His most controversial, celebrated, and imitated
work, the Belle dame sans merci (1424), begins with a
conventional situation: the wandering, mournful narrator
overhears an exchange between a disconsolate lover and
his lady. The language the lover uses to persuade the lady
of his love and to ask for hers in return reveals that he
has been cast in the old mold, in which the lady either
granted such requests or maintained a neutral distance.
Chartier’s belle dame reserves her right to refuse and
to disabuse the lover of his 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 affi rms 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 confi dence 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 throughout his career show Chartier’s
mastery of poetic conventions in portraying states of
love. Two amusing debate works, the Débat des deux
fortunés d’Amour (1425) and the Débat du réveille-
matin (uncertain date), present divergent and unrec-
onciled 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 amoe-
nus 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 narra-
tor encounters. Each woman describes the fate of her
beloved at Agincourt: the lover of the fi rst 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 fl eeing the
battlefi eld. 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 hérauk,
du vassault et du villain (ca. 1421–26) explores but
does not resolve the confl ict 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 na-
tion. 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 to have borrowed from his Latin to
provide the fi rst known occurrence of the word patrie
in this work, as well as the concept of a socially and
politically unifi ed France.
While the Quadrilogue remains Chartier’s best-
known prose work in French, the complexity of his
concern for the political and spiritual welfare of his
compatriots is best seen in the Livre de l’esperance ou
Le livre des trois vertus, a work begun in 1428 and left
unfi nished. Interspersing with lyric interludes extensive
prose dialogue between the author’s personifi ed faculty
of Understanding and personifi cations representing
Hope and Faith, Chartier explores many seemingly
unanswerable questions about the turmoil and moral
decline in France. Having chased away the specters of
Melancholy, Indignation, Mistrust, and Despair, whose
cumulative infl uence had brought Understanding to
the brink of suicide, Faith and Hope, chiefl y the latter,
provide extensive lessons to aid in Understanding’s
recovery. His memory is reawakened to allow him to ap-
ply the lessons of secular and biblical history, recounted
through numerous exempla, to the current state of af-
fairs in France and to his own spiritual state. Even in its
unfi nished form, L’esperance is a summa of Chartier’s
own erudition, put to the task of resolving the political
turmoil of his time or, at least, of fi nding an appropriate
spiritual context in which to understand it.
Numerous other works, in Latin and French, also
bear witness to Chartier’s versatility as a writer. Life as
a courtier is criticized in the Curial (De vita curiale),CHARTIER, ALAIN