, the formal structure of the poem is “odd.” Heinrichs accounts for this structural asymmetry by suggesting that it is here and in Reason’s later response to the knight (lines 1755–84) that the “real matière” of the poem is located: “Machaut’s emphasis is not really upon [the lovers] or the jugement, [they] merely furnish . . . the witty pretext for a discussion of the causes and consequences of misplaced spiritual allegiance” (pp. 184–88).

286ff. The long portrait of the lady’s appearance, her dancing, laughter and song follow a love poetry convention, as much illustrative of the lover’s devotion as of the charms possessed by the object of his desire. As J. J. Anderson, “Man in Black,” makes clear, the description of White in Chaucer’s BD draws heavily on this passage. See BD, lines 847–54.

302–95 Car si cheveus . . . The lady is described in a “head-to foot- portrait,” a traditional rhetorical device in medieval descriptions of ideal beauty (Wimsatt and Kibler, Behaingne).

305 Blanc et poly. Compare the extrametrical riddling on the countenance of “the good faire White” in BD: “Hyt was whit, smothe, streght . . .”(line 942) and “she “was whit, rody, fressh and lyvely hewed”(line 905).

319–35 Tous pleins de las pour loier .i. amant. Here love is described using the language of hunting, a trope that recurs several times throughout the poem, as well as a reminder of the call of the birds in the opening stanza.

331 Car quant lancier voloit .i. de ses dars. On the piercing potential of the beloved’s eyes, see the opening lines of Chaucer’s “Merciles Beaute”: “your yen two wol slee me sodenly; / I may the beautee of hem not sustene.” The idea is echoed in lines 433–34. See RR, lines 1688ff, where love’s darts pierce Amans through the eye, and strike deep into his heart.

409–27 In this section, the knight’s claims that his lady’s beauty has left a physical impression on his heart. Troilus and Criseyde, RR and the Confessio also describe wounds as a physical effect of love.

421 Othevien. Grandnephew of Julius Caesar, Octavian (63 BCE–14 CE) is better known as Augustus Caesar, the name he took after becoming the first emperor of Rome. His reign was marked by lavish expenditures on public buildings and the road system of the empire. Octavian was also a generous patron of the arts.

422 Galien. Galen, who lived c. 130–200, was the most noted physician of the ancient world. Born of Greek parents in Asia Minor, he moved in his early thirties to Rome, where he eventually became court physician to the emperor Marcus Aurelius. A remarkable polymath, Galen was the author of more than five hundred writings, mostly on human physiology, but on other topics as well, including philosophy.

457–82 In this passage, the knight refers to a number of allegorical figures, including Fair Welcome and Sweet Hope. However, unlike those who appear in the trial scene (see note to line 1484), they do not interact with other characters. Instead, “the Knight evokes these figures only to proceed to other matters . . . they serve but to underscore the Knight’s anguish” (Calin, Fountain, p. 46). When drawing attention to the links between Machaut and John Gower, Nicholson, Love, shows how these figures are part of the heritage of the convention of RR. Poets such as Machaut and Gower who were self-consciously departing from the tradition nonetheless retained elements such as these figures, the setting of the garden and so on. For more details, see Nicholson, Love, pp. 3–40.

671–83 A euphoric interlude of mutual joy in new love before fortune turns her wheel further. Compare TC 3:450–83.

684 Fortune. The figure of the goddess Fortune (Fortuna) derives from one of the best-known works of the Middle Ages, Boethius’ Consolation of Philosophy (c. 525). The ancient Roman worshiped Fortuna, the personification of luck, but Boethius assigns her a more important role in human affairs, making her responsible for the apparently random and capricious distribution of goods to human beings. Those she favors climb up on the while she holds as a symbol of her power, but the wheel, ever turning, eventually throws them off into the mud, depriving them of the benefits that they had previously enjoyed.

725–860 See note to lines 457–82 above. Again, allegorical figures are mentioned but only in passing.

745–54 Chascun deçoit et nelui ne deffie. Instead of blaming his lady for his unhappiness, the knight chooses to blame Fortune who appears in this section as an allegorical character. The classic presentation of the jealous lover is Jean de Meun’s, RR lines 8425–9462, who is more violent than Machaut’s lover. Gower’s Amans is more akin to Machaut in the subtleties of his disappointment. For example, Confessio 3:865–930, Gower’s Genius defines Jealousy in Confessio 4:455–586.

749ff. The lover demonstrates both his virtue and his intellectual finesse in his extended meditation on the cause of his suffering. Should he blame Love or his lady? He decides that neither is actually at fault, thereby showing his loyalty to both the divinity and his beloved.

881 Here the dialogue resumes and the lady responds to the knight’s story, explaining that she is more tormented than he is because there is the possibility that he can win his lover back, whereas for her, this is impossible.

980–83 This is the first of four passages found in the earlier manuscript tradition but not in the later collected works mss, including A. See also lines 1000–47; 1816–19; and 1861–84.

1000–01 Car nourreture / . . . vaint et passe nature. Proverbial. Also referred to by Froissart in Le trésor amoureux, and Christine de Pizan’s Mutacions de fortune. For more information, see Hassell, Proverbs, N35.

1002–03 s’il ne se desnature / Li leux au bois. Proverbial. Also referred to by Froissart in Le joli buisson de jonece.

1071 Et n’arreste ne que fueille de tramble. A very popular proverbial phrase.

1074 au feu, a la table. As Wimsatt and Kibler, Behaigne, note this image “suggest[s] the conventional presentation of the month of January in medieval picture calendars, in which the dining table and the fire are the foci of activity” (p. 486).

1081–87 The lover, understandably, here charges his lady with fickleness and instability, two of the conventional “truths” about women in the misogynistic traditions.

1185–98 Long a silent witness to the debate between two people of higher rank, the narrator now feels summoned to action by the difficulty they are experiencing in finding a judge to decide between them. See Andreas Capellanus, The Art of Courtly Love as a model for love debates requiring a judge. The literary genre is discussed in the introduction to this volume.

1204–13 Le petit chien. Wimsatt and Kibler, Behaigne, point out that” there are very few small domestic dogs in medieval fiction. Tristan’s Petitcreu is one, but he is a fairy dog, quite unreal, whereas Machaut’s dog, as Chaucer’s after him, acts in a naturalistic manner” (p. 486). Compare the dog’s behavior to the bird in lines 25–32 who leads the narrator into the solitary path where he overhears the conversation between the lady and the knight.

1267ff. Here, as Brownlee, Poetic Identity, notes, the re-telling of the beginning of the poem functions as “a process of textual self-authentification. . . . The main narrative thread of the Behaingne thus becomes, in summary form, a secondary narrative embedded in itself. The process of what might be called narrative doubling will be repeated several times in the course of the poem” (pp. 161-62). See the introduction for further discussion on this point.

1293 I. chevalier qui moult fait a amer. This laudatory portrait of Jean de Luxembourg, king of Bohemia, is one of several in Machaut’s works.

1297 Alixandre. Alexander the Great (356–323 BCE) was king of Macedon and conqueror of much of Asia Minor in the Middle East.
Hector. Hector, the son of Priam, king of Troy, is one of the principal characters of Homer’s Iliad, and, in the tradition of Virgil, Godfrey of Monmouth, and Anglo-Norman literature, the hero of the poem.

1327 Ovides. Publius Ovidius Naso (43 BCE–18 CE), usually known as Ovid, was one of the most celebrated poets of ancient Rome. His works on love, particularly Ars Amatoria (The Art of Love), a guidebook for prospective lovers, exerted a great influence on the writers of the Middle Ages.

1337 roys de Behaingne. For further discussion of Jean de Luxembourg, king of Bohemia see the introduction.

1362–442 In this section the narrator switches back and forth between the clerkly-witness of the story and an individual with “an explicitly extradiegetic dimension” (Brownlee, Poetic Identity, p. 162) where Machaut’s intimate knowledge of Jean, his habits and his residence overlap with the story.

1366 Durbui. Durbuy, one of Jean’s favorite residences, is now a small city in the Belgian province of Luxembourg.

1434–35 Here, the speaking “I” is “simultaneously within and without . . . the narrative he recounts”: the narrator is a participant as he leads the knight and the lady up to the castle door, but speaks as Machaut when he describes the customs of castle life (Brownlee, Poetic Identity, 164).

1443 At this point, the narrator ceases to play an active role in the plot and returns to his previous position of clerkly-witness.

1474 i. clerc que nommer ne saroie. Both Brownlee, Poetic Identity, pp. 165–66, and Wimsatt and Kibler, Behaigne, draw attention to the anonymous clerk in Jean’s entourage who is reading out loud to the king. Almost as soon as the narrator draws attention to him, he is immediately dismissed, which must be a self-referential and ironic moment of awareness on Machaut’s part.

1475 Qui li lisoit la bataille de Troie. Poets, such as Christine de Pizan, Froissart and Machaut himself, saw themselves as “advisors of princes and sages,” not as entertainers; the creators of “books, not performances.” Cerquiglini-Toulet, Melancholy, reminds us of the status of books, as texts to be read, as well as “beautiful objects” which were bought and collected by princes (pp. 40–41).

1484 Cil.xvj.. According to Wimsatt, Chaucer, these allegorical figures “embody different aspects of the king’s character”(p. 127). They also emphasize the “pleasures and the opulence of aristocratic life.” Huot compares them to those who appear in the JRN, line 1154: “from a self-indulgent idealization of aristocratic life in terms of chivalric prowess, youthful pleasures, wealth, and leisure, we have moved to the arena of moral and spiritual virtues. In this context, what is valorized is not the persistence of desire in the face of rejection, but rather the constancy of love and devotion in the face of death (“Patience,” p. 232).

1509–608 Here is another example of narrative doubling. This time, the knight is summarizing the plot of the poem for the benefit of the king. See note to line 1267.

1595–96 Si comme il est escript plus pleinnement. The nobleman’s playful and, in the context, nonsensical reference to the “written” text of his encounter with the lady, calls attention to the poem’s fictionality, to the fact that it does not represent “real” experience. Later, Reason makes much the same kind of metafictional reference in line 1782.

1626 Another example of narrative doubling. Now the king is re-telling the story of the knight and the lady to his allegorical jury. See note to line 1267.

1668–69 Si com la cire / Devant le feu se degaste et empire. Popular proverbial expression.

1698–99 je ne donroie mie / De leur amour une pomme porrie. Proverbial.

1723 Reason’s argument to this point may be readily summarized: (1) because the lady’s lover is beyond recovery, Reason will work to make her forget him, an attachment to the dead being an unreasonable state; (2) Youth, preoccupied with jollity and the pleasures of the present, will also push the lady toward forgetfulness; and (3) there is no love without sexual attraction and, in the absence of a body to love, it will disappear, especially since the soul is always ambivalent about the emotion, which is inherently sinful to some degree.

1779 Unlike the lady, so Reason argues, the lover is forced by Youth, Companionship, Beauty, Love, and Loyalty to continue in his affection for his faithless beloved, the constant sight of whom fills him with pain. And there is no relief possible since, even if his beloved took him back, he would no longer be able to trust her.

1782 See note to line 1596 above.

1811 Love agrees with Reason’s assessment of the lover’s suffering, but finds nothing extraordinary in the man’s inability to find secure happiness, for it is the fate of all lovers to serve without the expectation of meriting the reward of the lady’s favor.

1847 Offended by the lady’s faithlessness, Loyalty sides with the nobleman, accepting Reason’s explanation of why his suffering is greater.

1891 At this point in the dispute, the question for which the court has been convened has been forgotten completely. Youth addresses instead the issue of the nobleman’s situation and finds, much like Love, that it is hardly desperate or regrettable.

1925 Though he himself admonishes Youth to allow the nobleman to abandon his attachment to an undeserving woman, the king reminds the court that they have other business to consider.

1949 The knight is judged the winner in the debate, an indication, perhaps, of the greater power of male reasoning and discernment. It could be argued that the author who has created a fiction that so obviously favors men over women has insulted the gentler sex. Whether Machaut is guilty of this charge is the question that, with no little humor and irony, is debated in the Navarre.

1969–88 After passing judgment, the king advises both the knight and the lady to avoid giving into their grief. Wallowing in pain, he tells them, can lead to the death of the heart, as well as the self.

2012–43 The king’s entertainment of the knight and the lady has a number of points in common with King Sarpedoun’s hospitality to Pandarus and Troilus, and their leave taking in Chaucer’s TC.

2040–51 Si se partirent. The lady and the knight return to their homes after an eight-day stay with Jean. Although they both agree to accept the king’s judgment, Machaut leaves the question of whether they take his advice unanswered.

2052ff. Ci fineray / Ma matiere. Here, for the first time, the narrator steps outside the poem to reveal himself as the poet, rather than as the character of a clerkly witness.

2055–66 Characteristically, Machaut signs his poems with an anagram to be solved by rearranging the letters of a verse or pair of verses. The solution to the anagram is contained, as Machaut tells us, in the poem’s last line is not straightforward. Once the required letters are removed to spell the invariable form Machaut, the ones which remains cannot spell Guillaume. Thus he proposes the well-attested by-form Guillemin as a solution for the anagram. In his article, he goes on to demonstrate that this same form is necessary to solve the similar anagram that closes Machaut’s Remede de fortune.
Machaut makes his authorship part of the text, difficult either to ignore or to delete when copying or reading. For a similar example of an author riddling his name into the text, see John Gower’s Prologue to Book I of Vox Clamantis, lines 19–24, a device conceivably learned from Machaut.
2055ff. As Hœpffner (“Anagramme” p. 405) notes, the anagram can be successfully solved, but only when the by-form Guillemin is substituted for the more normal form of Machaut’s first name.

GUILLAUME DE MACHAUT, LE JUGEMENT DOU ROY DE BEHAINGNE: TEXTUAL NOTES

The Navarre is found together with the Behaingne in eight Machaut manuscripts that contain only the works of the poet. These are, together with their customary sigla: Vg, B, A, F, E, M, D, Pm. The Behaingne is found without the Navarre in an additional twelve manuscripts (a complete listing can be found in Earp, Guillaume de Machaut, 207). For a variety of reasons, one of these is an excellent, if early, witness to the Behaingne: C.

For reasons set out at some length in the introduction, this edition takes A as an authoritative text for Machaut’s works, including the two dits and the lai included in this volume. Because of the unique authority of A, the practice has been to deviate from its readings only in clear cases of spelling error, scribal misinterpretation, and omissions or miswritings of various kinds (such as diplographies). In these cases, the reading of A has simply been corrected. In the case of the Behaingne, there are several passages of some length that have been neatly excised in A’s verison of the text; this “editing” can hardly be interpreted as other that deliberate, and since there is good reason to think that Machaut himself might have been involved in the preparation of this text (of the fair copy that was its basis), these lacunae, if that is what they are, have been supplied from C, but are printed in italics to mark then off as only provisionally included within the edition of the poem proper. In keeping with the minimal variant policy of this series, only semantically significant variants are here noted. Spelling variations or slight changes in word order are ignored. All deviations from the readings of A, however, are here accounted for.

ABBREVIATIONS: A: Paris, BN ff 1584 [base text]; B: Paris, BN ff 1585; C: Paris, BN ff 1586; D: Paris, BN ff 1587; E: Paris, BN ff 9221; F: Paris, BN ff 22545; G: Paris, BN ff 22546; J: Paris, Arsenal 5203; K: Berne, Burger-bibliothek 218; M: Paris, BN ff 843; P: Paris, BN 2166; Pm: New York, Pierpont Morgan Library, M. 396; R: Paris, BN 2230; Vg: New York, Wildenstein family; Hoe: Oeuvres de Guillaume de Machaut, ed. Ernest Hoepffner.

55 embuschiez. A: embunschiez, spelling error.

61 que. A: qui, spelling error.

114 avant. A: avent, spelling error.

126 rentiers. A: renties, spelling error.

187 durté. A: dutte, spelling error.

202 Eimy. A: einmy, extra nasal stroke.

287 solaus. A: solans, spelling error.

323 pointure. A: poiture, extra nasal stroke.

382 Que d’ nature. A: Quature spelling error.

497 requerre. A: requerir spelling error.

525 annuy. A: anny, spelling error.

627 qu’un. A: cun, spelling error — homonym.

675 regnay. A: resnay, spelling error.

688 Einsi. A: Eins, spelling error.

742 qu’uns. A: cuns, spelling error — homonym.

852 ç’a. A: sa, spelling error — homonym.

933 ne pooie. M, C, B, D: ne savoie.

994 venir. A: veinr, spelling error.

1000–47 A: omitted. These verses are supplied from C.

1065 espoir. A: esporr, spelling error.

1158 pooir. A: poir, spelling error.

1183 dites. A: ditos, spelling error.

1187 refais. A: refaie, spelling error.

1271 vraiement. A: vraiemnt, spelling error.

1380 arrestoient. A: arrestoioent, spelling error.

1383 disoient. A: disoiet, missing nasal stroke.

1402 Et l’aue. A: Etiaue spelling error.

1437 aussi. A: ossi, spelling error.

1453 aussi. A: assi, spelling error.

1483 Jeunesse. A: largesse (eyeskip — reading supplied from C).

1530 c’iere. A: siere, spelling error — homonym.

1538 durement. D, E: doucement.

1667 aimment. A: amment, spelling error.

1682 Qu’une. A: Cune, spelling error — homonym.

1816–19 A: omitted. These verses are supplied from C.

1831 haute game. F: fausse game.

1835 autrement. A: autremnt, spelling error.

1861–84 A: omitted. These verses are supplied from C.

1899 n’amoit. C, B, D, E: avoit.

1906 recours. A: recoues, spelling error.

1908 Car. A: Ca spelling error.

2015 durement. C, E: doucement.

2043 Qu’eins. A: Quenie spelling error.