belief in the power of his own courtly rhetoric. To the lover, who says he will die if she
does not take pity on him, she suggests that he is succumbing to a metaphor, since she
has seen no one actually die of unrequited love. To his persistent and sometimes
accusatory pleas, she affirms that her indifference is neither cruel nor harmful. She
counsels him to be reasonable and to take her refusal in stride. The narrator suggests at
the close of the work that the lover did in fact die as a consequence. He asks lovers to
shun meddlers and braggarts who have done harm to the cause of love; and he asks
women not to be as cruel as the belle dame sans merci.
The reaction in courtly circles to the Belle dame sans merci attests both to the
continuing hold that convention had at court in determining codes of amorous conduct
and to Chartier’s innovative view of these codes. By the following year, while on his
mission to Hungary, Chartier was summoned to appear before a “Court of Love” because
of objections women at the French court had made to his work. Chartier defended himself
from a distance, composing L’excusacion aux dames (1425), in which the God of Love
accuses the author of wrongs against love’s rights. The author responds that, while in
some women pity is so deeply hidden as to be invisible, he maintains confidence in love
itself. He also claims that he had merely recorded the exchange between lover and lady. It
is not known to what extent his Excusacion won him forgiveness at court.
The Lay de Plaisance (1414) and numerous short lyrics composed thoughout his
career show Chartier’s mastery of poetic conventions in portraying states of love. Two
amusing debate works, the Débat des deux fortunes d’Amour (1425) and the Débat du
réveille-matin (uncertain date), present divergent and unreconciled views on the value
and nature of love. More frequently, Chartier’s poems rely heavily on convention, while
introducing new vantages or combining other concerns with the subject of love. Just as
the Belle dame sans merci moves outside of convention to challenge it, the Livre des
quatre dames (1416), composed in the wake of the French disaster at Agincourt,
intertwines love stories with the moral and political elements of a national tragedy. The
traditional springtime locus amoenus in this work, replete with the amorous diversions of
a shepherd and shepherdess, provides the backdrop for the sorrowful tales of four women
whom the narrator encounters. Each woman describes the fate of her beloved at
Agincourt: the lover of the first has been killed, the second lady’s lover has been taken
prisoner, the fate of the third lady’s lover is unknown, and the fourth lady’s lover has
disgraced himself by fleeing the battlefield. They ask the narrator to say which of them is
to be pitied the most. He confesses inability to judge and refers debate to his own lady in
writing.
Chartier rarely supplies resolutions to the debates related in many of his works. The
Débat du hérault, du vassault et du villain (ca. 1421–26) explores but does not resolve
the conflict between generations and between social classes. His best-known prose work,
the Quadrilogue invectif (1422), is also cast in the form of a debate. Lady France,
disheveled and tattered, eloquently inveighs against her three “children,” asking them to
account for their role in the lamentable state of the nation. The Knight, the Cleric, and the
Peasant present in turn excuses, accusations, and expressions of despair. No single estate
is to bear the burden of blame at the end of the Quadrilogue, yet it is clear that each must
assume a share of responsibility and that the divisive forces that cause them to rail against
one another need to be eliminated through concern for the common good. Chartier seems
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