Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/323

Rh by the enumeration of some sixty games at which he used to play at Valenciennes as a boy. The descriptions of burgher customs or of the female toilet, long though they be, do not fatigue us, because they contain a satirical element which was lacking in the poetical descriptions of the beauty of spring.

From the "genre" to the burlesque is but a step. But here again painting may rival literature in expressive power. Before 1400 art had already attained some mastery of this element of burlesque vision which was to reach its full growth in Pieter Breughel in the sixteenth century. We find it in the figure of Joseph in the "Flight into Egypt" by Broederlam at Dijon and, again, in the three soldiers asleep in the picture of the "Three Marys at the Sepulchre," at one time attributed to Hubert Van Eyck. Of the artists of the epoch none took more pleasure in effects of bizarre jocularity than Paul of Limburg. A spectator of the "Purification of the 'Virgin" wears a kind of bent wizard's cap, a yard long, and immoderately wide sleeves. The font displays three monstrous masks, shooting out their tongues. In the framework of the "Visitation," we see a soldier in a tower fighting with a snail, and a man wheeling away on a barrow a pig playing the bagpipes.

The literature of the epoch is bizarre in nearly every page, and very fond of burlesque. A vision worthy of Breughel is called up by Deschamps in the ballad of the watchman on the tower of Sluys; he sees the troops for the expedition against England collecting on the beach; they appear to him like an army of rats and mice.

Avant, avant! tirez-vous ça. Je voy merveille, ce me semble. —'Et quoy, guette, que vois-tu là?' Je voy dix mille rats ensemble Et mainte souris qui's'assemble Dessus la rive de la mer"

On another occasion, sitting at table, absent-minded and gloomy, Deschamps suddenly began to notice the way in which the courtiers were eating: some chewing like pigs;