Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/145

Rh Represented in actual mummery, these ideas naturally took the outward appearance of the pastoral proper. At the marriage feasts of Charles the Bold and Margaret of York at Bruges in 1468, an “entremets” glorified the princesses of yore as “noble shepherdesses who formerly tended and guarded the sheep of the ‘pays de par deça’ (the provinces ‘over here’).” At Valenciennes, in 1493, the revival of the land after the devastations of war was represented, “all in pastoral style.” Even in war the pastoral game was kept up. The stone-mortars of the duke of Burgundy before Granson are called “the shepherd and the shepherdess.” Philippe de Ravestein takes the field with four-and-twenty noblemen; they are all dressed up as shepherds and carry shepherds’ pouches and crooks.

As the Roman de la Rose had done, because of its contrast with the chivalric ideal, so the bucolic ideal in its turn gave rise to an elegant quarrel. A number of variations had been made on the theme of Franc Gontier: every one had declared that he was sighing for a diet of cheese, apples, onions, brown bread and fresh water, for a woodcutter’s work with its liberty and carelessness. But aristocratic life still looked very little like it and sceptics were aware of the inherent falsity of the factitious ideal. Villon unmasked it. In Les contrediz Franc Gontier he opposed to the idealized country man and his love under the roses, the fat canon, free from care, tasting good wines and the joys of love in a comfortable room, supplied with an ample hearth and a soft bed. The brown bread and the water of Frano Gontier?