Antoine de la Sale or
la Salle (1385/6 to 1460/1) was a French writer.
Family and Early Years
He was born in
ProvenceProvence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...
, probably at
ArlesArles is a city and commune in the south of France, in the Bouches-du-Rhône department, of which it is a subprefecture, in the former province of Provence....
, the illegitimate son of Bernardon de la Salle, a celebrated
GasconGascony is an area of southwest France that was part of the "Province of Guyenne and Gascony" prior to the French Revolution. The region is vaguely defined and the distinction between Guyenne and Gascony is unclear; sometimes they are considered to overlap, and sometimes Gascony is considered a...
mercenary, mentioned in
Froissart's ChroniclesFroissart's Chronicles was written in French by Jean Froissart. It covers the years 1322 until 1400 and describes the conditions that created the Hundred Years' War and the first fifty years of the conflict...
. His mother was a peasant, Perrinette Damendel.
At the Court of Anjou
In 1402 Antoine entered the court of the third Angevin dynasty at
AnjouAnjou is a former county , duchy and province centred on the city of Angers in the lower Loire Valley of western France. It corresponds largely to the present-day département of Maine-et-Loire...
, probably as a page.
In 1407 he was at Messina with
Louis II, Duke of BourbonLouis de Bourbon, called the Good , son of Peter de Bourbon and Isabella de Valois, was the third Duke of Bourbon....
, who had gone there to enforce his claim to the
kingdom of SicilyThe Kingdom of Sicily was a state that existed in the south of Italy from its founding by Roger II in 1130 until 1816. It was a successor state of the County of Sicily, which had been founded in 1071 during the Norman conquest of southern Italy...
. The next years he perhaps spent in
BrabantThe Duchy of Brabant was a historical region in the Low Countries. Its territory consisted essentially of the three modern-day Belgian provinces of Flemish Brabant, Walloon Brabant and Antwerp, the Brussels-Capital Region and most of the present-day Dutch province of North Brabant.The Flag of...
, for he was present at two
tournamentsA tournament, or tourney is the name popularly given to chivalrous competitions or mock fights of the Middle Ages and Renaissance . It is one of various types of hastiludes....
given at
BrusselsBrussels , officially the Brussels Region or Brussels-Capital Region , is the capital of Belgium and the de facto capital of the European Union...
and
GhentGhent is a city and a municipality located in the Flemish region of Belgium. It is the capital and biggest city of the East Flanders province. The city started as a settlement at the confluence of the Rivers Scheldt and Lys and in the Middle Ages became one of the largest and richest cities of...
.
In 1415 he took part in the successful expedition by
John I of PortugalJohn I KG , called the Good or of Happy Memory, more rarely and outside Portugal the Bastard, was the tenth King of Portugal and the Algarve and the first to use the title Lord of Ceuta...
against the
MoorsThe description Moors has referred to several historic and modern populations of the Maghreb region who are predominately of Berber and Arab descent. They came to conquer and rule the Iberian Peninsula for nearly 800 years. At that time they were Muslim, although earlier the people had followed...
in
CeutaCeuta is an autonomous city of Spain and an exclave located on the north coast of North Africa surrounded by Morocco. Separated from the Iberian peninsula by the Strait of Gibraltar, Ceuta lies on the border of the Mediterranean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. Ceuta along with the other Spanish...
.
In 1420 he accompanied the 17-year-old Louis III of Anjou in his attempt to assert his claim as King of
NaplesNaples is a city in Southern Italy, situated on the country's west coast by the Gulf of Naples. Lying between two notable volcanic regions, Mount Vesuvius and the Phlegraean Fields, it is the capital of the region of Campania and of the province of Naples...
.
He travelled from
NorciaNorcia is a town and comune in the province of Perugia in southeastern Umbria, located in a wide plain abutting the Monti Sibillini, a subrange of the Apennines with some of its highest peaks, near the Sordo River, a small stream that eventually flows into the Nera...
to the Monti Sibillini and the neighboring Pilate's Lake (the final resting place of
Pontius PilatePontius Pilatus , known in the English-speaking world as Pontius Pilate , was the fifth Prefect of the Roman province of Judaea, from AD 26–36. He is best known as the judge at Jesus' trial and the man who authorized the crucifixion of Jesus...
, according to local legend). The story of his adventures on this trip and of the local legends and Sibyl's grotto form a chapter of
La Salade, which also has a map of the ascent from
MontemonacoMontemonaco is a town and comune in the Province of Ascoli Piceno in the Italian region Marche, located about 90 km south of Ancona and about 20 km northwest of Ascoli Piceno. It is located within the Parco Nazionale dei Monti Sibillini, along the valley of the Aso River, on a plateau...
.
In 1426 La Sale probably returned with Louis III of Anjou, who was also
comte de ProvenceProvence ; Provençal: Provença in classical norm or Prouvènço in Mistralian norm) is a region of south eastern France on the Mediterranean adjacent to Italy. It is part of the administrative région of Provence-Alpes-Côte d'Azur...
, to Provence, where he was acting as
viguier of Arles in 1429.
In 1434 René of Anjou, Louis's successor, made La Sale tutor to his son,
John II, Duke of LorraineJohn II of Anjou was Duke of Lorraine from 1453 to his death. He inherited the duchy from his mother, Duchess Isabelle, during the life of his father, Duke René of Anjou, also Duke of Lorraine and titular king of Naples...
(also known as the
Duke of CalabriaDuke of Calabria was the traditional title of the heir apparent of the Kingdom of Naples after the accession of Robert of Naples. It was also adopted by the heads of certain Houses that had once claimed the Kingdom of Naples in lieu of the royal title....
), to whom he dedicated, between the years 1438 and 1447, his
La Salade.
In 1439 he was again in Italy in charge of the castle of
CapuaCapua is a city and comune in the province of Caserta, Campania, southern Italy, situated 25 km north of Naples, on the northeastern edge of the Campanian plain. Ancient Capua was situated where Santa Maria Capua Vetere is now...
, with John II and his young wife, Marie de Bourbon, when the place was besieged by the
king of AragonAlfonso the Magnanimous KG was the King of Aragon , Valencia , Majorca, Sardinia and Corsica , and Sicily and Count of Barcelona from 1416 and King of Naples from 1442 until his death...
.
La Sale married Lione de la Sellana de Brusa in 1439. He was about fifty-three; she was fifteen.
René abandoned Naples in 1442, and Antoine no doubt returned to France about the same time. His advice was sought at the tournaments which celebrated the marriage of the unfortunate
Margaret of AnjouMargaret of Anjou was the wife of King Henry VI of England. As such, she was Queen consort of England from 1445 to 1461 and again from 1470 to 1471; and Queen consort of France from 1445 to 1453...
at Nancy in 1445; and in 1446, at a similar display at
SaumurSaumur is a commune in the Maine-et-Loire department in western France.The historic town is located between the Loire and Thouet rivers, and is surrounded by the vineyards of Saumur itself, Chinon, Bourgueil, Coteaux du Layon, etc...
, he was one of the umpires.
La Sale's pupil was now twenty years of age, and after forty years' service to the house of Anjou, La Sale left it.
Luxembourg
He become tutor to the sons of
Louis de Luxembourg, Count of Saint-PolLouis de Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol, of Brienne, de Ligny, and Conversano belonged to the Ligny branch of the House of Luxemburg and was Constable of France....
, who took him to
FlandersFlanders is the community of the Flemings but also one of the institutions in Belgium, and a geographical region located in parts of present-day Belgium, France and the Netherlands. "Flanders" can also refer to the northern part of Belgium that contains Brussels, Bruges, Ghent and Antwerp...
and presented him at the court of
Philippe le BonPhilippe le Bon was a French engineer, born in Brachay, France.There is much confusion about his life and accomplishments. His main contributions were improvements to steam engines and industrializing the extraction of lighting gas from wood...
, duke of Burgundy. For his new pupils he wrote at Chatelet-sur-Oise, in 1451, a moral work entitled
La Salle. He followed his patron to
GenappeGenappe is a Walloon municipality located in the Belgian province of Walloon Brabant. On 1 January 2006 Genappe had a total population of 14,136...
in
BrabantThe Duchy of Brabant was a historical region in the Low Countries. Its territory consisted essentially of the three modern-day Belgian provinces of Flemish Brabant, Walloon Brabant and Antwerp, the Brussels-Capital Region and most of the present-day Dutch province of North Brabant.The Flag of...
when the Dauphin (afterwards
Louis XILouis XI , called the Prudent , was the King of France from 1461 to 1483. He was the son of Charles VII of France and Mary of Anjou, a member of the House of Valois....
) took refuge at the Burgundian court.
The Salad (1440-1444)
A textbook of the studies necessary for a prince. The title is of course a play on his own name, but he explains it as being due to the diverse subject matter of the book: a salad is composed "of many good herbs." The work covered geography, history, protocol and military tactics. One complete original copy has survived, and two early printed editions. It includes
Queen Sibyl's Paradise , and
Trip to the Lipari Isles , but these are have often been edited separately.
Little John of Saintré (1456)
He was nearly seventy years of age when he wrote the work that has made him famous,
L'Hystoire et plaisante cronicque du petit Jehan de Saintré et de la jeune dame des Belles-Cousines sans aultre nom nommer, dedicated to his former pupil, Jean de Calabre. An
envoi in manuscript 10,057 (nouv. acq. fr.) in the
Bibliothèque NationaleThe is the National Library of France, located in Paris. It is intended to be the repository of all that is published in France. The current president of the library is Bruno Racine.-History:...
, Paris, states that it was completed at
ChâteletThe Grand Châtelet was a stronghold in Ancien Régime Paris, on the right bank of the Seine, on the site of what is now the Place du Châtelet; it contained a court and police headquarters and a number of prisons....
on 6 March 1453 (i.e. 1456). La Sale also announces an intention, never fulfilled, apparently, of writing a romance of
Paris et Vienne. The manuscript of
Petit Jehan de Saintré usually contains in addition
Floridam et Elvide, translated by Rasse de Brunhamel from the Latin of Nicolas de Clamange. Brunhamel says that La Sale had delighted to write honorable histories from the time of his "florie jeunesse", which confirms a reasonable inference from the style of
Petit Jehan le Saintré that its author was no novice in the art of romance-writing.
Petit Jehan de Saintré gives, at the point when the traditions of
chivalryChivalry is a term related to the medieval institution of knighthood which has an aristocratic military origin of individual training and service to others. Chivalry was also the term used to refer to a group of mounted men-at-arms as well as to martial valour...
were fast disappearing, an account of the education of an "ideal knight" and rules for his conduct under many different circumstances. When Petit Jehan, aged thirteen, is persuaded by the Dame des Belles-Cousines to accept her as his lady, she gives him systematic instruction in religion, courtesy, chivalry and the arts of success. She materially advances his career until Saintré becomes an accomplished knight, the fame of whose prowess spreads throughout
EuropeEurope is, by convention, one of the world's seven continents. Comprising the westernmost peninsula of Eurasia, Europe is generally 'divided' from Asia to its east by the watershed divides of the Ural and Caucasus Mountains, the Ural River, the Caspian and Black Seas, and the waterways connecting...
. This section of the romance, apparently didactic in intention, fits in with the author's other works of edification. But in the second part this virtuous lady falls victim to a vulgar intrigue with Dame Abbé. One of La Sale's commentators, Joseph Neve, ingeniously maintains that the last section is simply to show how the hero, after passing through the other grades of education, learns at last by experience to arm himself against coquetry. The book may, however, be fairly regarded as satirizing the whole theory of "courteous" love, by the simple method of fastening a repulsive conclusion on an ideal case. The contention that the
fabliauA fabliau is a comic, often anonymous tale written by jongleurs in northeast France between ca. 1150 and 1400. They are generally characterized by an excessiveness of sexual and scatological obscenity. Several of them were reworked by Giovanni Boccaccio for the Decamerone and by Geoffrey Chaucer...
-like ending of a romance begun in idyllic fashion was due to the corrupt influences of the Dauphin's exiled court is inadmissible, for the last page was written when the prince arrived in Brabant in 1456. That it is an anti-clerical satire seems unlikely. The profession of the seducer is not necessarily chosen from that point of view. Some light is thrown on the romance by the circumstances of the duc de Calabre, to whom it was dedicated. His wife, Marie de Bourbon, was one of the "Belles-Cousines" who contended for the favor of Jacquet or
Jacques de LalaingJacques de Lalaing was a Walloon knight of the 15th century. He was originally in the service of the Duke of Cleves and afterwards in that of the Duke of Burgundy, Philip III, the Good, gaining great renown by his prowess in the tiltyard....
in the
Livre des faits de Jacques Lalaing which forms the chief source of the early exploits of Petit Jehan.
The incongruities of La Sale's aims appear in his method of construction. The hero is not imaginary. Jehan de Saintré flourished in the
Hundred Years' WarThe Hundred Years' War was a series of separate wars waged from 1337 to 1453 by the House of Valois and the House of Plantagenet, also known as the House of Anjou, for the French throne, which had become vacant upon the extinction of the senior Capetian line of French kings...
, was taken prisoner after
PoitiersThe Battle of Poitiers was fought between the Kingdoms of England and France on 19 September 1356 near Poitiers, resulting in the second of the three great English victories of the Hundred Years' War: Crécy, Poitiers, and Agincourt....
, with the elder Boucicaut, and was employed in negotiating the
Treaty of BrétignyThe Treaty of Brétigny was a treaty signed on May 9, 1360, between King Edward III of England and King John II of France. In retrospect it is seen as having marked the end of the first phase of the Hundred Years' War —as well as the height of English hegemony on the Continent.It was signed...
. Froissart mentioned him as "le meilleur et le plus vaillant chevalier de France." His exploits as related in the romance are, however, founded on those of Jacques de Lalaing (c. 1422-1453), who was brought up at the Burgundian court, and became such a famous knight that he excited the rivalry of the "Belles-Cousines", Marie de Bourbon and Maria of Cleves, Duchess of Orléans. Lalaing's exploits are related by more than one chronicler, but M. Gustave Raynaud thinks that the
Livre des faits de Jacques de Lalaing, published among the works of
Georges ChastellainGeorges Chastellain , Burgundian chronicler and poet, was a native of Aalst in Flanders. In spite of excessive partiality to the Duke of Burgundy, Chastellain's historical works are valuable for the accurate information they contain. As a poet he was famous among his contemporaries...
, to which textual parallels may be found in
Petit Jehan, should also be attributed to La Sale, who in that case undertook two accounts of the same hero, one historical and the other fictitious. To complicate matters, he drew, for the later exploits of Petit Jehan, on the
Livres des faits de Jean Boucicaut, which gives the history of the younger Boucicaut. The atmosphere of the book is not the rough realities of the English wars in which the real Saintré figured but that of the courts to which La Sale was accustomed.
Reconfort a Madame de Neufville (c.1458)
A consolatory epistle including two stories of parental fortitude, written at Vendeuil-sur-Oise.
Disputed Literary Works
The works in this section have been attributed to La Sale in the past but are not now believed to be by him.
Cent Nouvelles nouvelles (1461/2?)
La Sale is supposed to have been the "acteur" in the collection of licentious stories supposed to be narrated by various persons at the court of
Philippe le BonPhilippe le Bon was a French engineer, born in Brachay, France.There is much confusion about his life and accomplishments. His main contributions were improvements to steam engines and industrializing the extraction of lighting gas from wood...
, and entitled the
Cent Nouvelles nouvellesThe Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles is a collection of stories supposed to be narrated by various persons at the court of Philippe le Bon, and collected together by Antoine de la Sale in the mid-15th century....
. One only of the stories is given in his name, but he is credited with the compilation of the whole, for which Louis XI was long held responsible. A completed copy of this was presented to the Duke of Burgundy at
DijonDijon is a city in eastern France, the capital of the Côte-d'Or département and of the Burgundy region.Dijon is the historical capital of the region of Burgundy. Population : 151,576 within the city limits; 250,516 for the greater Dijon area....
in 1462. If then La Sale was the author, he probably was still living; otherwise the last mention of him is in 1461.
In the
Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles the Italian
novellaA novella is a written, fictional, prose narrative usually longer than a novelette but shorter than a novel. The Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Nebula Awards for science fiction define the novella as having a word count between 17,500 and 40,000...
is naturalized in France. The book is modelled on the
Decameron of
BoccaccioGiovanni Boccaccio was an Italian author and poet, a friend, student, and correspondent of Petrarch, an important Renaissance humanist and the author of a number of notable works including the Decameron, On Famous Women, and his poetry in the Italian vernacular...
, and owes something to the Latin
Facetiae of the contemporary scholar
Poggio Poggio Bracciolini was an Italian scholar, writer and humanist. He recovered a great number of classical Latin texts, mostly lying forgotten in German and French monastic libraries, and disseminated manuscript copies among the educated world.- Biography :Poggio di Duccio was...
; but the stories are rarely borrowed, and in cases where the
Nouvelles have Italian parallels they appear to be independent variants. In most cases the general immorality of the conception is matched by the grossness of the details, but the ninety-eighth story narrates what appears to be a genuine
tragedyTragedy is a form of art based on human suffering that offers its audience pleasure. While most cultures have developed forms that provoke this paradoxical response, tragedy refers to a specific tradition of drama that has played a unique and important role historically in the self-definition of...
, and is of an entirely different nature from the other
contes. It is another version of the story of
Floridam et Elvide already mentioned.
Further reading
- Petit Jehan de Saintré by J. M. Guichard (1843);
- Les Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles by Thomas Wright (Bibliothèque elzevérienne, 1858).
- La Salade was printed more than once during the sixteenth century. La Salle was never printed. For its contents see E. Gossart in the Bibliophile belge (1871, pp. 77 et seq.).
- Joseph Neve, Antoine de la Salle, sa vie et ses ouvrages ... suivi du Reconfort de Madame de Fresne ... et de fragments et documents inedits (1903), who argues for the rejection of Les Quinze Joyes and the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles from La Sale's works.
- Pietro Toldo, Contribute olio studio della novella francese del XV e XVI secolo (1895), and a review of it by Gaston Paris
Bruno Paulin Gaston Paris , known as Gaston Paris, was a French writer and scholar.He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1901, 1902 and 1903.-Biography:Paris was born at Avenay...
in the Journal des Savants (May 1895);
- Stern, Versuch liber Antoine de la Salle, in Archiv fur das Studium der neueren Sprachen, vol. xlvi.
- G. Raynaud, Un Nouveau Manuscrit du Petit Jehan de Saintré, in Romania, vol. xxxi.