Gautier le Leu’s, Jehan’s fabliaux evince acute observation and a rich experience of the
life of Picard peasants and merchants. The genre, free enough to encompass risqué tales
and cautionary fables, appealed to this storyteller keen on Gallic mirth: Jehan Bodiax, un
rimoieres de flabiax, as he called himself.
His versatility led him to widen the scope of his writings. A connoisseur of chansons
de geste, he soon realized that the Saxon wars, a landmark in Charlemagne’s reign, were
a fit subject for a vast epic, and by 1180 he undertook the composition of the Chanson
des Saisnes, which his disease prevented him from completing. Four drafts of this work
are extant, the shortest one known as A (4,337 lines) and the longest as T (8,019 lines).
Analysis shows that later writers tried to bring the unfinished poem to completion after
the 12th century. The first 3,307 lines of A provide us with a text as close as possible to
what Jehan’s original work may have been. Here, we can recognize the innovator at once
by his art and literary theories as well as his idea of history. In keeping with the Roland
tradition of the chanson de geste, he foregrounds Charlemagne but also humanizes the
God-chosen emperor, whose character underwent further transformation with the
continuators. Nor is Jehan’s inspiration purely epic: with the amours of Baudouin, the
young Frenchman, romance is woven into the martial narrative, while the comedy
peculiar to fabliaux creeps into the episode of Saint-Herbert du Rhin. The poem
synthesizes all the components of the author’s craftsmanship: a scholarly minstrel,
fascinated by history and committed to his times, both an observer of reality and a
visionary, but first and foremost a poet capable of breathing life into whatever he
portrayed.
Jehan dealt once more with an epic subject in the Jeu de saint Nicolas, a semiliturgical
drama produced during the grand siège, or convention, of the Arras brotherhood,
between 1194 and 1202. As in the Chanson des Saisnes, the background is the war of
Christians and heathens. After an initial victory by the king of Africa’s Saracens, the only
survivor of the Christian host eventually ensures the triumph of his party, thanks to the
protection of the saint; the king and his men convert to Christianity. The Jeu is a chanson
de geste in miniature. Yet once more, the narrow frame of the genre, the dramatized
miracle play, bursts under the poet’s creative power. “Throughout the play,” Albert
Henry writes, “sacred and profane, sublime and comic, marvellous...and realistic
elements are to be found side by side.” In this powerful and original work, a masterpiece
of medieval dramatic literature, is reflected the multifarious personality of an author who
showed as much sincerity in praising Auxerre wine as in extolling the crusade.
Disease turned Jehan into one of our great lyric poets. When obliged to withdraw from
the society of his contemporaries, he wrote a long supplication to his friends and
benefactors in his farewell poems (Congés), composed in 1202. Taking up the stanzaic
form of Hélinant de Froidmont’s Vers de la Mort, he bade a pathetic farewell to the world
in forty-five octosyllabic stanzas. The regret of bygone joys, rebellion against and
resignation to his misfortune, faith in God, gratitude to those who harbored him “half
sound and half rotten”—all the themes of a new genre are to be found here. A work of
harrowing sincerity, the Congés stand, in the early 13th century, as the first example of
“ordeal lyricism” to be found in so many poets from Rutebeuf to Verlaine.
A teller of spicy stories, the author of a chanson de geste, a skillful dramatist, a lyric
poet, and a critic (in the prologue to the Chanson des Saisnes, he puts forward a
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