Charles d'Orléans
Charles d'Orléans (1394-1465). Poet. Nephew to Charles VI, Charles was brought up in a cultured, cosmopolitan court. In 1407, however, his father, the duke of Orléans, was assassinated at the order of his cousin, the duke of Burgundy, and Charles, pursuing retribution, was thrust into the political turmoils of the late Hundred Years War. Captured at Agincourt in 1415, he spent the next 25 years as a prisoner in England. His imprisonment, while courteous, was solitary and conducive to poetry. Charles had already composed a few lyrics and a short, rather unfocused allegory, La Retenue d'Amours; in England he found his forte, the shorter fixed forms such as chanson and ballade. Freed in 1440, he first attempted to pick up the threads of his inheritance and political ambitions; soon disillusioned, he settled from about 1450 until his death in 1465 almost exclusively in Blois, where he cultivated poets and artists. His personal manuscript for these later years survives; it preserves not only his own œuvre (in these years the rondeau predominates) but also works composed by his entourage, including Villon.
Charles's rank means that we have an unusual wealth of biographical information; this and his romantic life-history tempt critics to read the poems of exile autobiographically, insisting on images of imprisonment or attempting to identify Charles's unnamed ‘dame’. But although the ballades are attributed to an insistent poetic je, this persona remains shifting and fragmented. A recurring dialectic is established between the poetic je and its counterpart, ‘mon cueur’, in which the former is the detached analyst, the latter the victim of conflicting personifications. Thus emotional conflicts are the atricalized, and out of the conventional metaphors of fin'amor (whose traditional character should warn us against reading the lyrics too confessionally) Charles creates a coherent poetic landscape (‘le logis de mon cueur’, ‘la nef de Bonne Nouvelle’, ‘l'ermitage de Pensee’, ‘la forest d'Ennuyeuse Tristesse’, the ‘moustier amoureux’). Within this frame, dramatically represented, abstractions and poetic persona interact: the poetic je plays chess with Dangier, takes council with Confort, and—typically self-reflexive—reads the ‘rommant de Plaisant Penser’.
From 1440, particularly in the rondeaux, this elaborate allegorical world achieves even greater sophistication. A new conflict becomes a leitmotiv: the poetic je is increasingly torn between Melancolie and Nonchaloir, an elegant, faintly amused detachment, even indifference. Reading and writing are visualized not simply as acts, but as objective states which in turn objectify the poet's sentiments (‘Dedens mon Livre de Pensee | J'ay trouvé escripvant mon cueur | La vraye histoire de douleur, | De larmes toute enluminee’). And the range of allegorical settings is increased: war and conflict are conventional enough, but more original are the hunt or the law-courts, the tournament or the fête champêtre (‘Les fourriers d'Esté sont venus | Pour appareillier son logis, | Et ont fait tendre ses tappis, | De fleurs et verdure tissus’).
This revitalization of metaphor is matched by formal and linguistic flexibility. Charles's vocabulary is not wide, but his shifts of register, his conversational syntax, his use of proverbs or technical terminologies give an impression of ease and intimacy. His handling of the fixed forms which he favoured is masterly: the essential musicality of ballade and rondeau, the discipline of the refrains, and the metric constraints provide a spatial framework in which he flourishes. His most lasting contribution is his centring of the poetic enterprise on self-exploration; like Villon's or Machaut's, Charles's poetic je is one of the pioneers of the landscape of the self.
[Jane Taylor]
Bibliography
- D. Poirion, Le Poète et le prince (1965)
- J. Fox, The Lyric Poetry of Charles d'Orléans (1969)
- D. A. Fein, Charles d'Orléans (1983)
- D. H. Nelson, Charles d'Orléans: An Analytical Bibliography (1990)
