Intertextuality and Satire in the Roman de Fauvel's Motets

The Roman de Fauvel (hereafter Fauvel) presents a single, allegorical narrative attributed to Gervais du Bus. It tells the tale of a horse who “embod[ies] the vices” in both deed and nomenclature, the name “F-A-V-V-E-L” being an acrostic of flaterie (flattery), avarice (extreme greed), vilanie (vileness), varieté (fickleness), envie (envy), and lacheté (laxity). Fauvel also translates as “veil of falsity”.[1] In Book I, the goddess Fortuna elevates Fauvel from his lowly stable to the royal palace, where he has a custom-built manger and luxury hayrack installed. Fawning churchmen make pilgrimages to see him, stroke his tonsured mane and brush the dung from his tail. The France over which he presides is “bestorné” (“inverted”): the moon rises above the sun, the king has authority over the pope, and women have authority over their husbands. In Book II, Fauvel's ego is inflated to the point at which he asks Fortuna for her hand in marriage. Rejecting him, she instead offers the hand of Lady Vainglory.[2] At their heavily allegorical wedding, there is a duel between the Virtues and the Vices spectated by such guests as Flirtation, Adultury, and Carnal Lust, all personified. Finally, Fortuna reveals that Fauvel's raison d'etre is to reproduce more “Faveux” to corrupt the “fair garden of France”, and to eventually become a harbringer of the Antichrist.[3] There is a concluding but inconclusive prayer that the “lily of virginity” might restore France to its former grace and piety.[4]

In its longest extant interpolated manuscript form at the start of fonds français 146 (hereafter fr. 146), this “Beast Epic” is “grossly expanded” and “stretched by the addition of a huge number of musical pieces”: the interpolations in fr.146 comprise “169 musical items, 72  … illustrations and 2877 lines of verse, the last almost doubling the length of the poem”.[5] In light of these numerous embellishments and the original narrative's rhetorics of greed and luxury, it is unsurprising that Emma Dillon identifies that “'excess' is a word often used to characterize fr. 146.”[6] She describes its “complex confection of texts in a single manuscript; its abundance of music …; the flamboyance of its illuminations”;  reviewing Dillon's monograph, Sylvia Huot reflects upon the “enormous scholarly attention” which Fauvel's demand for interdisciplinary study has attracted, and the “ingenious readings” which its intertextuality and  satirical bent has inspired.[7]

Fauvel's satire is emphatically situated within the political climate of its time of writing as “an ironical satire upon the deplorable state of the court of King Philip IV and King Philip V, as well as that of the papal court at Avignon”.[8] Textual clues situate fr. 146 at the beginning of the fourteenth century: for instance, the arms borne by the Virtues in the tournament in book II have “the date 1316 emblazoned on them”, confining the “fictive present” to the period after Philip's accession.[9] Fauvel's political commentary is particularly explicit at folia 10v-11r, where the motets Se cuers ioans / Rex beatus / Ave and Servant regnum / O Philippe / Rex regnum appear. Elizabeth Brown suggests that both were pre-existing motets for Louis X, adapted for fr. 146 to refer to Philip V.[10] Their presence here “at a particular concentration of royal interest” at the junction of books I and II and directly before a miniature of Fauvel on the throne (Fig. 1) bolster Elizabeth Brown's suggestion, supported by Emma Dillon, that  these are “didactic messages” for Philip V to advise and teach him.[11] Dillon takes this premiss further, suggesting that “this admonition also embraces complaint aimed specifically at Philip, motivated by the changing political scene at the time of the book's creation”.[12]

Servant regem's texts' didacticism is explicit, with such statements as “mercy and truth and also clemency save a king …. A wise king scatters the impious” in the triplum and “O Philip …, use the counsel of upright men …, holding the rein of peace of the church and judging the people in equity” and, inciting crusade, “attack the race of pagans” in the motetus.[13] Much like the Virtues/Vices tournament, this motet is a dialectic between the things which a good king ought and those which he ought not to do, built upon oppositions. This is further emphasised by the biblical allusions in the triplum in contrast with the motetus' ceremonial, secular tone. Dillon further notes how these texts are visually separated between fos. 10v and 11r (figs. 3 and 4), with the tenor (unusually for fr. 146) written out twice.[14]Servent regem / O Phillipe is placed to the left of the image of Fauvel (fig. 4), and Dillon relates this to a medieval trope of leftness being equated with evil, referring to Fauvel and Lady Vainglory's left-handed marriage.[15] Conceivably, this motet could actually be two-in-one, designed to be performed first with the triplum and the tenor and then with the duplum and the tenor: “each pair makes correct contrapuntal sense”, and these twofold advisory complaints are thus each clearly articulated.[16] The tenor's chant fragment is also sung twice, further binarily structuring the motet. The dual oppositions of these texts are brought together as one, not just within the motet's form, but by an unusual five-note rhythmic motif which Dillon identifies at “moments of textual importance”.[17] As the earliest surviving example of the kind of particular rhythm in Ars nova notation—this is one of seventeen Ars nova notated motets in Fauvel, only six of which are not found in other extant sources—“a consequence of assuming that [a motet was] written for Fauvel is to place [it] at the very centre of the early Ars nova and at the apex of the transmission of this repertory.[18] Dillon suggests that it would stand out to “informed eyes and ears”, appearing three times in the motetus (bb. 1-22) and then again in retrograde (bb.22-8).[19] Much like fr. 146, the motet brings these various texts together into a single, emphatically and notationally new text with its own boundaries and performative space, and uses the tensions between them discursively in order to make a powerful, didactic impact.

 Fig. 1: 11r, Fauvel on the throne, fr.146.

The motet Aman novi / Heu Fortuna / Heu me on folio 30r also hangs upon political subtext. The triplum alludes to Enguerran de Marigny, the disgraced chamberlain of Philip IV who was hanged on the Eve of Ascension in 1315 and left out, raindrenched, as an exemplar on the gallows of Montfaucon.[20] Dillon writes that Marigny's “ascent to power was at least one of the models for the Fauvel character”.[21] This parallel of characterisation is also made explicit in the motetus, Heu fortuna, which announces Fauvel's impending death. Indicated in the rubric to be sung by Fauvel, Bent describes this as a “love-death song” to Fortuna. Unusually, the tenor combines two chant fragments: beginning with the Office for the Dead, it merges into Maundy Thursday.[22] While this “appropriately morbid” dual liturgical association serves to “feed into the pervading images of crucifixion and death in the upper voices”, the Office for the Dead in particular encourages an audience “to read the liturgy of the Dead as somehow belonging to the character of the horse”, cued by the text “Heu me”.[23] Juxtaposed with the “Heu Fortuna” love-death song, these multiple Fauvel voices “cast [him] in the opening of the motet as participant in a deathly liturgical chorus”: the motet's intertextuality becomes a platform from which Fauvel can perform his own mortality.[24] Envoking operatic dramaturgy, Bent describes Fauvel motets such as this as “reflective 'arias' glossing the main text”, the motetus Heu Fortuna being a “pivotal case” of “direct speech by Fauvel after Fortuna's rejection”.[25] Dillon identifies this as an “ingenious new dramatic twist to the tale”: “in an ironic reversal of its original intention, to woo Fortuna, we witness Fauvel’s song succeed only in planting the idea for his own rejection and demise”, and this irony is realised in the motet's performance, in which all of these morbid texts at cross-purposes are sung and heard simultaneously.[26]

Fig. 2: 30v miniature, fr.146.

The intertextual layers of the motet genre constitute meta-intertextuality within an already heavily intertextual manuscript. Bent has written of a musicological tendency to approach the motets in Fauvel “as if they were self-contained compositions, treating fr. 146 as just one of several sources transmitting them”.[27] A close reading of fr. 146 defies such an approach. Andrew Wathey writes of

the extraordinary richness, structure and depth of allusion here present …, tightly focussed and integrated within the main theme of the literary work. The large body of interpolated material, when not specifically composed for this version of Fauvel, was brilliantly adapted, shaped and positioned—textually, musically and pictorially—to amplify Gervès's work or to turn its messages to the interpolators' new purposes. The musical compositions are emphatically not marginal but vital to the interpolated Fauvel.[28]

With musical interpolations covering the liturgical and devotional, sacred and profane, monophonic and polyphonic, the motets in the Roman de Fauvel are a select and scattered few facets of a complex bricolage of interacting texts, brought teeming together in this single, object manuscript. Butterfield's ekphrastic reading of fr. 146 is also one of materiality, telling of how it “at once revels in and confounds such boundaries” as the margins at the edge of each page.[29] The mise-en-page of these already “excessive” texts; these “line-drawings that stray over the boundaries of what can be seen, heard, and grasped into performance”; this “succession of pages crowded with notation, illustration, and text” culminates, she writes, in a “supreme visual shock”, “powerful[ly]” borne of “a creative tension between the excesses of the material and the finesse of the design.[30] Viewed from this complex perspective, fr. 146 is a material critique of materialism. In light of these interacting tensions mapped across a material, pictorial object, Fortuna's parting words as Fauvel prepares to die and to leave the material world impart, typically for the Roman de Fauvel, a powerful ironic blow:

Pensee, Fauvel, maleüreux,

A la fin de cuer douleureux,

Et que du monde la figure

S’enfuit soudene en pourreture ….

Fauvel, cogita,

Quod preterit

Mundi figura.

Fugit subita;

Sic interit

Quasi pictura.

“Think, unfortunate Fauvel, what fate holds for faithless hearts and how swiftly the flesh flees to dust …. Fauvel, reflect that the shape of the world is passing away. It flees suddenly; it perishes like a picture.”

The motets of Fauvel, fleeting musical interludes as they are, are only imperfectly congealed upon fr. 146's pages, and Fortuna's poignant commentary on the transience of material life heightens the lucidity of this already multifarious, viscerally ironic text.

Fig. 3: 10v, fr.146

Fig. 4: 11r, fr.146

Bibliography

Avril, François, Regalado, N., Roesner, E., Chaillou, & Gervais. (1990). Le roman de Fauvel in the             edition of Mesire Chaillou de Pesstain : A reproduction in facsimile of the complete          manuscript, Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, fonds français 146. New York: Broude Brothers.

Bent, Margaret, & Wathey, Andrew, eds. (1998). Fauvel studies : Allegory, chronicle, music, and image in Paris, Bibliothèque nationale de France, MS français 146. Oxford: Clarendon       Press.

           

            Bent, Margaret (1998). “Fauvel and Marigny” in ibid.

            Butterfield, Ardis (1998). “The Refrain and the Transformation of Genre in the Roman de             Fauvel” in ibid.

            Dillon, Emma (1998). “The Profile of Philip V” in ibid.

Brown, Elizabeth (1980). “The Ceremonial of Royal Succession in Capetian France: The Funeral of             Philip V”. Speculum, 55(2), 266-293.

Clemencic, René, Vitry, P., & Clemencic Consort. (1992). Le roman de Fauvel [sound            recording]. (Musique d'abord). Arles, France: Harmonia Mundi France.

Dillon, Emma (2002). Medieval music-making and the Roman de Fauvel (New perspectives in    music history and criticism). Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Dillon, Emma (2002a). “The Art of Interpolation in the Roman de Fauvel”, The Journal of           Musicology, Vol. 19, No. 2, pp. 223-263.

Huot, Sylvia. (2004). Review: “Medieval Music-Making and the Roman de Fauvel”. French             Studies,58(1), 79-80.

Sanders, Ernest. (1975). The Early Motets of Philippe de Vitry. Journal of the American   Musicological Society, 28(1), 24-45.

Wathey, Andrew. "Fauvel, Roman de." Grove Music Online. Oxford Music Online. Oxford           University Press, accessed November 19, 2015.             http://www.oxfordmusiconline.com/subscriber/article/grove/music/09372

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[1]Bent and Wathey, 1; Långfors, A., & Le Petit, R. (1914). L'histoire de Fauvain, réproduction phototypique de 40 dessins du MS. français 571 de la Bibliothèque nationale, précédee d'une intr. et du texte critique des Légendes de Raoul Le Petit, par A. Långfors. Par. in ibid, 1.

[2]Ibid.

[3]Wathey 2015.

[4]Ibid.

[5]Ibid; Butterfield 1998, 105; Wathey 2015.

[6]Dillon 2002, 7.

[7]Huot 2004, 79.

[8]Clemencic 1975, 3.

[9]Dillon 1998, 217.

[10]Brown, 235.

[11]Dillon 1998, 216.

[12]Ibid, 217.

[13]Dillon 1998, 221.

[14]Ibid, 220.

[15]Ibid. 224.

[16]Ibid, 220.

[17]Ibid, 221.

[18]Avril 1990, 25; Bent 1998, 40.

[19]Ibid, 221.

[20]Bent 1998, 36.

[21]Dillon 2002a, 256.

[22]Bent 1998, 37.

[23]Dillon 2002a, 152.

[24]Ibid, 153.

[25]Bent 1998, 40.

[26]Ibid, 258.

[27]Bent 1998, 35.

[28]Wathey 2015, emphasis my own.

[29]Butterfield 1998, 105.

[30]Ibid, 105.