Anna Kłosowska
ON THE LOVE OF COMMENTARY TEARSONG: VALENTINE VISCONTI’S INVERTED STOICISM Anna Kłosowska When her husband Louis of Orléans was assassinated on the orders of the duke of Burgundy John the Fearless in 1407, Valentine Visconti adopted the emblem of a chantepleure (fountain; literally, tearsong) with a devise “Rien ne m’est plus, Plus ne m’est riens,” or, in Mid-American translation, “that’s it, folks. I don’t care.”1 It is a well- wrought devise, symmetrical in its oxymoric equation between more (plus) and nothing (rien). The Latin version is a perfect palindrome: “Nil mihi praetera, praetera mihi nihil”: there’s nothing more for me. Nothing is, from now on. She died scarcely more than a year later, in 1408.2 1 I owe a debt to Eileen Joy for “tearsong,” the translation of chantepleure; to Nicola Masciandaro for the idea of “inverted Stoicism” and other suggestions, here and in “Beyond the Sphere: A Dialogic Commentary on the Ultimate Sonneto of Dante’s Vita Nuova,” Glossator 1 (Fall 2009): 47-80; and to Jean- Marie Fritz, for first mentioning to me chantepleure, see: Jean-Marie Fritz, Paysages Sonores du Moyen Age: Versant Epistémologique. Paris: Champion, 2000, and his Le discours du fou au Moyen Age, Paris: PUF, 1992. See also: Emanuele Tesauro, L’idée de la parfaite devise, trans. Florence Vuilleumier, Paris: Belles Lettres, 1992, and Michel Zink, “Un paradoxe courtois: le chant et la plainte,” in: Literary aspects of courtly culture: Selected Papers from the Seventh Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature . ., ed. Donald Maddox and Sara Sturm-Maddox, Cambridge: D.
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