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Old French in the Eighteenth Century: Aucassin Et Nicolette

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Old French in the Eighteenth Century: Aucassin Et Nicolette OLD FRENCH IN THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY: AUCASSIN ET NICOLETTE Peter Damian-Grint The complex publishing history of the short medieval prosimetric work Aucassin et Nicolette provides a certain, perhaps unexpected, insight into eighteenth-century attitudes to Old French literature and indeed to the Middle Ages in general. This ‘chantefable’, as its anonymous author called it, would seem (at least on one level) to be ideally suited to an eighteenth-century readership: a ‘strange and powerful fable’1 that tells a tale of thwarted but finally triumphant love, allied to a deliciously subversive sense of humour, a dash of derring-do and the attractive exoticism of a medieval setting. It was first presented to a modern French public in 1752, but not in its original form: in fact, no criti- cal edition of the text appeared until Paul Méon included one in his expanded re-edition of Étienne Barbazan’s Fabliaux et contes in 1808, over fifty years later. Nevertheless, during those fifty years Aucassin et Nicolette can be said to have entered fully into French culture through a series of different incarnations, being rewritten in translations, a fairy- tale, an extrait, a narrative poem and an operetta.2 Yet despite the variety of literary forms under which Aucassin et Nico- lette appears, the same attitudes and the same approaches to the text come up again and again. They indicate that in the eyes of the general public – or at least the writers and publishers – of eighteenth-century France, two elements are of crucial importance in the reception of literary medievalism: a particular archaism of a distinctive kind, and (perhaps more surprisingly) a very up-to-date sensibilité. One would naturally expect a thirteenth-century love story to already include both elements almost by definition, and this may indeed have been what made Aucassin et Nicolette particularly attractive to prospective rewriters. 1 Charlton D., “Aucassin et Nicolette ou les mœurs du bon vieux temps (Aucassin and Nicolette or the customs of the good old days)”, in id., Grétry and the Growth of opéra-comique (Cambridge: 1986) 191. 2 For some of the editions of Aucassin et Nicolette, see Martin A. – Mylne V. – Frautschi R., Bibliographie du genre romanesque français, 1751–1800 (London: 1977) no. 52.6. 306 peter damian-grint Nevertheless, in the different versions of the text that appeared through- out the century these two elements, archaism and sentimentalism, are consistently heightened by their eighteenth-century adaptors. Translation: La Curne de Sainte-Palaye’s Les Amours du Bon Vieux Temps The publishing history of Aucassin et Nicolette begins with the discovery of the manuscript in the Bibliothèque royale in Paris by the distin- guished Old French scholar Jean-Baptiste de La Curne de Sainte- Palaye.3 Sainte-Palaye did not, however, produce a critical edition of the text: the eighteenth-century public was not yet ready for Old French in its raw state, as was convincingly shown just a few years later by Barbazan’s Fabliaux et contes, an austerely scholarly production which was a commercial flop.4 Instead Sainte-Palaye published a mod- ernized version – in effect a translation – in the Mercure de France, under the title ‘Histoire ou romance d’Aucassin et de Nicolette, tirée d’un ancien manuscrit’.5 Although the subtitle simply indicates an ancient original,6 the use of the word ‘tirée’ could also be a hint to the alert reader to expect the kind of résumé-cum-translation that appeared in the Mercure, the Année littéraire and other periodicals of the time. It seems, nevertheless, a strange decision for one of the foremost antiquarians of France to publish a medieval text in the Mercure – and to publish it anonymously, besides, for his contribution is unsigned. Why did he not publish it in the Mémoires de l’Académie Royale des Inscrip- tions et Belles-Lettres, his favoured place of publication?7 Even if editions 3 It is now Bibliothèque nationale de France, fonds français 2168, fol. 70r–80v. The date of Sainte-Palaye’s discovery is not known. 4 Barbazan Etienne, Fabliaux et contes des poètes français des XIIe, XIIIe, XIVe et XVe siècles (Paris, Philippe Vincent: 1756); see Wilson G., A Medievalist in the Eighteenth Century: Le Grand d’Aussy and the ‘Fabliaux ou Contes’, Archives Internationales d’Histoire des Idées 83 (The Hague: 1975) 61–62; Damian-Grint P., “From Trésor des recherches to Vocabu- laire austrasien: Old French dictionaries in France, 1655–1777”, in Damian-Grint P. (ed.), Medievalism and ‘manière gothique’ in Enlightenment France, Studies on Voltaire and the Eighteenth Century 2006:05 (Oxford: 2006) 109–110. 5 Mercure de France (1752) février 10–65. 6 Not surprisingly, Sainte-Palaye eschews ‘gothique’ for a more neutral term. 7 Some fifteen mémoires, remarques and notices of Sainte-Palaye’s had already appeared in vol. VII–XVII of the Mémoires de l’Académie des Inscriptions et Belles-Lettes and four more would appear in later volumes (XX–XXVI). See Gossman L., Medievalism and the Ideologies of the Enlightenment: The World and Work of La Curne de Sainte-Palaye (Baltimore: 1968) 359–360..
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