man that loyalty in love brings the only true happiness, whereupon all four resolve to make a book out of this joint adventure. Thus Jean's hundred ballades tell the story.

An interesting supplement to the work of Jean le Seneschal is the little series of thirteen ballades, the answers of as many amateurs, who undertook one side or the other of the controversy. Two of the poets support the claims of fickleness; seven champion constancy, and four take an amused, slightly skeptical tone with no reference to the real issue.

Satire, in the centuries in which the ballade flourished, was largely directed against the frailties of the Church and of the court, and against the frivolities and follies of the ladies. In ballade literature, the clergy rarely, the aristocracy more often, and the feminine sex most often, are the object of attack. The jargon of the lowest grades of Paris society was used by Villon and by many other poets in their gross attacks on gross abuses. The satirical "sotte" ballade, nearly always expressed in terms of unspeakable indecency, assailed institutions and individuals indiscriminately. Most of these are unprintable, and, because of their dialect, incomprehensible to all but special students of jargon or thieves' patter.

Many of the satires against women are written in the language of the gutter, but some are entrusted to the ordinary vernacular. Deschamps has a balade "contre les femmes" with the refrain, "Il n'est chose que femme ne conçomme." Villon spares no vicious detail in the Ballade de la Belle Heaulmière aux Filles de Joie. And in his Ballade de Bonne Doctrine a Ceux de Mauvaise Vie, his refrain is: "Tout aux tauernes & aux filles," "taverns and wenches every whit." The king and the court were naturally in a position to be treated more tenderly by the satirist, though in the twenty-five ballades by Meschinot and Chastellain, appended to Les Lunettes

de Princes of Meschinot, Louis XI is the object of the satire.

French history also finds expression in ballades. Both important and unimportant events, royal marriages, treaties, campaigns, and military heroes, furnished at various times the subject matter of this fixed verse form. Great historical poetry was not produced. In the wealth of ballades furnished by Deschamps we find one on the birth of Charles VI and of Louis d'Orléans, his brother; another, on the death of Bertrand du Guesclin (1380), carries the refrain, "Plourez, plourez, flour de chevalerie," "Weep, weep, O flower of chivalry"; still another, on the peace concluded with England in 1394, uses for refrain, "There will never be peace till Calais is given up." Deschamps' ballade "sur le marriage de Richard, roi d'Angleterre, et d'Isabeau de France" overlooks the sad disparity between the child of eight and the royal widower. A well-known historical ballade has for its subject the state of France after the battle of Agincourt (1415). Naturally the rivalry between Louis XI and Charles the Bold found ballade expression, too. In the Chroniques de Louis XII by Jean d'Auton are several ballades dealing with the failure of the King's campaign in Naples (1502-1504). In 1520, the gorgeous meeting of Francis I and Henry VIII on the Field of the Cloth of Gold was celebrated in a ballade by Clément Marot. Later Cardinal Mazarin was, as might be expected, the object at times of congratulation, at times of execration in ballade litera

ture.

IV

BALLADES IN THE DRAMA

Sibilet, the sixteenth-century critic, wrote in 1548 that ballades and rondeaus were to be found in farce,

morality, and mystery "as thick as pieces of meat in a fricasee!" His statement is richly illustrated by the ballades in the fifteenth- and sixteenth-century mysteries that have come down to us. Ballades, like the triolets and the rondels more frequently employed in the mysteries, were used as adornments of the text. They were, as the subject matter of the mysteries would suggest, for the most part prayers to the deity and supplications to Mary for her intercession. A ballade prayer in the Mystère de Sainte Barbe (fifteenth century) is spoken by Origines and three companions. A ballade without envoy in which the stanzas are similarly distributed among several characters, the Magi, in this case, is to be found, too, in Le Mystère de la Passion d'Arnoul Greban.

Occasionally the ballade figured as a prologue to the mystery. The prologue, whatever its form might be, was spoken by the author, by a member of the company, or by some priest not a member of the company. The purpose of such a prologue was to fix the attention of the audience, to give them some notion of the plot, or to express the author's humility. The prologue in the fifteenth-century Le Martire de Saint Adrien is spoken by a priest. Another ballade prologue is spoken by an actor at the opening of the mystery of Notre Dame de Puy by Claude Doleson. A noteworthy ballade prologue, a fifteenth-century piece of "diablerie, introduces André de la Vigne's St. Martin and is spoken by Lucifer.

These lyric passages in the mysteries were, in general, sung, or, at any rate, were declaimed to the accompaniment of music. In view of the intimate connection of the ballade formula with the puy, another circumstance in the presentation of the mysteries is here worth noting: namely, the accepted fact that, in the fourteenth century, the Miracles de Nostre Dame were acted at

some puy, the location of which has not been determined.

Ballades continued to be written from the fourteenth century to the seventeenth. By far the greater number of them are insignificant as literature. They exhibit the sort of ingenuity that is inconsistent with real poetry. The tricks of the ballade writers, their acrostics, their word plays, made the form a kind of intellectual game. The satirical ones are remarkable for bold personalities. François Villon alone in these three centuries produced ballades, one is tempted to say a ballade, of great beauty.

These poems have for us, therefore, a social rather than a literary interest. In them for three hundred years the dominant ideas of medieval society were perpetuated. The current conceptions of love, death, and religion, the hand-to-mouth wisdom of proverbs, satire mordant and mild, the chronicle of marching events, aristocratic politics, all these subjects were accepted as within the proper scope of the ballade. Of particular interest, too, is its presence in the religious drama. So many of the mysteries are connected with puys that it is not surprising to find the ballade, itself in part a product of the puy, figuring in a number of the sacred plays. The ballade was thus considered equally appropriate for the expression of sacred or profane emotions.

V

THE BALLADE IN THE TREATISES ON POETRY

The fluctuating esteem in which the ballade and the rondeau were held is reflected in the rhetorico-poetical treatises of which the poets and critics of France were so prolific in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. These treatises not only recorded the progress of the forms and the practice of the poets who had used them, but in

some cases suggested elaborate innovations or novel complications of a type already sufficiently fixed and intricate. The handbooks of poetics that multiplied in these years are very generally looked upon as a symptom of decadence. But, in the case of the ballade, it must be understood that the refinements and the intricacies suggested by pedants were not necessarily accepted generally by the poets. Rhymsters early distorted the form in accordance with the prescriptions of theorists; but Villon, a man of some education, writing after at least four of .ne treatises had appeared, transcended their theory and produced the most beautiful ballades in literature.

Deschamps' L'Art de Dictier (1392) contains the earliest theoretical discussion of the ballade. Its neglect in France followed the invasion of ideas from Renaissance Italy and the rise of the Pléiade. Boileau's passing reference to it in his Art Poétique (1675), shows how lightly the form had come to be held at the end of the sixteenth century. The casual mention of the ballade by this critic indicates the verdict of the French classical age in regard to this form. Between 1392 and 1673 there were thirty of such treatises in circulation, the first being Deschamps' L'Art de Dictier and the latest Boileau's L'Art Poétique. In Le Déffence et Illustration de la Langue Française (1549), which marked Du Bellay as a Renaissance man, vowed to the building up of a native style formed by classically educated taste, he inveighs against ballades, rondeaus, chants royal and other such "condiments," as he calls them, as an evidence of the ignorance of his predecessors.

Before Boileau, the classical despot, disposes of the ballade as a form that owes its popularity chiefly to tricks of rhyme, Molière in Les Femmes Savantes, played (1672) the year before Boileau's set of rules appeared, embodies in Trissotin's fatal phrase the timely verdict of the seventeenth-century man of letters in