Page:The Waning of the Middle Ages (1924).djvu/62

42 Adolphus of Cleves is forbidden to go into mourning for his wife, out of consideration for the duke, who is ill. The chancellor Nicolas Rolin dies: the duke is left in ignorance of his decease. Yet he begins to suspect it and asks the bishop of Tournay, who has come to visit him, to tell him the truth. “My liege, says the bishop—in sooth, he is dead, indeed, for he is old and broken, and cannot live long.—Déa! says the duke, I do not ask that. I ask if he is truly dead and gone.— Hà! my liege—the bishop retorts, he is not dead, but paralysed on one side, and therefore practically dead.—The duke grows angry.—Vechy merveilles! Tell me clearly, now, whether he is dead. Only then says the bishop: Yes, truly, my liege, he is really dead.”

Does not this curious way of announcing a death suggest some trace of ancient superstition, more even than the wish to spare a sick man? The anxiety to exclude systematically the thought of death denotes a state of mind analogous to that of Louis XI, who would never again wear the dress he had on, nor use the horse he was riding at the moment when evil tidings were announced to him, and who even had a of the forest of Loches cut down where the tidings of the death of a new-born son were brought to him. “Monsieur the Chancellor,” the king writes on May 25, 1483, “I thank you for the letters etc., but I beg you to send me no more by him who brought them, for I found his face terribly changed since I last saw him, and I tell you on my word that he made me much afraid, and farewell.”

The cultural value of mourning is that it gives grief its form and rhythm. It transfers actual life to the sphere of the drama. It shoes it with the cothurnus. Mourning at the court of France or of Burgundy, at the time with which we are concerned, has to be regarded as a sort of acted elegy. Funeral ceremonial and funeral poetry, which in primitive civilizations are still undistinguished (in Ireland, for instance), had not yet been completely separated. Mourning still continued a remnant of its poetical functions. It dramatized the effects of grief.

The nobler the deceased and the survivors are, the more heroic the mourning. For a whole year the queen of France may not leave the room in which the death of her consort was