ALTERNATIVAS DE OPTIMIZACIÓN

“Quelqun’un entreprit alors d’accommoder en langue d’oïl l’oeuvre du célèbre dominicain.”41 These are the words with which, in the wake of Charles Langlois, we could characterize Laurent d’Orléans’s work, and more notably, his French tract on the pechies de la

langue. The “famous Dominican” Langlois speaks of as the object of such a linguistic process of

“accommodation” is, of course, William Peraldus.

Somme le roi, also known as Somme Lorens or Li Livres royaux des vices et des vertus is

a moral encyclopedia which, according to several of its interpreters, bears the irrefutable imprint of Peraldus’s Summa Vitiorum et virtutibus.42 Written in 1279-80 by Laurent d’Orléans, a

40 _{The hypothesis of Dante’s visit to Paris has been accredited especially by those critics who have studied the} possibility that Dante might have become acquainted with the Romance of the Rose during a trip to the French capital. There is, however, no biographical evidence to support such a hypothesis.

41 _{Charles V. Langlois, La vie en France au Moyen Age, (Geneva: Slatkine, 1970, IV), 134.}

42 _{The earliest assertion in this sense belongs to R.E. Fowler, who, in a study from 1905, advances the hypothesis} that both Gower (in Mirour de l’Omme and the Confessio Amantis) and the author of the Somme le Roi drew extensively on Peraldus’s Summa (Une source française des poèmes de Gower, Mâcon, 1905). Speaking of Peraldus’s legacy in the later Middle Ages, Welther also asserts: “La Somme-le-Roi (…) renferme de larges emprunts faits à la Summa (de Guillaume Peyraut), à côté de traités latins antérieurs.” (L’Exemplum, 169). Let us mention in passing that in the list drawn by Welter of writers influenced by Peraldus, Somme le Roi immediately follows Brunetto Latini’s Livre du Trésor. One of the places where Peraldus’s sway on Laurent d’Orléans is more easily recognizable seems to be the chapter on the sins of the tongue, from the Somme le Roi. (See I peccati, 132- 133).

Dominican friar, confessor to King Philip III, Somme le Roi was commissioned by the king himself, who wanted to have and offer to his court a major book of moral instruction drawn in the living, everyday language.43

The book is structured in six major tracts: 1. the ten commandments; 2. the twelve articles of faith; 3. the seven deadly sins; 4. the virtues; 5. the commentary on the Pater nostrum; and 6. the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit.44 None of these parts is original; they are translations or adaptations of previous writings, mostly Latin. Charles Langlois remarks that the entire Somme, a generally ‘badly wrought book’ (un livre mal fait), is a short version of another moral tract called Le Miroir. Even when the Somme deviates from the Miroir, Langlois says, (in the chapters on the sins of the tongue and the gifts of the Holy Spirit, for instance), it is still not original, because these two chapters are borrowings from Peraldus.45 The great eclecticism on account of which Langlois pronounced his severe judgment on the originality of the Somme does not weigh negatively in our consideration of Laurent d’Orléans.46 Our purpose is precisely to examine the way in which a moral writer in French vernacular adapted Peraldus’s Latin tract on

43 _{Charles Langlois notes that a great part of the immediate success of the Somme must be attributed to the fact that,} being a book commissioned by the king himself, the Somme easily aroused the curiosity of the aristocratic circles of the time (La vie en France, 123).

44 _{In Ms. 2071 of the Bibliothèque de l’Arsenal which I use, the order is as follows: the seven deadly sins are placed} at the very beginning, so as to emphasize the importance of the ethical component of the Somme. The same

manuscript ends with the ten commandments, while the part devoted to the seven gifts of the Holy Spirit is missing.There are several other French manuscripts of the Somme beginning with the seven deadly sins instead of the ten commandments (Ms. 409 and 22932, two of the oldest ones, and the Ms. of Alençon).

45 _{For a systematic cross-reading of the Miroir and the Somme, see E. Brayer, “Contenu, structure et combinaison du} ‘Miroir du monde’ et de la Somme le Roi’,” Romania 79 (1958), 1-38, and 433-470.

46 _{Despite his negative assessment of d’Orléans as a writer, Langlois is quick to evoke the enormous and long} success of the Somme le Roi, a work preserved in nearly one hundred manuscripts and translated early on into several European languages (Italian, Spanish, Provençal, English and Flemish). For the English adaptations of the

Somme, see Leo Carruthers, La Somme Le Roi de Lorens d’Orléans et ses traductions anglaises: Etude comparée

(Paris: Association des Médiévistes Anglicistes de L’Enseignement Supérieur, 1986). One of the English versions of the Somme is available in a modern edition: The Book of Vices and Virtues. A Fourteenth century English

verbal sins. What matters for us is Laurent’s work as a translator, the terms and notions he used to describe verbal transgressions.

In the French Somme, the section on les pechies de la langue is imbedded into the larger category of pechies de la gueule (‘sins of the mouth’), which occupy the seventh position within the scheme of the capital sins. The general framework Laurent adopts in his moral tract is an allegorical presentation of the seven capital vices starting from St. John the Apostle’s vision of the seven-headed beast coming out of the sea. Within this general framework, each individual sin is a head (chief) of the beast. The simile makes sense if we are to consider the etymological association between the heads of the beast and the seven sins as “capital” (‘heads’ from which subsequent offspring derives). The ten horns of the beast are, then, the trespassemens (‘transgressions’) of the ten commandments. Unfortunately, however, and this is one of the main charges addressed by critics to Laurent, when he comes to treating the subdivisions of the seven sins, he gives up the allegory of the seven-headed beast, and speaks of branches and twigs of the tree of evil. 47

The seventh head of the apocalyptic beast is, thus, represented by les pechies de la

gueule, a ‘head’ subdivided into the… tree of gluttony and the tree of les pechies de la langue.

Although in the Summa Vitiorum Peraldus had not treated the sins of the tongue along with the sins of gula, the association between gluttony and verbal sin was not unusual, but rather a traditional coupling, as Casagrande and Vecchio have pointed out. In Laurent’s Somme, the sins of the tongue flow quite naturally from a virulent condemnation of drunkenness, as a

47 _{The allegory of the trees of good and evil was the general framework in which the Miroir treated the virtues and} vices. Thus, although, Laurent replaced the image of the tree of evil with that of the apocalyptic beast, he was unable to move further within this framework, and switched to the tree, which could lend itself more easily to divisions and ramifications.

manifestation of the sin of gluttony. The drunkards have the evil habit of frequenting the taverne (‘tavern’). Here, in this ecole et chapelle du diable (‘school and chapel of the devil’), people no longer pay attention to the way they speak and are prone to committing very many sins of the tongue.

This is the springboard from which Laurent launches his disquisition on the sins of the tongue. If we were to read this section in parallel with the De peccato linguae one major difference would strike the eye: only ten main verbal transgressions are posited by Laurent. The French moralist justifies his reduction with the help of a new biblical metaphor. The evil tongue (la male langue) is the dry tree Jesus cursed on his way to Jerusalem, because it was bearing no fruits. Counting the ways in which the male langue manifests itself would be as hard and daunting as counting the leaves of a tree. What can be counted, however, more easily in a tree are its branches, and Laurent identifies ten such main branches: idle talk (oiseuse), boasting (vantise), flattery (losenge/losengerie), slander (detraction), lying (mensonge or fallace), perjury (perjure or faus serment), contention (contenz), murmur (murmure), rebellion (rebellion) and blasphemy (blaspheme).

In the category of oiseuse enter the vain words, the words of the peddlers, the stories and jokes. All the practitioners of idle speech waste not only time, but also their inner self (vuident le

tresor du coeur), says Laurent taking up an Augustinian-Peraldian idea. Vantise (the former iactantia, of Peraldus) is also a form of transgressive speech, as the one who boasts acts like a

thief (voleur de Dieu) who attributes to himself what is God’s work. For the sin of flattery, the third branch of the tree of the evil tongue, Laurent uses two terms adulateur, a reminiscence of Peraldus’s adulator, but also--and more often--the terms losengeur (‘the one who sings praises’,

‘praiser’), or flateur, that were more common in the everyday language. We will encounter these French terms in the Roman de la Rose, when the habit of flattery is discussed.

Peraldus’s detractio came down to the Somme as detraction, but the practitioner of this sin is not so much the detractor/ ‘detracteur’ as in Peraldus, but rather the medisans (which etymologically means ‘evil speaker’, or ‘the one who speaks evil’). The technical moral terms used by Peraldus are thus not only gallicized (like in the couple detractio-detraction), but also replaced with more understandable terms from the living language, that the laymen were able to grasp.

The sin of mendacium is translated by Laurent as mensonge and is described, along Peraldian lines, as a falsification of reality. Lying falsifies man (fausse lomme) as one falsifies the royal seal or money, therefore the liar (le menteur/mensongier) will be judged at the Last judgment as a faussaire (falsifier). From lying, Laurent moves on, just like Peraldus, to

periurium, translated as perjure or faus serement, the latter term being less cryptic, and defines it

as a transgression (trepassemenz) of the truthful oath. The next category, contenz, is Peraldus’s former contentio, but here again new moral terms are introduced, as the sin is subdivided into seven twigs: estriver (‘contradicting’), tencier (‘quarreling’), ledengier (‘name calling’ or ‘insulting’), mal dire (‘cursing’), remponer (‘reproaching’), menassier (‘menacing’), descorde

sosciter (‘sowing of discord’). Among these seven divisions of contenz (of which several were

separately treated by Peraldus as autonomous categories), Laurent establishes a slight hierarchy, asserting that the most dangerous is the sin of sowing of discord, because it disrupts cities and agreements (destourbe les pais et les concordes).

The sin of murmure follows that of contenz, as the ones who do not dare to quarrel overtly, start speaking in a low voice, between the teeth. This class of verbal sin is further

divided into 1. murmuring against man (like the servants against their masters, or the poor against the rich, etc.) and 2. murmuring against God. The next verbal sin, rebellion, flows naturally from murmuring. For if protesting in a low voice is a bad thing, it is even worse to rebel (male chose est de murmurer, mais trop vault pis rebellion), says Laurent, who draws again comparisons among verbal sins. It is worth noting that rebellion was not among the twenty-four classes of peccatum linguae established by Peraldus; it is Laurent’s own contribution, likely made to please the one who had commissioned the book. No other “virtue” could more please a king than submission, the diametrical opposite of rebellion, a sin to be inveighed against virulently, as Laurent does. Why is rebellion a verbal transgression? Because the “rebels,” in their desire to impose their will on others, do not heed other’s people’s advice, but make fun of them. Moreover, if they are chided, they defend themselves verbally and protest against scriptural warnings.

The last sin treated is blasphemy, again a deviation from Peraldus’s line of thinking, according to which blasphemy was the utmost form of trangressive speech and was thus treated at the very beginning of the De peccato linguae. Although the reasons that may drive man to insult God or the saints are taken up by Laurent, the harsh tone of Peraldus’s condemnation of blasphemy does not subsist in the confessor of king Philip. Again, the reason for this depreciation of the gravity of blasphemy might lie in the addressee of the book. As a king, Philip was likely to be more concerned with political and worldly matters than with religious ones, and Laurent was undoubtedly well aware thereof. In La littérature française au moyen âge, Gaston Paris notes the mild tone of Laurent’s moral tract, and explains it by the fact that the moralist did not want to turn the world into a cloister (il ne veut pas faire du monde un cloître)48, while

Langlois, with his outspokenness, does not hesitate to speculate about the embarrassment Laurent may have felt in writing a book of moral instruction for his king: “Il n’est pas douteux, du reste, que frère Laurent se soit senti gêné, à la longue, par la conscience qu’il était amené a rabâcher.” 49

All these factors may account for the major differences in structure and in tone between the De peccato linguae and Laurent’s chapter on the sins of the tongue. The reason why the latter is important for us is the moral lexicon that Laurent d’Orléans introduces in the French language, and this shortly before Jean de Meun started writing his Mirroir aus amoureux. Several of the terms used by Laurent are present in the Romance of the Rose, as well, therefore a reading of the

Somme, even a perfunctory one, as I have provided here, may cast a great deal of light on the

verbal habits that the characters of the Rose are debating obsessively.