Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/345

Rh antique prose. The vision of Antiquity was still very bizarre. At the funeral service of Charles the Bold at Nancy, his conqueror, the young duke of Lorraine, came to honour the corpse of his enemy, dressed "in antique style," that is to say, wearing a long golden beard which reached to his girdle. Thus got up to represent one of the Nine Worthies, he prayed for a quarter of an hour.

The word "antique" as conceived in France about 1400 belonged to the same group of ideas as "rhétorique, orateur, poésie." No one would have thought of applying the word "poésie" to a ballad or a song in the old French form. This classical word, which evoked the idea of the admired perfection of the Ancients, meant above all an artificial form. The poets of this time are perfectly capable of expressing heartfelt emotions in a simple form, but when they wish to attain superior beauty, they hunt up mythology, employ pedantic latinized terms and then consider themselves "rhetoricians." Christine de Pisan expressly singles out a mythologic piece, which she calls "balade pouétique," from her ordinary work. Eustache Deschamps, wishing to air his talent, in sending his works to Chaucer, his fellow-poet and admirer, adds the following lines: