the city. One knight is married to a beautiful wife; the
second, a bachelor, is in love with the wife of the fi rst
(who has granted her love in return). As the two
knights are neighbors, the lovers, separated by a wall,
speak to each other nightly at an adjoining window. To
evade her jealous husband, the lady claims that she
gets up during the night because she loves to hear the
song of the nightingale. The angry husband has the
bird trapped and shows it to his wife. When she pleads
for him to release it, he instead kills it and throws it on
her, staining her garment. The lady wraps the bird in a
cloth and sends it to her lover. He makes a little golden,
jeweled casket for the bird, and thenceforth he carries
it around with him at all times.
Typically enough for Marie’s lais, “Laüstic” serves as a
scholarly vortex for opposing views on love. Some feel
that “Laüstic” does not chart a tale of true love at all. The
wife agrees to the pleas of the bachelor knight because
he is good, but also simply because he lives near her.
The tale is devoid of the quest for love that we encoun-
ter, for example, in Marie’s “GUIGEMAR,” or the magical
transformation of “Yonec,” in which a man metamor-
phoses into a bird in order to enter the room of his lover.
Furthermore, while in “Yonec” the husband’s fatal
wounding of the bird/man ultimately leads to an enno-
bling of the love (the lady jumps out her window and
goes off to fi nd her beloved) and to a revenge against the
jealous husband (the son born of the love affair later
cuts off the husband’s head), in “Laüstic” there is no
sense that the lovers make any effort to pursue their
relationship after the bird is killed.
On the other hand, the husband in “Laüstic” acts
excessively, and his character builds sympathy for the
frustrated lovers. Moreover, the unmarried knight’s
continuing devotion, manifested in his carrying of the
casket, suggests the meaningfulness of what existed
between himself and his neighbor’s wife. Although the
nightingale has been crushed as a vehicle for their rela-
tionship, it still serves as a memorial, as does the lai
itself. The enclosure of the bird evokes the context of a
spiritual reliquary (although this imagery has also been
interpreted as an ironic comment on the lovers unspir-
itual love).
The association between the casket and the poem—
two artistic constructions that hold potential meaning
within—raises the central issue of love in a different
way. Clearly Marie is interested in the imagery of
entrapment in “Laüstic.” The wife is held within her
own home, and the bird is fi rst ensnared by the hus-
band’s servants, then encased in its little coffi n. Does
the lai become a sort of beautifully adorned mauso-
leum for a love that was never really alive; or, con-
versely, does it reveal that what is inside, although
static (the written form of the tale, the dead bird), still
has movement through the symbolic and interpretive
messages it conveys?
FURTHER READING
Burgess, Glyn S. The Lais of Marie de France: Text and Con-
text. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1987.
McCash, June Hall. “Philomena’s Window”; “Issues of Inter-
textuality and Infl uence in Works of Marie de France and
Chrétien de Troyes.” In “De sens rassis”: Essays in Honor of
Rupert T. Pickens, edited by Keith Busby, et al., 415–430.
Amsterdam: Rodopi, 2005.
Tudor, A. P. “The Religious Symbolism of the ‘Reliquary
of Love’ in Laüstic.” French Studies Bulletin: A Quarterly
Supplement 46 (1993): 1–3.
John KerrLAY (BRETON LAI, LAI) A lay (or lai) is a
short narrative poem, often performed aloud to music
(e.g., the strumming of a harp). Although a few of the
surviving texts draw from the CLASSICAL TRADITION—
such as the 14th-century SIR ORFEO—the genre typi-
cally includes subjects of Celtic origin (the “matter of
Britain”).
The ANGLO-NORMAN poet MARIE DE FRANCE com-
posed the earliest surviving lais ca. 1165. Her collec-
tion includes 12 stories, composed in rhyming
octosyllabic COUPLETs, and which she claims to have
heard sung by storytellers in Britain and in Brittany. In
the general prologue, Marie explains that she wrote her
lais down because they are worthy of remembrance
and must not be forgotten (ll. 35–40). Women occupy
a central role in all of the narratives, which portray the
complexities of human love and often focus on an illicit
love affair.
In the 14th century, the lay—which became known
in England as the Breton lai—gained popularity among
authors writing in MIDDLE ENGLISH LANGUAGE. The242 LAY