Pierrepont. With an original turn of mind and a malicious sense of humor, the author
hides behind his persona the better to impose his presence. In a style both spontaneous
and convoluted, he gives an unexpected twist to commonplace motifs.
After a lengthy prologue devoted to the exploits of Count Richart de Montivilliers,
here made duke of Nor-mandy, Escoufle recounts the star-crossed love affair of Richart’s
son Guillaume and Aelis, daughter of the Emperor of Rome. The two young lovers run
off together. In a forest in Lorraine, while Aelis is asleep, a kite (OFr. escoufle) flies off
with her red silk alms purse. Guillaume becomes lost while seeking it; Aelis awakens in
the interval and thinks she has been abandoned. The separated lovers are reunited after
many wanderings at the court of the Count of Saint-Gilles. In Guillaume de Dole, the
young German emperor Conrad, a confirmed bachelor, hears his jongleur Jouglet singing
the praises of Guillaume de Dole and his sister, the beautiful Liénor, and promptly falls in
love. He becomes friendly with her brother, telling him of his intention to wed Liénor.
His seneschal, jealous of Guillaume’s good fortune, goes to Dole and learns from
Liénor’s naive mother that the young girl has a rose-shaped birthmark on her thigh. In a
version of the wager story, popular in the Middle Ages, he uses this information to lead
others to believe he has obtained her favors. But Liénor comes to court and easily proves
him wrong. In the prologue, Jean Renart boasts of being the first to include lyric
selections in a romance. Indeed, he uses this procedure, which was to become
enormously successful in succeeding generations, with a remarkable aptness, sense of
citation, and mirror-like effect. The chansons de toile that he places in the mouths of
Liénor and her mother have been particularly admired.
The Roman de la Violette (or the Roman de Gérard de Nevers) by Gerbert de
Montreuil, possibly the author of a Perceval continuation, was written between 1227 and
- Although the plot is more like that of the Roman du comte de Poitiers, the romance
is also imitative of Guillaume de Dole, with its inserted lyrics, including a chanson de
toile; and its use of the wager motif (in its usual form, a wager between the hero, sure of
the faithfulness of his beloved, and the traitor); and the birthmark (here, a violet on the
breast rather than a rose on the thigh), the traitor’s knowledge of which, thanks to the
indiscretion of an evil duenna, is interpreted as proof of his success. Convinced of
Eurïaut’s infidelity, Gérard, who has lost his lands by losing the wager, wishes to kill her
but decides to abandon her in the forest after she saves his life. He lives the life of a
wanderer, while Eurïaut, rescued by the Duke of Metz, becomes the object of his
attentions. The lovers finally are reunited, and Eurïaut’s innocence is proven through trial
by combat.
The anonymous Galeran de Bretagne (ca. 1220) develops the theme already treated by
Marie de France in Fresne. A woman slanders a neighbor who has given birth to twin
sons, claiming that she must have known two men. Shortly afterward, the slanderer
herself gives birth to twin daughters. Caught in her own trap, she has one infant
abandoned outside a nunnery, where she is found and baptized Fresne, for the ash-tree in
which her cradle was hung. She is raised alongside the abbess’s nephew, Galeran, son of
the count of Brittany, and as they grow older they fall in love. But Galeran, who has
become count after his father’s death, must set off on adventures that take him to the
home of Fresne’s parents, while she, mistreated and despised, is driven from the nunnery.
A general recognition, pardon, and marriage end the romance.
The Encyclopedia 1473