point he has been both knight and Christian subject, clad in the Pauline
armor ofEphesians 6 , 13 – 18.^41 But when the hermit speaks of the knight’s
homeland, the knight acquires a more specific identity:
Du paÿs es et de la marche
Ou Fortune, Douleur et Rage
Ont entreprins de faire rage. ( 36. 6 – 8 )[You are from the country and of the marches where Chance, Misery and Rage
have set about to wreak havoc.]
Through wordplay, de la Marche becomes a synecdoche of a suffering
land; like Hawes’s poet-rhetorician, thisrhétoriqueuris afigure of the
state he serves. This is reinforced when the author devolves from the place
of protagonist to become a mere spectator at a tournament in which
Accident and Debile overcome“Phelippe, que l’on ama tant”( 225. 7 )–de
la Marche’s lord Philip the Good, along with Charles the Bold and Mary of
Burgundy. The poem proves to be a ceremonial elegy, its centerpiece not
the narrator’s private encounter with death–the destiny of the individual
Christian faced with frailty and old age, represented in Hawes’s poem–but
an act of public mourning.
The tournament episode culminates in an apostrophe to the reader:
O vous qui ce livre lisés,
Assavourez ceste adventure.
En ce beau miroir vous mirez:
Par ce trespas vous passerez... ( 265. 1 – 4 )[O you who read this book, take well into account this adventure. Look at yourself
in thisfine mirror: through this transition you shall go...]
De la Marche also utters his bitter sorrow (“desplaisance dure”) at the death
of the patrons who sustained him (“soubz eulx j’ay pris nouriture,” 266. 6 ).
Susie Speakman Sutch and Anne Lake Prescottfind in this intervention by
de la Marchein propria persona, as avowed servant of the Burgundian ducal
house, a reintegration of the tournament episode into the narrative frame.
As a homiletic reminder of mortality, the address to the reader corresponds
morally with the pilgrimage mode of the surrounding text; as nostalgic
praise of de la Marche’s deceased patrons, it promotes Burgundian chivalric
ideology through the noble deaths it privileges. The passage“gives moral
legitimacy to an episode that by all internal signs appears to be self-sufficient
and autonomous, residing outside the narrative boundaries of the pilgrim-
age of life allegory (or, we could say more precisely, deeply embedded within
the frame as a self-contained specularrécit, a mise-en-abîme).”^42 If Hawes
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