La Belle Dame sans mercy

[Paris, J. Hubert, c. 1529].
1 vol. (80 x 120 mm) of [32] p. [A-B8]. Red morocco, triple fillet frame on covers, spandrels with small irons and central medallion decorated with a rose, spine ribbed and decorated, gilt title, fillet on edges, gilt edges, inner lace (binding signed by Bauzonnet-Trautz).

One of the most emblematic pieces of courtly love: La Belle Dame sans mercy.
The term proverbial rarity is not misused here: it is neither more nor less than the only known copy of this rare edition – formerly part of the Fairfax-Murray collection.
This delightful copy was carefully compiled in the 19th century by Bauzonnet, in a delicate and refined red morocco binding.

We apologize for the imperfect translation generated by Deepl for the purposes of the show.

La Belle Dame sans mercy is a long poem consisting of one hundred octosyllabic verses, in three rhymes (therefore eight hundred verses). It is, after Le Livre des quatre dames, written in the aftermath of the Battle of Agincourt in 1416, the longest of Chartier’s poems; it is one of the fifteen or so pieces he wrote in French, leaving his more political works written in Latin when he took part in major diplomatic missions or when he was the influential secretary of the Dauphin, the future Charles VII.

Written in 1424, his Belle Dame sans mercy remains without question the most famous courtly poem of the Middle Ages after the unmissable Roman de la Rose; and whatever the value of his Latin and French prose writings, it was La Belle Dame that ensured Alain Chartier’s posterity as an author and poet of courtly love; along with Jean de Meung and François Villon, he remains one of the few medieval authors whose fame survived until the middle of the 16th century.

“Naguères chevauchant pensoye”: these famous lines are the opening of the poem, which revolves around the notion of the ‘femme fatale’, unfamiliar to courtly love, and the drama of the rejected lover. For these reasons, the poem sparked a heated debate throughout the 15th century: a young woman could not be free of all passion and become “without Mercy”. “A scandal that was the subject of discussion for nearly a century” (Bechtel) and which called for an immediate response from its author, in the form of two other poems, The Fair Lady Who Had Mercy, and then The Complaint Against the Death of His Lady.

Throughout the 15th century and until the beginning of the 16th century, the poem was debated, approved, praised, contradicted and condemned in a number of verse pieces, and was even staged. Copied and recopied throughout the 15th and 16th centuries – some fifty manuscripts are known – then obviously printed, the first time around 1488, before being included in the edition of the Fais d’Alain Chartier, printed for Antoine Vérard in 1498.

Why such lasting success, beyond the banter of 1424? It is due to the literary quality of the text: “It was quite simply the first time that we heard such fine writing about love,” says Pierre Champion (Histoire poétique du quinzième siècle, Paris, Édouard Champion, 1923, vol. I, p. 69). The text is entirely devoted to this question, with no linguistic or political allusions such as one might find in other works of the genre, including Chaucer or the Romance of the Rose.

The text’s fame even crossed borders, as copies of the text translated into English – a sublime outrage! The wound of Agincourt not yet having healed – appeared around 1450, by Richard Ros (born around 1429), one of the closest courtiers of King Henry VI of England, both knight and poet.

And on to the modern era: a little less than four centuries later, in the Romantic era, this translation, which had retained its original title in French, inspired John Keats in the writing of his famous ballad of 1819 (“O what can ail thee, knight-at-arms”).

“I saw pale kings and princes too,
Pale warriors, death-pale were they all;
They cried-‘La Belle Dame sans Merci
Thee hath in thrall’

(The kings, the princes, the warriors, all pale as death, cry to him: the beautiful lady without mercy holds you in slavery.)

The general definition of the Beautiful Lady is set in the context of courtly love: it is an apology for a chaste love that the knight must win from the lady of his heart. To this end, he is prepared to face many trials, until the beauty… gives in. This theme is obviously found in Arthurian legend, where all chivalric novels focus on the conquest of the Lady. Even to the point of mystical metaphor, such as the quest for the Grail and purity. Other texts are more steeped in folklore or magic and, as the tale or poem progresses, the Beautiful Lady, the one for whom the knights die of love, is transformed into a kind of fairy, who always comes to meet the wandering knight, as Viviane or Morgan le Fay would do. And, in an almost parallel to Sleeping Beauty, even more constrained, the Belle Dame yields to the advances of her valiant suitors.

But Alain Chartier goes much further: his Belle Dame is “merciless” and constantly rejects the advances of the suitor, displaying an authority and a freedom that were unimaginable and difficult to imagine in the 15th century, and in the centuries that followed!

Love can be murderous, and hope, once defeated, brings down all heroes: this is a complete reversal of courtly matters; man no longer triumphs but bows down before female power.

Five centuries before us, Chartier dared to assert that power and freedom – if not fear – “change sides”, or at the very least that these attributes can be legitimately assumed by women.

As such, The Beautiful and Damned inspired the most famous painters of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood – strong female figures are the subjects of almost all their works. As much as The Salome, Judith, Lilith and other castrating women, who have always been both attractive and monstrous for many artists. A distant relative of Homer’s sirens, she is obviously found in Heine’s Loreley (1824), inspiring Apollinaire’s Loreley (in Alcools, 1913). Even modern singers have followed in the footsteps of Keats, with Marianne Faithfull and Sting notably following up on his poem, and Patti Smith often seeing her name linked to the term “Belle dame sans merci” to emphasize her independence and freedom.

Thanks to medieval manuscripts, the text survived the 15th century, until it could finally be printed on its own: a single incunabulum edition in 1488, and only five other editions in the 16th century. Given their rarity, Tchemerzine can only describe four of them, while Bechtel and the USTC give six, published between 1489 and 1530. The five 16th-century editions are distinguished only by the number of pages or the engraving on the title page.

Here, the printing (of the wood, the fleurons and the text, in Gothic characters) is that of the Parisian printer Julien Hubert: a delightful engraved wood representing a man and a woman in conversation forms the title page.

Only this version of this woodcut and this book is known (Bibliographie des Éditions parisiennes du 16e siècle, 105880), with a privilege dated August 27, 1529.

This edition is only known through the copy that we present, which comes from the Fairfax Murray and Jean Bourdel collections.

Renouard and Bechtel – the two reference bibliographies – only cite the edition by this copy; the USTC can only cite one, which it had lost track of and had been given according to Renouard: it is probably this one.

The other editions listed by the Universal Short Title Catalogue* are as follows:

Lyon, 1488, three copies (BnF; Bibliothèque Mazarine; British Library);
Paris, 1500, no known copy, cited by Brunet, I, p. 751;
Rouen, 1505, two copies (BnF; Harvard: Houghton Library);
Lyon, 1515, only one copy (Yale University, Beinecke Library);
Paris, 1530, only one known copy (“Private collection”).

* The USTC is a bibliography of all printed editions published during the early age of printing, in England, France, Italy or any other part of the world where printing with movable type is known. Developed over more than twenty-five years of research and analysis at the University of St Andrews, the USTC now contains information on the location of more than 6 million copies of books printed between 1450 and 1700. The USTC contains references drawn from more than 9,000 libraries worldwide, as well as from museums, archives and private collections. Much of this material is fabulously rare: almost a third of all the documents listed in the USTC now exist in only one or two copies.

From the Fairfax-Murray Library (Sale, Early French Books, London, 1961, no. 633, and inventory label), then Jean Bourdel (bookplate).

Bechtel, Catalogue des gothiques français 1476-1560, C-263; H. W. Davies, Catalogue of a collection of Early French Books in the Library of C. Fairfax Murray, London, 1961, vol. II, pp. 967-972, no. 633 (this copy); Renouard, Brigitte Moreau, Inventaire chronologique des éditions parisiennes du XVIe siècle, 1697; Tchemerzine-Scheler, II-314; USTC, 73209; Piaget, La belle dame sans merci et les poésies lyriques, Droz, 1949.