La Marche, Olivier de. Parement et triomphe des dames, ed. Julia Kalbfleisch. Rostock: Adler,
1901.
——. Mémoires et opuscules, ed. H.Beaune and J.d’Arbaumont. 4 vols. Paris: Champion, 1983–88.
——. Le chevalier délibéré by Olivier de la Marche, printed at Paris in 1488, intro. Elizabeth
Mongan. Washington, D.C.: Library of Congress, 1945.
Stein, Henri. Étude biographique, littéraire et bibliographique sur Olivier de la Marche. Brussels:
Hayez, 1888.
LA SALE, ANTOINE DE
(1385/86–1460/61). Illegitimate son of a celebrated Gascon mercenary, Bernard de La
Sale, Antoine served for most of his life at the court of Anjou, performing administrative
and military duties for Louis II, Louis III, and King René. He traveled extensively,
especially in Italy. From 1435 to 1446, he served as tutor to Jean de Calabre, René’s
young son. During this period, he wrote La Salade (1440–44), a prose pedagogical
treatise that touches on, among other subjects, geography, history, rules of protocol, and
military tactics. It is preserved in one complete manuscript (Brussels, Bibl. Roy. 18210–
15) and two early printed editions. Incorporated in it are two earlier works by La Sale,
sometimes edited separately: Paradis de la reine Sibylle and Excursion aux Iles Lipari.
In 1448, La Sale entered the service of Louis de Luxembourg, count of Saint-Pol, as
tutor to his three children. For his pupils, he composed La Sale (1448–51), a second
pedagogical treatise, this time in the form of exempla taken from classical and Christian
authors to illustrate such virtues as prudence, moderation, justice, pity, and abstinence.
This prose work of 167 chapters is extant in two manuscripts (Brussels, Bibl. Roy. 10957,
revised by the author’s own hand, and Bibl. Roy. 9287–88).
La Sale also composed works of fiction and historiography: Jehan de Saintré (1456),
Floridan et Elvide (1456), Adicion extraicte des chroniques de Flandres (1456),
Réconfort a Madame de Fresne (1457), and Des anciens tournois et faictz d’armes
(1459). The most important of his works is Jehan de Saintré, preserved in ten
manuscripts. This substantial prose romance, in which some have wished to see a roman
a clef, tells of a young page whose love for the Dame des Belles Cousines, coupled with
his own natural merits, leads him to become a great knight. When Jehan is away at a
tournament, the lady comes to an abbey, where she is seduced by its worldly abbot. The
hero himself is beaten by the abbot but eventually has his revenge. The work is an
important description of the life of the nobility in the later Middle Ages, gilding its
underlying decadence with a still courtly vocabulary. Critics are divided as to whether it
promotes or condemns late-medieval chivalry, whether it advances an aristocratic or a
bourgeois ideal.
Several works occasionally attributed to La Sale—Cent nouvelles nouvelles, Quinze
joyes de mariage, and Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing—are no longer widely
believed to be by him.
William W.Kibler
[See also: RENÉ D’ANJOU]
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