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Sensationalism and the
Genealogy of Modernity
A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective
Edited by Alberto Gabriele
Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity
Alberto Gabriele
Editor

Sensationalism
and the Genealogy
of Modernity
A Global Nineteenth-Century Perspective
Editor
Alberto Gabriele
Department of English and American Studies
Tel Aviv University
Tel Aviv, Israel

ISBN 978-1-137-60128-5 ISBN 978-1-137-56148-0 (eBook)


DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56148-0

Library of Congress Control Number: 2016957881

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2017


This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of
translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on
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The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this
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This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by Springer Nature


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The registered company address is: 1 New York Plaza, New York, NY 10004, U.S.A.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

My sincerest thanks to all the authors who contributed to the collection


and to the anonymous peer-reviewer at Palgrave. The final revisions have
been completed during a residency at the University of Melbourne spon-
sored by a Macgeorge fellowship. I wish to thank Rachel Fensham, Head
of the School of Culture and Communication, and Ken Gelder from the
English department for his hospitality within the Australian Centre. The
Macgeorge family needs to be acknowledged for making available their
1911 mansion on a hill descending toward an affluent of the Yarra River
where the invisible song-lines of the Aboriginal first nation could still be
detected and honored. I am particularly grateful to everyone else at the
School and at the University who welcomed me there with exquisite kind-
ness and generosity, in particular my neighbors Jeff and Sam Haynes who
promptly shared top-notch technology of every conceivable practical use-
fulness to make my stay even more pleasurable. My sincerest thanks to the
staff and managers of the State Library of Victoria and of the University
of Melbourne library, particularly Philip Kent, for granting me access to
all their resources, and to the staff of the New York Public Library, British
Library at King’s Cross and Columbia University Library for their help
when I was writing the first draft of the introduction.

v
CONTENTS

Introduction: Sensationalism and the Genealogy


of Modernity: Transnational Currents, Intermedial
Trajectories—A Global Nineteenth-Century Approach 1
Alberto Gabriele

Part I Sensational Tactics in the Nineteenth Century 27

Irony and Popular Politics in Germany, 1800–1850 29


James M. Brophy

The Horror of Clothing and the Clothing of Horror:


Material and Meaning in Gothic and Sensation Fiction 49
Stefanie Lethbridge

Adelaide, Sensationalism and the Development


of New Journalism in the Early History
of the South Australian Press 69
Anthony Laube

vii
viii CONTENTS

Urban Perils and the Sensational Bicycle:


Text-Image Dynamics in the Victorian
Magazine Cycling, 1894–1896 95
Efrat Pashut

Part II Transmedial Trajectories:


The Vanishing Act of Performance 119

Destructive Re-Creations: Spectacles


of Urban Destruction in Turn-
of-the-Century USA 121
Hélène Valance

The Magician’s Box of Tricks: Fantômas, Popular Literature,


and the Spectacular Imagination 143
Matthieu Letourneux

Sawing People in Half: Sensationalist Magic Tricks


and the Role of Women on Stage in the
Early Twentieth Century 163
Katharina Rein

Sensational Voices: Premodern Theatricality,


Early Cinema, and the Transformation
of the Public Sphere in Fin-de-siècle Vienna 193
Sabine Müller

Part III Visualizing the Space of Industrial Modernity 215

The Whole Thing (and Other Things):


From Panorama to Attraction in Stephen Crane’s
“The Open Boat,” Ashcan Painting, and Early Cinema 217
Michael Devine
CONTENTS ix

Urban Metaphysics versus Metropolitan Dynamisms:


The Italian Vision Before the First World War 239
Ester Coen

Spatiality and Temporality in Benjamin and Adorno 257


Anat Messing Marcus

The Sensibilities of Semicolonial Shanghai:


A Phenomenological Study of the Short Stories
by Liu Na’ou 277
Aubrey Tang

Index 297
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

James M. Brophy is the Francis H. Squire Professor of Modern European


History at the University of Delaware. He is the author of Capitalism,
Politics, and Railroads in Prussia, 1830–1870 (1998) and Popular Culture
and the Public Sphere in the Rhineland, 1800–1850 (2007) as well as co-
editor of Perspectives from the Past: Sources in Western Civilization (1998;
5th ed., 2012). In addition, he has published numerous essays on the
social, economic, and political history of nineteenth-century Germany. He
is working on Markets of Knowledge: Publishers and Politics in Central
Europe, 1770–1870, a book project that examines dozens of German pub-
lishers as cultural brokers and political actors. He has recently been a
Berlin Prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin.
Ester Coen is Professor of Contemporary Art History at the University
of L’Aquila. An expert on Futurism, Metaphysical art, and Italian and
International avant-gardes of the first half of the twentieth century,
she has curated and contributed to numerous exhibitions: Pittura
Metafisica (with Giuliano Briganti, Palazzo Grassi, Venice, 1979),
Umberto Boccioni (with Bill Lieberman, the Metropolitan Museum of
New York, 1988), Italian Art in the Twentieth Century (Royal Academy,
London 1989); Memoria del Futuro (Centro Reina Sofia, Madrid 1990),
Metafisica at the Scuderie del Quirinale (Rome 2003), and, more recently,
Matisse Arabesque (Scuderie del Quirinale, March–June 2015). In 2009
she was one of the three committee members of the Futurism centenary
exhibition (Centre Pompidou Paris, Scuderie del Quirinale Rome and
Tate Modern London).

xi
xii NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Michael Devine is Assistant Professor of English at SUNY Plattsburgh.


His first book project on American poetry, early cinema, and the visual arts
was a finalist for the Zuckerman Prize in American Studies. His articles
have appeared in American Literature and Adaptation, and has forthcom-
ing essays on the literature of attractions in the 1890s and on early cinema
in post-9/11 literature and film.
Alberto Gabriele is the author of Reading Popular Culture in Victorian
Print: Belgravia and Sensationalism. He has been a visiting scholar at the
School of Cultural Texts and Records, Jadavpur University, and a visiting
fellow at the University of New South Wales at ADFA, Canberra, and at
the University of Sydney in 2014, and a fellow in residence at the University
of Melbourne in 2016. He has completed two monographs on Precinema
and the Literary Imagination (volume I The Emergence of Precinema: Print
Culture and the Optical Toy of the Literary Imagination and volume II
Fragmentation, Movement and the Modern Episteme) and was awarded a
major grant to complete his research project on the nineteenth-century
Leipzig publishing industry.
Anthony Laube is Curator of the Newspaper Collection at the State
Library of South Australia. He is the author of a number of historical stud-
ies of the early settlement of the south coast of South Australia as well as a
biography of the nineteenth-century traveler and authoress Agnes Grant
Hay, A Lady at Sea. He is a member of the Australian Newspaper
Preservation Plan working group (ANPlan). He is the author of over
200 online histories of South Australian newspaper titles on the State
Library website.
Stefanie Lethbridge is Senior Lecturer in English Literature and Culture
at the University of Freiburg, Germany. Her research interests are mainly
in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century print culture studies, British poetry,
and popular culture. She has completed a monograph on British poetry
anthologies in their print culture context, Lyrik in Gebrauch:
Gedichtanthologien in der englischen Druckkultur 1557‒2007. Her current
research projects focus on hero cultures and publishers’ series in India.
Matthieu Letourneux is Professor of French Literature at the University
of Paris Ouest Nanterre (Paris X, France). He is a specialist of serial fiction,
popular literature, and media culture. His more recent books are Cinéma,
premiers crimes (2015, with Alain Carou), Fantômas, Biographie d’un
criminel imaginaire (2013, with Loïc Artiaga), La Librairie Jules
NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS xiii

Tallandier, Histoire d’une grande maison populaire (2012, with Jean-Yves


Mollier), and Le Roman d’aventures, 1870–1930 (2010). He is chief editor
of the international online peer-review Belphégor (https://belphegor.
revues.org/) devoted to popular literature and media culture. He has
edited works of Pierre Souvestre and Marcel Allain, Louis Forest,
Eugène Sue, Emilio Salgari, and Gustave Aimard.
Anat Messing Marcus holds an MA from the Cohn Institute for the History
and Philosophy of Science and Ideas. She is currently a graduate student at the
University of Cambridge’s Department of German and Dutch.
Sabine Müller is a researcher and lecturer at the Department of German
Studies of the University of Vienna and is working on her habilitation
project “Kultivierte Latenz. Die anders Moderne in der österreichischen
Literatur 1930–1960.” She specializes in modern Austrian literature,
Austrian cultural history, and culture theory. Her publications include
“Teststrecke Kunst. Wiener Avantgarden nach 1945” (Ed., 2012) and
“Elfriede Jelinek: Tradition, Politik und Zitat” (Ed., 2009).
Efrat Pashut holds an MA from Tel Aviv University’s English and
American Studies track department, where she studied with Alberto
Gabriele. Her research focuses on Victorian periodicals, and specifically on
the periodical Cycling. She is interested in several aspects of the periodical,
such as the trope of sensationalism, the culture of leisure, and gender.
Katharina Rein holds an MA in Cultural History and Theory, Philosophy,
and Ancient History from the Humboldt-University Berlin, where she
works on her doctoral dissertation concerning stage magic between 1862
and 1921. She works as a researcher and lecturer at the International
Research Institute for Cultural Techniques and Media Philosophy
(Internationales Kolleg für Kulturtechnikforschung und Medienphi-
losophie) of the Bauhaus-University Weimar. Rein is a member of the
international research project “Les Arts Trompeurs. Machines, Magie,
Médias/Deceptive Arts. Machines, Magic, Media,” where she is currently
responsible for the research axis “L’art magique, pratiques et discours.” In
2013 and 2014, she was a fellow of the Max Weber Foundation. Rein’s
publications include the German monograph Gestörter Film. Wes Cravens,
A Nightmare on Elm Street” (2012, Darmstadt) and various articles on
stage conjuring, horror film, and television series as well as other topics of
media and cultural history.
xiv NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Aubrey Tang is a PhD candidate in the Department of Comparative


Literature at the University of California, Irvine. Her research interests
include affective cinema, sensations and cinema, film and urban culture,
phenomenology, as well as Chinese and Sinophone film historiography.
Hélène Valance is a graduate of the Université Paris 7 Diderot, and
teaches American art and visual culture at Ghent University. She is the
author of Nuits Américaines: le Nocturne dans l’art aux Etats-Unis,
1890–1917 (Paris: Presses de l’Université Paris-Sorbonne, forthcoming in
2015). Her essays include: “Buffalo: The ‘Electric City of the Future’
That Never Really Was” in Cities of Light: Two Centuries of Urban
Illumination edited by Sandy Isenstadt, Dietrich Neumann and Margaret
Maile Petty; “White City vs. la Ville Lumière: Electrical Illuminations at
the World’s Columbian Exposition, Chicago 1893” Is Paris Still the
Capital of the Nineteenth Century? edited by Hollis Clayson and André
Dombrowski (forthcoming); and “Whistler’s Mother: An International
Misunderstanding” in Circulation. Terra Foundation for American Art
Research Series edited by François Brunet (forthcoming).
LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 1.1 The Master applies himself to languages


and the sciences, private collection 36
Fig. 1.2 Rhine Crisis cartoon, private collection 42
Fig. 2.1 Cover of the 1904 paperback edition
of Wilkie Collins’s Woman in White
published by Routledge. © Andrew Gasson 64
Fig. 4.1 “A Close Shave!,” Cycling, September 1894.
Courtesy of the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne 112
Fig. 4.2 “A Shock,” Cycling, March 1896. Courtesy
of the State Library of Victoria, Melbourne 113
Fig. 5.1 “Burning of the Peristyle, with Western View
of the Court of Honor and Administration Building.”
From H.H. Van Meter, The Vanishing Fair. Chicago:
The Literary Art Co., 1893: 8. Author’s collection 135
Fig. 5.2 “Cavalry Escorting Meat Train Protected
by Infantry from the Chicago Stockyards during Strike.”
From H.H. Van Meter, The Vanishing Fair. Chicago:
The Literary Art Co., 1893: 22. Author’s collection 136
Fig. 7.1 “Stone walls and chains do not make a prison—for
Houdini,” ca. 1898 (image: Library of Congress,
LC-USZ62-53798 DLC) 169
Fig. 7.2 Suffragette leader Emmeline Pankhurst being
arrested after protesting in London on May 22, 1914 179
Fig. 8.1 Market women at Neuer Markt, Vienna, photograph
by Emil Mayer, around 1900 © Bezirksmuseum Meidling 202

xv
xvi LIST OF FIGURES

Fig. 8.2 Barker in Vienna’s Prater amusement park,


postcard, photograph by Emil Mayer, around
1910 © IMAGNO/Austrian Archives 210
Fig. 9.1 Bucking Bronco (1894), Library of Congress,
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded
Sound Division 222
Fig. 9.2 A Street Arab (1898), Library of Congress,
Motion Picture, Broadcasting, and Recorded
Sound Division 227
Fig. 9.3 In the Grip of the Blizzard (1899), Library
of Congress, Motion Picture, Broadcasting,
and Recorded Sound Division 232
Fig. 9.4 George Benjamin Luks (1867–1933).
The Spielers (1905). Addison Gallery of American Art,
Phillips Academy, Andover, Massachusetts, gift
of anonymous donor, 36 1/16 in. × 26 1/4 in.
(91.6 cm × 66.68 cm) oil on canvas 234
Fig. 10.1 Giorgio De Chirico. The Enigma
of an Autumn Afternoon [1910], private collection 244
Fig. 10.2 Giorgio de Chirico. Le Voyage emouvant [1913].
MOMA, New York. © 2015 Artists Rights Society (ARS),
New York/SIAE, Rome 247
Fig. 12.1 Detail of Liu Na’ou’s essay in Women’s Pictorial,
(Furen Huabao) 18 (May 1934): 16 289
Fig. 12.2 Illustration by Guo Jianying in Literature
and Art Pictorial (Wenyi Huabao), 1: 1934 291
Introduction: Sensationalism
and the Genealogy of Modernity:
Transnational Currents, Intermedial
Trajectories—A Global Nineteenth-Century
Approach

Alberto Gabriele

In the 1860s the British culture industry employed the adjective


“sensational” to market the plot-driven, excitingly eventful narratives
of popular fiction written by the likes of Wilkie Collins, Mary Elizabeth
Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood and Charles Reade. The ubiquitous
appearance of the term “sensational” in print culture wove a network
of references that made the literary field a porous membrane, shaped by
the social forces set in motion by the process of industrial modernity and
in turn affecting them. Advertising, popular entertainment, debates on
aesthetic taste and the senses at large all co-opted a rhetoric of strong,
stupefying, not necessarily elevating, sensations to articulate a trope, that
of sensationalism, which defined popular culture, and the protean experi-
ments it encouraged.1 The numerous uses of the trope of sensationalism
provided the culture industry with a long-lasting power of reinventing

1
See also Alberto Gabriele (2009).

A. Gabriele ()
Department of English and American Studies,
Tel Aviv University, Tel Aviv, Israel

© The Author(s) 2017 1


A. Gabriele (ed.), Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity,
DOI 10.1057/978-1-137-56148-0_1
2 A. GABRIELE

itself, making it a methodologically questionable choice to limit it to the


chronological demarcation of nineteenth-century/twentieth-century
culture, and the at times hierarchical distinction of Victorian/modernist
art and literature. A wide field of cultural production, therefore, echoed
and multiplied the stimuli of the serialized coup de theatre that set the
tempo of the serialized narrative installment of sensation fiction. These new
modalities of cultural production shaped the style, syntax and format of
several genres, literary and journalistic, painterly and performative, while
deeply impacting the structures of psychological reception of the urban
reader and observer.
The challenge to traditional forms of representation that accompanied
this process lay in the desire to mediate the fragmentation of modernity
into a manageable cogent unity. This aesthetic and normative impera-
tive to retrace an increasingly elusive notion of unitary order appeared in
several fashions. In literature, for instance, it surfaced as the overall teleo-
logical development of narrative structure meant to reaffirm the values
of the dominant culture. In visual culture at large, this striving for unity,
which circulated within a loosely Platonist discourse, whose semantic
field migrated from philosophy to religion and culture at large, presented
countless instances of symbolic condensation and of figurative representa-
tion. Many cultural forms reproduced this logic, shaping both the mate-
rial fabric of culture and the intellectual after-image it left with readers.
Journals titles attempted to imprint a sense of unity to their miscellaneous
contents with their titles and editorial line. The medium of the bound
book itself, moreover, gathered the scattered experience of reading peri-
odical literature in a homogenous format; the “new” spectacles of pre-
cinematic entertainment, again, sought to reproduce the stabilizing visual
regime of older models of painterly vision through the mechanical and
industrial standardization of these new forms of entertainment, resulting in
the emergence of the cinematograph first, and later, its industrial develop-
ment in narrative cinema.
This new rhetoric of the modern with its recognizable tropes of
structure and order meant to manage the dizzying multiplicity of indus-
trial modernity that resurfaced whenever the history of modernization,
in its uneven global dissemination, hit a threshold of formalization in
the countries that followed the British model of industrial development.
The well-oiled machinery of global trade, which was long in the mak-
ing before the inception of the industrial age, enabled the transmigration
of cultural products and the movement of cultural agents outside of the
national borders. These transmigrations of cultural forms moved not only
INTRODUCTION: SENSATIONALISM AND THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY... 3

in the direction of the colonial territories, but to and from neighboring


European territories that absorbed and reinterpreted cultural novelties
coming from neighboring centers of cultural production and industrial
innovation outside of the respective national markets. Sensationalism and
the Genealogy of Modernity proposes to highlight this global dimension of
popular culture in the course of the nineteenth century, while at the same
time seeking to expand the scope of traditional histories and professional
expertise that grew too attached to source materials that have been con-
fined at times exclusively to one linguistic and cultural context.
Since the invention by Henry More of the term “sensorium” in 1650
within a philosophical debate that sought to articulate a reflective form of
empiricism, or to salvage its spiritual component, the semantic field of sen-
sationalism has been linked to a theorization of “moral sentiment,” as Adam
Smith did in his work of 1759, linking it to the cultivation of refinement
enabled by commercial culture, and by the visual component of the social
interaction with others that might correct the excesses of the former.2 With
industrialization, as attested at least since Wordsworth’s Prelude Book 7
(in the 1805 version) and the empirical registering of impressions caught
by the moving observer in the modern city, sensation is experienced out-
side of any intellectual structure, absorbed as sheer fragmentation resisting
the normative force of logic and narrative that might articulate its meaning
in manageable units. The spectacular interaction of the subject cultivating
one’s moral refinement while dealing with the reality of the commercial city
denies in The Prelude Book 7 the hypostatized stability of a clearly defined
relation between the observer and the spectacle observed, which was pos-
ited in philosophical treatises and in a large tradition of painting. Sensation
is reduced in Wordsworth’s Prelude to sheer fragmentation, vision to an
endless movement of things caught by the observing subject in movement,
perception of one’s subjectivity to a porous membrane with no definite
boundaries.3 While the saturation of the capacity for absorbing sensory
stimuli and the ensuing psychic implosion is clearly exemplified in the narra-
tive of Wordsworth’s autobiographical poem, contemporary theorists such
as Thomas Trotter similarly linked the modern “nervous condition” to the

2
See James Chandler, xvii. For a thorough investigation of the relation between economic
advancements and the theories of sentiment see Pocock, J.G.A., Virtue, Commerce and
History.
3
See Alberto Gabriele (2008).
4 A. GABRIELE

reality of urbanization, making it the symptom of modern city life, prone to


possible pathological developments, which have been recognized later also
by Georg Simmell and Walter Benjamin.4
The semantic field of sensationalism, therefore, marked the emergence
of a modern epistemic challenge, resulting from the immediate experience
of perceiving reality in fragments, in isolated pieces to be rearranged into a
sequence. A sense of cogency was instated either by means of new thought
processes that symbolically condensed the new reality into larger ideas like
that of the system (so crucial to the modern epistemes of philology, biol-
ogy and the theory of value, as noted by Foucault in The Order of Things),
or by means of new narratives that made reality more manageable. The
literal movement of people, commodities and agents that inhabit the space
of modernity, as well as the metaphorical movement of identities in and
out of existing structures of power, reshuffled the traditional hierarchies
and the narratives of causality that made sense of contemporary reality,
thus inspiring writers as well as artists and theorists to engage with this
new challenge.
Inextricably linked to the uneven emergence of industrial modernity
in different geographical contexts, sensationalism becomes a constant
transhistorical presence, a trope of the emergence of modernity, which can
be charted over a very long period, from the early part of the nineteenth
century in the British examples, and later in the century in France, the USA,
Germany, Italy and Russia. In the latter areas modernization coincided also
with the advent of newly redefined geopolitical entities. In structuring itself
as a new language, sensationalism presented recognizable patterns and
tropes, more or less visible in the contemporary landscape of competing
discourses that reinstated intellectual categories of old, such as the notion
of organic unity or structural order in aesthetic theory and in the sociologi-
cal articulation of gendered, national and racial identities. The aesthetic
and intellectual rupture provided by fragmentation in the experience of
urban modernity coexisted with the desire to resort to a notion of order
and structure, until the modernist avant-gardes of the early part of the
twentieth century recuperated many of the experiments and intuitions of
the previous century in a conscious embrace of a new aesthetics of visual,
stylistic and intellectual fragmentation that ruptured the continuum of

4
See Trotter’s Nervous Temperament, qtd. by John Brewer in “Sentiment and Sensibility,”
in The Cambridge History of English Romantic Literature, p. 26.
INTRODUCTION: SENSATIONALISM AND THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY... 5

spatial and temporal conventions. The spatial and temporal dislocation that
modernity brought since its inception became a shared language for artists
and writers in the early part of the twentieth century, thus providing an
easy narrative of rupture and innovation in opposition to the tradition of
aestheticism that had only reinstated older intellectual formations such as
the discourse of beauty, with different degrees of abstraction from figura-
tive representation or the immediate reality of everyday life.
Mapping the temporal and geographic coordinates of the trope of
sensationalism in the long, global nineteenth century, therefore, helps to
reorient the temporal coordinates of the history of industrial modernity
and to identify a continuum in its manifestation and representations.
Such a continuum closely links modernist experimentations with the
highlighting of materiality and the engagement with fragmentation and
disruptive sensations in the course of the long nineteenth century. This calls
for a comparative approach, not only by juxtaposing different geographical
areas that might be viewed in clearer focus in opposition to other ones, but
by dispersing this history over a longue durée. This is why Sensationalism
and the Genealogy of Modernity chooses to focus on cultural productions
drawn from the whole time span of the “(very) long nineteenth century,”
in order to allow to perceive the hidden and often unacknowledged con-
tinuities throughout a period that is often divided into separate disciplin-
ary fields (Romantic, Victorian, Modernist) all reduced to the confines of
the national disciplines of literature, art and cultural studies. The collec-
tion allows to see, through the prism of different geographical locations,
in Europe, the USA, Asia and Australia, how the larger questions associ-
ated with the inception of modernity, ranging from the redefinition of the
psychology of perception to the gendered structures of social organization,
were articulated in each context, and to take note of invisible tangential
points of cultural exchange, and of parallel developments that might have
resulted from these contingencies. While the “Global Nineteenth Century”
approach of the subtitle dispenses with an impossible encyclopedic thor-
oughness, it nonetheless aims to recognize the unavoidable necessity to
incorporate such a global perspective in contemporary research, in order
to better highlight the phenomena usually ascribed to only one cultural
context. The collection Nineteenth Century Worlds. Global Formation Past
and Present (2008), while choosing to address “the most pressing con-
cerns of contemporary geopolitics,” presents studies that focus only on
English-language texts. However critical such a perspective might be, it
nonetheless reaffirms the structures and formations of one form of global
6 A. GABRIELE

dominance, the British empire. I held a (partially) similar view in my under-


standing of the global—but actually, Victorian—networks of distribution of
print culture identified in my doctoral thesis proposal defended in 2003. It
is with the aim of mapping new synergies between approaches, specializa-
tions and agents that I put together this collection of essays, as a way to
create new points of contact in the scholarly landscape.
A “Global Nineteenth Century” approach is even more necessary, and
at the same time belated, when considering that the actual history of the
development of modern economic systems has always been transnational,
and fueled by the power of global trade, before it crystallized in the revered
representatives of a national canon of artists and writers often extrapolated
from this more complex history. The comparative, interdisciplinary
dialogue that the essays in Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity
enable, moreover, is much needed as, overall, they sharpen the perception
of the historical specificity of each context, so that the task of theorizing
and producing an argument within the boundaries of national history is
constantly reshuffled by the concomitant development of similar realities
elsewhere. The history of popular culture and the transmission of sensa-
tional forms, from news of wars and revolutions—an often unacknowl-
edged sensationalism—to the evolving entertainment practices targeting
the urban audience (with extension in the countryside, as we will see), is
deeply transnational, not only in the obvious migration of cultural prod-
ucts, and through the impact of foreign ideas and practices, but as a fili-
gree trace that helps to reconsider the intellectual horizons of the study of
literature and culture in several locations throughout the long nineteenth
century. Adopting a strictly nineteenth-century focus without questioning
or reflecting on the arbitrary conventions of a periodization organized in
centuries, moreover, runs the risk of offering partial, if not a “frozen-in-
time,” perspective that does not advance the understanding of the rever-
berations of larger historical forms beyond the nineteenth century.
The interdisciplinary dialogue across borders, periods and disciplines
situates the study of nineteenth-century culture in a global context,
according to a trend, the study of “the global,” which is deeply trans-
forming the cultural horizons of several academic fields, including the
study of literature outside of the limiting focus on national literary
traditions. While the global approach at times appears as the recasting
of older methodological concerns with the notions of “translation,”
“appropriation,” “exchange,” and with the dynamic interaction of
INTRODUCTION: SENSATIONALISM AND THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY... 7

productive terms such as “center” and “periphery” (or the question-


ing of such a distinction), the local and the national (or international),
which have always been the foundation of scholarly inquiry in many
fields, this collection dispenses from limiting one’s scope to the debates
of any one field, as is often the case of research tackling the question
of the global, in isolation from the other ones.5 The dialogue between
the essays published here proposes, therefore, interdisciplinarity on a
global scale as an ongoing redefinition of critical tools and methods,
rather than the application of a standardized methodological formula
to one specific context. The cross-pollination resulting from engaging
with different disciplinary fields and periods that the reader will be
exposed to will be a means to redefine and reorient one’s own critical
coordinates and to be inspired by different contexts, methodologies
and scholarly styles. Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity,
which grows out of the conference organized at Tel Aviv University
in December 2013, with scholars coming from Ireland, France,
Germany, Holland and Italy, but includes also six new submissions,
seeks to advance the scholarly debate on sensationalism by taking a
new approach to several methodological questions.

PERIODIZATION
The essays contained in Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity,
far from focusing only on the most symptomatic representations, such as
the sensational 1860s in the British Victorian context, expand the focus
to encompass on one hand the precursors of sensationalism in the his-
tory of popular art forms such as political ballads (Brophy) or gothic fic-
tion (Lethbridge), and on the other the later articulation of the trope of
sensationalism in the fin de siècle culture of journalism (Laube, Pashut)
and the early part of the twentieth-century entertainment through mass
culture, periodical literature, early cinema and performance (Valence,
Letourneux, Rein, Devine, Müller, Tang).

5
For a productive overview of the question of place in colonial and postcolonial studies see
the introduction (Chap. 1) and the conclusion (Chap. 11) of (Dis)Placing Empire by Lindsay
J Proudfoot and Michael M Roche.
8 A. GABRIELE

GLOBAL CURRENTS
Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity seeks to understand the
rise of industrial modernity and the workings of popular culture by cre-
ating a dialogue between American studies specialists (Devine, Valance),
Australian (Laube), Austrian (Müller), British (Letheridge, Pashut,
Rein), Chinese (Tang), French (Migozzi), German (Brophy, Messing
Marcus) and Italian (Coen). Since the inception of industrial modernity
in these areas happened at different times and in relation to different
power structures, the juxtaposition of essays on different periods helps
to build a narrative that will inevitably identify common patterns as well
as recognize more historically specific responses to the culture of moder-
nity. An essay such as Tang’s stresses even more the need, in focusing
on the global circulation of popular fiction, for an attention to what
Arjun Appadurai calls the “radical disjuncture” between different sorts of
global flows and “the uncertain landscapes created in and through these
disjunctures” (Appadurai 3).

URBAN AESTHETICS: THE “MODERNITY THESIS”


REVISITED
A dominant paradigm in the study of industrial modernity harks back to the
works of Georg Simmell and Walter Benjamin, who insisted on the intense
and shocking experience for the subject immersed in the synesthetic experi-
ence of urban modernity by crystallizing what nineteenth-century critics
had already noted in countless examples. One among them is Margaret
Hale’s comment in Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South (1854–55): “It
is the town life. Their nerves are quickened by the haste and bustle and
speed of everything around them.” While, on the one hand, expanding
on this tradition through the discussion of intensely charged literary and
theatrical works (Valence, Pashut, Letourneux, Rein), the discussion in
Sensationalism and the Genealogy of Modernity of the emotional responses
spurred by nineteenth-century modernity, on the other hand, departs from
this model when including, for instance, the humorous and ironic dimension
of the reception of shocking news and sentimental rallying cries (Brophy),
the aural dimension of a disappearing address to the audience in a long tra-
dition of pre-nineteenth-century sensationalism (Müller), and the subjec-
tive reverberations that mediate the shock of the modern (Tang). Another
way to reshuffle the categories associated with a study of modernity is to
INTRODUCTION: SENSATIONALISM AND THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY... 9

question the canonical opposition between city and countryside in defining


the spatial coordinates and the sensory apparatus associated with modernity.
Studies such as Pashut’s help to question this stark opposition by tracking
the impact of the sensational trope, and its quickened tempo of fragmented
intensified perceptions, in the late nineteenth-century leisure industry asso-
ciated with the enjoyment of the countryside. Overall, Sensationalism and
the Genealogy of Modernity makes the study of the senses, so crucial in con-
temporary scholarship, the focus of several interventions, some of which
more specifically address the question of visualization in popular forms of
instruction and entertainment, and in the theory of modernity elaborated
by Adorno and Benjamin (Messing Marcus, Tang, Devine and Coen),
whereas others recuperate an often undervalued dimension of aural sensa-
tionalism in the experience of popular culture (Müller, Brophy). Benjamin,
in particular, is a ubiquitous presence in the collection that reaffirms his
enduring impact in contemporary historical and cultural studies.
What is called the “modernity thesis,” and ascribed to Benjamin, is an
approach to a study of modernity that is currently under attack, not only
through the rhetorical move of phrasing it as a hypothesis, by a school
of film and cultural theorists that in some cases rely on the findings of
our contemporary psychological studies to contradict the view offered by
Benjamin, while operating a curious dismissal of the very archival traces
and the contemporary responses to the phenomena of modernity that
best help to single out how nineteenth-century commentators first per-
ceived it, as the quote of Elizabeth Gaskell, among countless others, can
attest. These studies strangely ignore the massive evidence of nineteenth-
century material culture and the insights from nineteenth-century texts
that Benjamin collected in preparation of all of his essays, in a proliferation
of quotations as if to attempt a philological reconstruction of an intui-
tive stemma codicum (a chart of the transmission of texts) of nineteenth-
century culture at large.

INTERMEDIAL SYNERGIES: THE VANISHING ACT


OF PERFORMANCE

One of the challenges in the study of the cultural productions associated with
industrial modernity is the unstoppable proliferations of copies, adaptations
and mediations, which imply a complex and often elusive lived experience
of the contemporary consumers caught between different media. In the
multiplication of stimuli accompanying the cultural landscape of industrial
10 A. GABRIELE

modernity, and in the often unstoppable metamorphosis and transmedial


migration of each product, the protean nature of these cultural productions
often eludes a thorough scholarly scrutiny. They may be missed, unless they
appear in the solid materiality of one medium (book, journal, painting,
film) that may condense the multidirectional and synesthetic experiences of
the modern city and reduce them to an observable object of analysis. What
is lost in this translation is the multimedial and multisensory experience of
modernity itself. The protean appearances of nineteenth-century cultural
productions in a series of dizzyingly unstable reproductions make it almost
impossible, and to some degree methodologically questionable, to focus
on only one of them. Nicholas Daly has charted the transmutations of the
cultural trace of the “woman in white” from novel to poster, theatrical
adaptation, painting and popular culture through religious worship (the
apparitions of the “woman in white” at Lourdes), allowing to expand the
focus from one medium to a much more receptive and mimetic field of cul-
tural production. Stefanie Letheridge in her essay in this collection reminds
us, with Allingham, of Benjamin’s reference to the poster of the theater
adaptation of Wilkie Collins’ sensation novel The Woman in White instead
of the cover of the book itself, and that is a case in point of the dispersed
and multimedial dissemination of any cultural product that may constitute
a slippery path for the cultural historian.
While the difficulty of tracking the resourceful entrepreneurial
exploitation of anything that caught the imagination of the public is not
unsurmountable, and can be overcome through the methodological model
of scholarship offered by Nicholas Daly, the lived experience of the modern
city through the many forms of performance that artists and cultural pro-
ducers were immersed in and interacted with becomes a lost text that may
indirectly propagate the centrality of the more material media (painting,
film) at the expense of their precursors in time-bound ephemeral forms.
Futurism’s “Variety Theatre” was a programmatic embrace of a poetics of
the direct, frontal challenge to the remoteness of the audience of spec-
tators in traditional theater. It did so by adopting the poetics of attrac-
tion, articulated in the shocking and the sensational, which broke the
separation between audience and public in the short-lived experience of
the performance itself that mimics the sensory experience of modernity.
The theory of attractions elaborated by Futurist performers has provided a
memorable category to early cinema historians (Gaudreault 1978; Gunning
1995, among others), so much so that is now aligned to the filmic object
and not to the experiments with spectatorship and audience participation
INTRODUCTION: SENSATIONALISM AND THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY... 11

that were theorized and practiced at the same time. The famous “serate,”
the happenings of the futurist avant-garde, harking back to the theatrical
slaps in the face of traditional audiences of performances such as Jarry’s
1896 Ubu Roi, constitute a place for experimenting with novel percep-
tions and for practicing a dislocation of accepted signifying conventions.
These perceptions became memorable stylistic features in the history of
modernism only when fixed on a canvas or in another tangible artistic form
by the performers-artists themselves, while necessarily dispersing the origi-
nal experience of performance. The ephemeral origin of painting in perfor-
mance is highlighted in the Futurist proclamation that “the gesture for us
will no longer be a fixed moment of universal dynamism: it will be decisively
the dynamic sensation made eternal” (Goldberg 2011: 14). The collabora-
tion of modernist artists who designed props and costumes for the theater
is a constant feature throughout the history of modernism, from the sets for
Ubu Roi made by Bonnard, Vuillard and Toulouse-Lautrec, to the ongo-
ing collaboration of avant-garde artists and filmmakers such as Malevich,
Eisenstein, Rodchenko and De Chirico with the theater for the production
of plays, ballets and operas (Goldberg 2011: 12; Bowlt 2014; Bellow 2013).
The question of movement of forms and colors, as well as the dislocation of
traditional meaning, was a central concern for all, but it was in the futurist
“words-in-freedom-drama” performed in Rome in 1914 at the Sprovieri
gallery, where paintings by Carrà, Balla, Boccioni, Russolo and Severini
were exhibited, that Marinetti, Balla and Cangiullo themselves provided
a live performance of the “words in freedom” written by Cangiullo, while
enhancing the sensory dissonance of the visitors of the gallery by producing
a series of noises (Goldberg 2011: 18).
Paris and the space of the Parisian café or of the theater have a central
role not only in the history of performance and the emergence of modern-
ist art and literature—the influence of Ubu Roi for the young Marinetti
being a case in point—but as one of the earliest sites in which specta-
tors were exposed, among other acts, to Lumière’s patented invention
of the cinematograph. The café, the traditional site for the exchange of
ideas in the newly constituted public sphere, was also a crucial place for
the reinvention of modern forms of visual spectacle, in a fluid transition
from lived performance to a material, and also mechanical, recreation of a
spectacular attraction, as attested also by the countless monotypes printed
by Edgar Degas registering the impressions of the café concert on paper
(Hauptman). Vanessa Schwartz in Spectacular Realities has demonstrated
that the first projections of the cinematograph in Parisian cafés was eyed
12 A. GABRIELE

by cultural promoters as a new industrially produced spectacle that could


equal, compete, both in production costs and in the rapidity of turnout,
with the popularity of wax museums like the Musée Grévin, which repro-
duced episodes of sensationalized city life taken from the faits divers of
the periodical press. A fascination with death was also the leitmotif of Le
Cabaret du Néant, which offered the distinctive death-related decor of its
ambience, but also the performance of macabre magic acts, so much so
that Matthieu Letourneux redefines the task of the author of serial crime
fiction in the early part of the twentieth century as a magician’s act with
a fascination with macabre details like the ones that attracted customers
to the Le Cabaret du Néant. Ester Coen notes that Balla, another Italian
futurist in Paris, visited the Cabaret and mentioned it in his letters.
The lived experience of these performance spaces, therefore, is a crucial
intertextual trace that needs to be accounted for in an understanding of the
reinvention of artistic and literary conventions operated by modernism.
The novelty lies not in the groundbreaking use of artistic and literary tech-
niques within the space of the canvas, or the printed book, nor in the idea
of the Gesammelkunstwerk, but rather in the hybrid form of textuality
that the urban sensorium itself represented before these multisensory, at
times dissonant, stimuli took material forms in book and painted forms.
One whole section in the collection shall, therefore, stress the importance
of this lived performance in the genealogy of modernity.
The collection is organized in three parts: I. Sensational Tactics in the
(Very) Long Nineteenth Century. II. Transmedial Trajectories: the Vanishing
Act of Performance. III. Visualizing the Space of Industrial Modernity.

I. SENSATIONAL TACTICS IN THE LONG NINETEENTH


CENTURY
The essay collection opens with James Brophy’s discussion in “Irony and
Popular Politics in Germany, 1800–1850” of the rhetorical tropes perme-
ating the often flimsy category of “the popular.” Due to the protean nature
of popular culture, the slippery taxonomy used to fix its categories, and
its often untraceable reception, the sphere of the “popular” constitutes
an almost formidable challenge to any systematization. The essay seeks to
identify some fundamental rhetorical figures that shape the expression of
popular culture, first the figure of the synecdoche animating the political
sentiments gathered around the projected symbol of unity of the monarchy
INTRODUCTION: SENSATIONALISM AND THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY... 13

in popular anti-Napoleonic songs. It then proceeds to discuss the power


of irony “as a poetic and narratological idiom” that spells an eighteenth-
century emergence of modernity through its ability “to accentuate dif-
ference, independence, and self-reflexive consciousness,” as a form of
“oppositional citizenship” that neutralizes the imposed narrative of nation-
alism and redirects political response to domestic issues and the liberal
causes of the early part of the nineteenth century. The range of materi-
als discussed explicitly, from broadsheets to popular ballads, lithographs,
periodicals, but also the objects of a broader material culture that includes
“playing cards, porcelain plates, and you-shall-not-have-it nightcaps,”
points to a Romantic sensorium that is far from confirming the typology
of the passive and threatened subjectivity of the mid-nineteenth-century
accounts of the flâneur and the badaud. The range of sources, which
include police reports as unintentional ethnographic records of the opposi-
tional moods of the crowds, as well as visual representations of social types
through prints and vignettes—in parallel to the developments in France of
genres such as the Phisiologie—attests to the sophistication of contempo-
rary culture in theorizing about itself in memorable ways that often echoed
in twentieth-century scholarly discussions without being traced back to the
archival material that explicitly articulated them. The often-invoked ques-
tioning of the imagined discursive boundary of the private sphere in oppo-
sition to the public one, so as to make the private sphere a complementary
component of nation-building, and also of colonial ideology, needs to
redraw its imaginary boundaries by seeing both, as the essay invites us to
do, in relation to a transnational public sphere rife with sensational emo-
tions of a political nature that reverberated all over Europe during the lib-
eral upheavals of the 1820s, 1830s and 1840s.
Material culture and the question of modern agency fall within the dis-
cursive field analyzed also by Stefanie Lethbridge in the following essay,
“The Horror of Clothing and the Clothing of Horror: Material and
Meaning in Gothic and Sensation Fiction.” The essay weaves a wide range
of references to literary narratives culled from sensation and gothic novels,
which co-opt the semiotic power of clothing to articulate a fascinating
phenomenology of the redefined relations, in the course of the nineteenth
century, between object and subject in the new landscape of expanding
markets and triumphant commodity culture. The attention to material-
ity present in the gothic and sensation novel’s elaborate descriptions of
clothing points, for Stephanie Letheridge, to instances of “social order
disruption” for male and female characters alike: “instead of expressing
14 A. GABRIELE

the self, clothes here frequently indicate disjunctions between subject and
object and on occasion a disquieting domination of the material over the
spiritual.” Horror results “when there is a loss of control over the individ-
ual’s negotiations with their social environment, when the material surface
observed by others changes or eliminates the subject beyond the subject’s
control.” Most interestingly, the essay also links the material aspect of
book production itself, “the cover of the book,” to a similar concern with
appearance, social status and the slippery sites of signification that social
mobility and commodity culture enabled in the course of the nineteenth
century. This section of the essay points to a rich variety of commodities
disseminated by the publishing industry and in doing so, it prompts a
parallel reflection on the question of agency that these objects enabled,
albeit in disguise. Letheridge’s opens up a whole set of questions for a cul-
tural historical approach to the study of nineteenth-century book history.
Can the narrative of the circulation and production of books be differ-
ent and freer than the more overdetermined and teleological one that the
plot of the novel imposes on the actions of its characters? The case of the
material nature of books that reveal, expose or demystify the functioning
structure of culture offers a distinctive and different typology in the history
of commodity culture in the nineteenth century that can help redefine a
notion of subjectivity built in relation to the material object. Could, fur-
thermore, a freer agency be ascribed to the reader, one that can transcend
the taxonomic imperatives of the age?
The following two essays take the discussion of the trope of sensational-
ism in the Victorian context outside of the limited scope of the “sensational
craze” of the 1860s, by tracking the evolution of the trope in the history
of journalism: Anthony Laube traces the genealogy of the emergence of
“new journalism” in South Australian papers from the 1850s, whereas Efrat
Pashut codifies the modalities of sensationalism in the text-image dynam-
ics in the Victorian magazine Cycling, during the peak popularity of the
manufacture and sale of the Safety model (1894–96). Methodologically,
Laube’s essay chooses to focus on the South Australian context (the col-
ony that had Adelaide as its capital) in order to revise a model of dissemi-
nation of cultural innovation from the metropole to the colonial outposts.
Laube distinguishes two phases: an early period of experimentation and
entrepreneurial prowess on the part of the first newspaper editors, many
of which anticipated some of the practices of New Journalism, and a later,
profit-dominated development, defined by a less fluid structure of power
within the management of the South Australian papers, in an attempt to
INTRODUCTION: SENSATIONALISM AND THE GENEALOGY OF MODERNITY... 15

please the local political class and steer away, at least initially, from sen-
sational elements. Laube identifies several important forces that shaped
the development of journalism in Australia: the discovery of gold in the
neighboring colony of Victoria, the technological advancements in com-
munications between Europe and the colonies represented by the opening
of the Suez Canal and the establishment of telegraphic communication,
and the intercolonial and international mobility of the journalists that set-
tled there after stints in Britain, America, South Africa, Hong Kong and
Germany. He proceeds to investigate South Australian history of the press
through specific genres, such as the alternative press, the illustrated press
and the mainstream press, and also by identifying sub-genres in the ongo-
ing shaping of the new language of journalism in the Australian colony
such as sports reporting, the creation of a target audience of women and
investigative journalism.
Efrat Pashut’s essay “The Sensational Bicycle: Textual and Visual
Narratives in Cycling, 1891–1896” expands the study of the sensational
trope beyond the often studied period of the “sensation craze” of the
1860s to track the impact of the newly marketed “Safety” model with
pneumatic tire, as represented in the British journal Cycling through
fiction, non-fiction and illustrations between 1891 and 1896. The trope
of sensationalism, with the thrill of exciting news and sudden discoveries
it sustains, is both inextricably linked to the naturalization of consump-
tion patterns and immersed in the logic of market economy at large,
with which the genre of sensation fiction has often been associated. In
choosing the macrotext of the complete run of the magazine in the years
1891–96, Pashut avoids a purely thematic reading of the digital archive of
the Victorian periodical press, which can produce a “google-like” list of
references on any topic at a click of a mouse, in order to conduct a more
rigorous research aiming at retracing the experience of reading the maga-
zine in its original format, incorporating stimuli and suggestions coming
from the juxtaposition of several elements in the language of journalism
at the end of the nineteenth century. In tracking the psychological effects
of riding a bicycle in the city and, most interestingly, in the countryside,
she is then able to dispel the ungrounded notion that the sensory overkill
was only relegated to life in the city. The bicycle appears, therefore, as
an agent of the ambivalence that modernity represents, and sometimes
it becomes a symbol of the project of enlightenment that dispels super-
stitious notions associated with the rural folklore of the “undead.” The
latter mode is present in E. Douglass Fawcett’s story “A Hand from the
Another random document with
no related content on Scribd:
Chil quatre baron de France descendirent de lors chevaus devant
l’ostel dou roi, et puis les chevaliers d’Engleterre les menèrent
deviers le roi, et le trouvèrent acosté et adestré, ensi que je vous di,
de moult vaillans hommes. Qant il furent parvenu jusques au roi, il
l’enclinèrent; et li rois les requelli assés ordonneement de
contenance et de parole. Messires Ustasses de Ribeumont s’avança
de parler et dist: «Sire, li rois de France nous envoie par deviers
vous et vous segnefie que il est chi venus et arestés sus le mont de
Sangates pour vous combatre; mais il ne puet veoir ne trouver voie
conment il puist venir jusques à vous. Si en a il grant desir pour
dessegier sa bonne ville de Calais, et a fait aviser, taster et regarder
par ses honmes conment il poroit venir jusques à vous; mais c’est
cose imposible à faire, ce li ont reporté si honme. Si veroit volentiers
que vous vosissiés mettre de vostre consel ensamble, et il i meteroit
dou sien, et par l’avis de ceuls, aviser place raisonnable là où on se
peuist combatre. Et de ce sonmes nous cargiet de vous dire et
remoustrer. Si nous en voelliés respondre de par vous ou de par
vostre consel.»
Li rois d’Engleterre, qui bien entendi ceste parole, fu tantos
consilliés et avisés de respondre et dist: «Signeur, je ai bien entendu
tout ce que vous me requerés de par mon adversaire, qui tient mon
droit hiretage à tort, dont il me poise. Se li dirés de par moi, se il
vous plest, que je sui chi endroit, et j’ai demoret priès d’un an. Tout
ce a il bien sceu, et i fust bien venus plus tos, se il vosist; mais il m’a
chi laissiet demorer si longement que je ay grossement despendu
dou mien, et i pense avoir tant fait que assés temprement je serai
sires de la ville et dou chastiel de Calais. Et ne sui pas consilliés dou
tout faire à sa devise ne à se aise, ne de eslongier ce que je pense à
avoir conquis, et que je ai tant desiret et comparet. Se li dirés, se ils
ne ses gens ne pueent par là passer, si voissent autour pour querir
la voie.»
Li chevalier de France veirent bien que ils n’aueroient aultre
response, si prissent congiet. Li rois lor donna, qui les fist conduire
par les chevaliers meismes de sa cambre qui amené les avoient
jusques à lui, et montèrent sus lors chevaus. Et les amenèrent chil
jusques au pont de Nulais, là où li contes Derbi et ses gens estoient;
et puis retournèrent li chevalier dou roi en l’oost. Et li chevalier
françois passèrent oultre, et enclinèrent en passant le conte Derbi, et
cevauchièrent tout le cemin sans nul empecement; et s’en vinrent
sus le mont de Sangate et as tentes dou roi de France. Et li
comptèrent, presens pluisseurs hauls barons, tout ce que il avoient
veu et trouvé, et la response dou roi d’Engleterre, de laquelle li rois
de France fu tous merancolieus; car, qant il vint là, il quidoit par
bataille recouvrer la ville de Calais, et n’i pooit obviier ne pourveir par
aultre voie, fors que par la bataille et avoir eut la victore. Fos 140 vº
et 141.
P. 50, l. 1: Nulais.—Ms. B 6: Et fut messire Joffroy de Cargni, le
sire d’Aubegni, messire Gui de Nelle et le sire de Chastelvelin.
Fº 393.
P. 50, l. 2 et 3: Ribeumont.—Ms. A 4: Ribemont. Fº 138.
P. 50, l. 7: paisieuvlement.—Ms. B 4: paisivlement. Fº 133.—Ms. A
7: paisiblement. Fº 157.
P. 50, l. 24: ses gens.—Mss. A 11 à 19: ses mareschaus.
P. 51, l. 18: Nulais.—Mss. A 7 et B 4: Milais. Fº 157 vº.

§ 310. P. 51, l. 25: Entrues.—Ms. d’Amiens: Quant il (le roi


Philippe) vi qu’il n’en aroit autre cose, il se parti de là et compta le
ville de Callais pour perdue, et se retraist à Arras et donna touttes
mannierrez de gens d’armez congiet, et laissa chiaux de Callais
finner au mieux qu’il peurent. Fº 98.
—Ms. de Rome: Entrues que li rois de France estoit sur le mont
de Sangates, et que il estudioit conment et par quel tour il poroit
combatre les Englois qui fortefiiet estoient, ensi que ichi desus vous
avés oy recorder, vinrent doi cardinal en son hoost, le cardinal
d’Espagne, uns moult vaillans et sages homs, et li cardinauls d’Oten,
envoiiés là en legation de par le pape Clement, qui resgnoit pour ce
temps. Cil doi cardinal, ensi que il estoient cargiet, se missent tantos
en grant painne d’aler de l’une hoost en l’autre; et volentiers euissent
veu par lors promotions que li rois d’Engleterre euist brisiet son
siège, laquelle cose il n’euist jamais fait. Toutes fois il parlementèrent
tant et alèrent de l’un à l’autre que, sus certains articles et trettiés
d’acord et de paix, ils procurèrent que uns respis fu pris entre ces
deus rois et lors gens là estans au siège et sus les camps, à durer
tant seullement trois jours. Et furent ordonné [par] euls, huit nobles
signeurs, quatre de par le roi de France, et quatre de par le roi
d’Engleterre: de par le roi de France, li dus Oedes de Bourgongne, li
dus Pières de Bourbon, messires Jehans de Hainnau et mesires
Lois de Savoie; et dou costé les Englois, li contes Derbi, li contes de
Norhantonne, messires Renauls de Gobehen, et messires Gautiers
de Mauni. Et li doi cardinal estoient traitieur et moiien et alant de l’un
à l’autre. Si furent chil signeur, les trois jours durans, la grignour
partie dou jour en conclave ensamble, et missent pluisseurs devises
et pareçons avant, des quelles nulles ne vinrent à effet.
Entrues que on parlementoit et le respit durant, li rois d’Engleterre
faisoit toutdis efforcier son hoost et faire grans fossés sus les dunes,
par quoi li François ne les peuissent sousprendre. Et sachiés que
chils parlemens et detriemens anoioit durement à ceuls de Calais,
qui volentiers euissent veu plus tos lor delivrance, car on les faisoit
trop juner. Chil troi jour se passèrent sans paix et sans acord, car li
rois d’Engleterre tenoit tout dis son opinion et metoit en termes que
point ne se delairoit que il ne fust sires de Calais, et li rois de France
voloit que elle li demorast. En cel estri se departirent les parties, ne li
cardinal ne les peurent puis rasambler, liquel, qant il veirent ce que
on ne voloit entendre à euls, il se departirent et retournèrent à Saint
Omer.
Qant li rois Phelippes vei ce que perdre li couvenoit Calais, si fu
durement courouchiés: à envis le laisoit perdre. Et, tout consideré, ils
ne ses gens n’i savoient conment aidier ne adrechier; car de aler de
fait sus l’oost le roi d’Engleterre, c’estoit cose imposible, pour les
grans marescages qui sont tout autour de Calais et la mer qui estoit
fort gardée. Avisé fu et proposé en l’oost de France que il
retourneroient à Saint Omer et venroient dou costé de Berghes et de
Bourbourch; mais qant il regardoient le pasage de Gravelines et les
destrois et mauvais et perilleus passages que il aueroient à passer,
et conment bien soissante mille Flamens gisoient de ce lés devant
Calais, il rompoient et anulioient lors imaginations et disoient:
«Toutes nostres pensées sont vainnes. Il nous fault perdre Calais.
Mieuls nous vault une ville à perdre que de mettre en peril euls cent
mille. Se nous le perdons celle fois, une aultre fois le porons nous
bien recouvrer. Il n’est aventure qui n’aviegne. On en a petitement
songniet dou temps passé, car on le deuist avoir pourveue pour tenir
dis ans ou vint, selonch la force dont elle est et la belle garde, ou on
le deuist avoir abatue et mise tout par terre; car avant que on le puist
ravoir, elle fera mouit de mauls au roiaulme de France.»
Ensi se devisoient et parloient li François, qant il veirent que li
trettié furent falli, et li cardinal retournet à Saint Omer. Un jour, il fu
ordonné au departir et au deslogier de là, et de retraire casqun là où
mieuls li plaisoit. Si se deslogièrent un matin, et montèrent li signeur
sus lors cevaus; et varlès demorèrent encores derrière, qui
entendirent au requellier tentes et trefs et à tourser et à mettre à
charoi et à voiture. Là i ot des vitalliers de l’oost pluisseurs atrapés
qui perdirent chevaus et pourveances, car Englois sallirent hors de
l’ost pour gaegnier. Si prissent des prisonniers et conquissent des
chevaus et des sonmiers, des vins et des pourveances, et tout
ramenèrent en l’ost devant Calais. Et li signeur de France et li
François retournèrent en lors lieus. Fº 141 vº.
P. 51, l. 25: Entrues.—Ms. A 7: Entrementières. Fº 157 vº.
P. 52, l. 6: tant.—Ms. B 6: qu’il otriast une triève trois jours. Fº 395.
P. 52, l. 8 et 9: misent... ensamble.—Mss. A 2 à 6, 11 à 14, 18, 19:
ordonnèrent des deux parties quatre seigneurs ensemble.
P. 52, l. 11: furent.—Ms. B 6: le duc de Bourbon, messire Jehan de
Haynau, le sire de Biaugeu et messire Jofroy de Cargny. Fº 395.
P. 52, l. 19: pareçons.—Ms. A 7: parechons. Fº 158.
P. 53, l. 16: desbareté.—Ms. A 7: desbaratés. Fº 158.
P. 53, l. 20: kewe.—Ms. B 6: des deslogeurs. Sy en trouvèrent de
chiaus et assés qui avoient trop tart dormy. Fº 396.

§ 311. P. 53, l. 24: Apriès.—Ms. d’Amiens: Quant chil de Callais


virent que point ne seroient secouru, et que li roys de France estoit
partis, si furent durement esbahy. Adonc commencièrent il à entrer
en grans tretiés deviers monseigneur Gautier de Mauny, qui en
portoit pour Dieu et par aumousne les parollez. Nullement il ne pooit
abrisier le roy d’Engleterre qu’il les presist à merchy, mès les volloit
tous faire morir, tant l’avoient il courouchiet dou tamps passet. Fº 98.
—Ms. de Rome: Apriès le departement dou roi de France et de
son hoost dou dit mont de Sangate, chil de Calais veirent bien que le
secours en quoi il avoient eu fiance, lor estoit fallis; et si estoient à si
très grande destrèce de famine que li plus poissans et li plus fors se
pooient à grant malaise soustenir. Si orent consel et lor sambla que il
valloit mieuls euls mettre en la volenté dou roi d’Engleterre, se plus
grant merchi n’i pooient trouver, que euls laissier morir l’un apriès
l’autre par destrèce de famine, car li pluiseur en poroient perdre
corps et ame par rage de fain. Si priièrent generaulment à mesire
Jehan de Viane, lor chapitainne, que il en vosist tretiier et parler. Li
gentils chevaliers lor acorda et monta as crestiaus des murs de la
ville, et fist signe as cheuls de dehors que il voloit parler à euls. On i
envoia. Il pria que on vosist donner à sentir au roi d’Engleterre que il
envoiast homme notable parler à lui, car il voloit entrer en trettié. On
le fist tantos et sans delai.
Qant li rois d’Engleterre entendi ces nouvelles, il fist venir mesire
Gautier de Mauni devant lui. Qant il fu venus, il li dist: «Gautier, alés
veoir que ces gens de Calais voellent dire: il me font requerre par lor
chapitainne que je envoie parler à euls.» Mesires Gautiers respondi
et dist: «Sire, volentiers.» Adonc se departi il dou roi et s’en vint tout
à cheval, assés bien acompagniés de sa famille seullement, et vint
as barrières de Calais, et trouva messire Jehan de Viane qui se
apoioit sus une baille, et estoit issus hors de la porte par le guichet.
Qant li doi chevalier se veirent, il se recongnurent assés, car
aultres fois il s’estoient veu. «Mesire Gautier, dist mesire Jehan de
Viane, vous estes uns vaillans homs et moult usés d’armes. Si
devés tant mieuls entendre à raison. Li rois de France, moi et mi
compagnon qui ichi dedens sonmes enclos, nous a ichi envoiiet,
ensi que faire le puet, car il est nostres sires, et nous sonmes si
subject, et nous conmanda estroitement au departir de li que nous
gardisions la ville et le chastiel de Calais si que blame n’en
euissions, ne ils point de damage. Nous en avons fait nostre pooir et
diligense jusques à chi, et tous les jours nous avions esperance de
estre delivret, et li sièges levés. Or est avenu que nostres espoirs est
fallis de tous poins, et nous fault esceir ou dangier de vostre signeur
le roi d’Engleterre; car nous sonmes si astrains que nous n’avons de
quoi vivre, et nous couvenra tous morir de male mort, se li gentils
rois, qui est vos sires, ne prent pité de nous. Si vous suppli
chierement, messire Gautier, que vous voelliés aler deviers lui et li
priier pour nous et remoustrer conment loiaument nous avons servi
nostre signeur le roi de France conme si saudoiier et si soubject, et
[pour] les povres gens de ceste ville aussi qui n’en pooient ne
osoient aultre cose faire, et nous laise partir hors de la ville nous,
chevaliers et esquiers, qui ichi dedens sonmes enclos, et prende en
merchi et en pité le povre peuple de Calais, plenté n’en i a pas, et
nous laise partir et isir et aler ailleurs querre nostre mieuls, et prende
la ville et le chastiel, l’or et l’argent et tout ce que il i trouvera.»
A ces paroles respondi mesires Gautiers de Mauni et dist: «Mesire
Jehan, mesire Jehan, je sçai assés de l’intension et volenté le roi
nostre sire, et bien sachiés que c’est se entente que vous n’en irés
pas ensi que vous avés chi dit; ains est sa volenté et intension que
vous vos metés dou tout en sa pure volenté, ou pour rançonner
ceuls qui il li plaira ou pour faire morir. Car chil de Calais li ont tant
fait de contraires et de damages et despis, et ocis de ses hommes et
fait despendre si grant fuisson d’avoir au seoir devant celle ville dont
moult l’en est, ce n’est pas mervelles; et ne sçai pas, en l’air et argu
où il est et l’ai veu tous jours jusques à ores, se vous porés passer
pour raençon, que il ne voelle avoir vos vies.»
Donc respondi messires Jehans de Viane et dist: «Mesire Gautier,
ce seroit trop dure cose pour nous et grant cruautés pour le roi
d’Engleterre, se nous, qui chi sonmes envoiiet de par le roi de
France, on nous fesist morir. Nous avons servi nostre signeur, ensi
que vous feriés le vostre, en cas semblable. Si considerés nostre
estat, et nous vous en prions, il li doit souffire, se il a nostres corps
pour prisonniers, et la ville et le chastiel en son conmandement, que
tant a desiré à avoir, et le povre peuple de Calais, il laise partir et
aler lor cemin.» Donc se rafrena un petit mesires Gautiers de Mauni
et considera les humles paroles de mesire Jehan de Viane et dist:
«Certes, mesire Jehan, pour l’onnour de chevalerie et l’amour de
vous, j’en parlerai et prierai si acertes que je porai; mès je sçai bien
que li rois d’Engleterre est moult courchiés sus vous tous, et ne sçai
pas conment on le pora brisier ne amoderer. Vous demorrés chi; je
retournerai tantos et vous ferai response.»
Adonc s’en retourna li dis messires Gautiers de Mauni, et vint
deviers le roi qui l’atendoit devant son hostel. Et là estoient grant
fuisson de signeurs, li contes Derbi, son cousin, le conte d’Arondiel,
le conte de Norhantonne, mesire Renault de Gobehen, mesire
Richart de Stanfort et pluisseur hault baron d’Engleterre, lesquels li
rois avoit tous mandés pour oïr et sçavoir que chil de Calais voloient
dire. Bien supposoit li rois que il se voloient rendre, mais il ne sçavoit
pas la fourme conment; si le desiroit à savoir.
Qant mesires Gautiers de Mauni fu venus jusques à l’ostel dou roi,
il descendi de son palefroi. Tout chil chevalier se ouvrirent à sa
venue et li fissent voie. Il vint devant le roi et l’enclina. Tantos que il
ot fait reverense au roi, li rois li demanda: «Mesire Gautier, que dient
chil de Calais?»—«Très chiers sires, respondi li chevaliers, il se
voellent rendre, et longement et assés sus cel estat je ai parlé à la
chapitainne, mesire Jehan de Viane, et ils à un il vous prient et font
requeste que vous voelliés prendre la ville et le chastiel et tout che
qui dedens est, reservé lors corps, et les laissiés aler lor
voie.»—«Mesire Gautier, respondi li rois, vous savés une partie de
ma volenté en ce cas. Quel cose en avés vous respondu?»—«Très
chiers sires, je le vous dirai, sauve tous jours vostre correction. Il
vous ont tant courechiet de faire morir vos hommes sus mer, et ossi
chi tenu tant longement et fait despendre vostre argent, que dur est
à ce pardonner, ne euls prendre par le parti que ils le voellent
avoir.»—«Mesire Gautier, respondi li rois, vous avés bien parlé, car
ma volenté est telle que tout i morront.»
Donc se retraii un petit mesires Gautiers arrière dou roi, car il
congnissoit assés la manière de li, et regarda sus les barons qui là
estoient et leur fist signe de l’uel tant seullement que il vosissent
aidier à soustenir sa parole, et puis vint devant le roi et dist: «Très
chiers sires et redoubtés, se vous faisiés ce que vous dites, il en
seroit trop grant nouvelle, et vous seroit tourné à trop grant cruaulté,
et nous donriiés, moi et les vostres, trop mauvais exemple ou temps
avenir de nous metre ne enclore en nulle garnison de par vous, car
se vous faisiés ces gens morir, ensi que vous dites, parellement on
feroit de nous.»
Chils exemples et langages amolia grandement le coer dou roi
d’Engleterre, car li plus des barons qui là estoient, l’aidièrent à
soustenir et li dissent: «Chiers sires, messires Gautiers de Mauni
parole de verité et de raison, et nous vous prions que vous le
voelliés croire, et brisier et adoucir un petit la pointe de vostre aïr.» Li
rois d’Engleterre regarda sus ses gens et vei bien que il parloient
tout acertes; si se rafrena et dist: «Biau signeur, je ne voel pas tous
seuls estre à l’encontre de vous. On prendera à raençon les
chevaliers et les esquiers qui dedens Calais sont; et ceuls de la
nation de Calais on fera morir, car bien il l’ont deservi.»
Donc dist mesires Gautiers de Mauni: «Très chiers sires, on
n’aueroit jamais fait: ce seroit trop grans cruaultés à faire morir tant
de peuple. Moult en i a qui n’i ont nulles coupes, quoi que il soient là
enclos. Ouvrés de humelité: prenés la ville et le chastiel, et donnés
tout le demorant congiet. Si prieront pour vous et recorderont ens ès
estragnes contrées, où il iront querre lor cavance, le bien de vous, et
tenront celle grace à ausmonne.»
«Gautier, Gautier, respondi li rois, il ne puet estre ensi. Chil de
Calais ont fait morir tant de mes hommes que il fault que des leurs il
en soient mors aussi. Et pour ce que si acertes vous en parlés et
priiés, aussi il ont un très grant moiien en vous, je m’en passerai
parmi tant que je vous dirai. Vous retournerés là et dirés au
chapitainne que il couvient, pour la plus grant grace que je lor voel
faire, que euls siis honmes bourgois des plus notables de Calais,
nus piés et nus chiefs, en lor lignes draps tant seullement, les hars
ou col, viennent ichi et aportent les clefs de la ville et dou chastiel en
lors mains, et de ceuls je ferai ma volenté; et le demorant des
honmes de la ville, je prenderai à merchi.»—«Chiers sires, respondi
mesires Gautiers de Mauni, tout ce je le ferai volentiers.» Fos 142 et
143.
P. 54, l. 6: crestiaus.—Ms. A 7: carniaux. Fº 158.
P. 54, l. 9: tantost.—Ms. B 6: le conte de Northonne, monseigneur
Gautier de Mauny, monseigneur Renault de Godehen et
monseigneur Thomas de Hollande. Fº 397.
P. 55, l. 10: samblant.—Mss. A 7 et B 4: semblable. Fº 158 vº.
P. 56, l. 4: le.—Ms. A 7: au. Fº 158 vº.
P. 56, l. 5: sagement estoit enlangagiés.—Ms. A 7: sage estoit en
parler et en language. Fº 158 vº.—Ms. B 4: saiges estoit de
langaiges. Fº 139 vº.
P. 57, l. 8 à 11: monsigneur.... moy.—Mss. A 7 et B 4: que la plus
grant grace qu’il pourrait trouver ne avoir en moy. Fº 159.
P. 57, l. 12: six.—Ms. B 6: des plus gros. Fº 400.

§ 312. P. 57, l. 19: A ces parlers.—Ms. d’Amiens: Tant fu allé et


venu que six bourgois de le ville se missent en le volenté dou roy et
li vinrent presenter, tous nus, les hars ou col, les clefs de le ville. Li
roys volloit que tantost et sans delay chil fuissent decollé; mès la
royne d’Engleterre et messirez Gautiers de Mauni en priièrent tant
doucement que li roys leur pardonna son mautalent, et n’eurent nul
mal dou corps. Fº 98.
—Ms. de Rome: Sus cel estat se departi dou roi d’Engleterre
messires Gautiers de Mauni et retourna jusques à Calais et vint as
barrières, là où messires Jehans de Viane, la capitainne, l’atendoit.
Se li recorda toutes les paroles devant dittes, ensi que vous les avés
oï, et dist bien que ce estoit tout ce que il en avoit peut impetrer.
«Messire Gautier, respondi messires Jehans, je vous en croi bien.
Or vous pri je que vous voelliés chi tant demorer que je aie
remoustré tout cel affaire à la conmunauté de la ville, car il m’ont chi
envoiiet; et en euls en tient, ce m’est avis, dou faire et dou laissier.»
Donc respondi li sires de Mauni et dist: «Je le ferai volentiers.»
Lors se departi messires Jehans de Viane des barrières et vint sus
le marchié, et fist sonner la cloce pour assambler toutes manières de
gens en la halle. Au son de la cloce vinrent ils tous, honmes et
fenmes, car moult desiroient à oïr nouvelles, ensi que gens si
astrains de famine que plus ne pooient. Qant il furent tout venu et
assamblé en la place, honmes et fenmes, messires Jehans de Viane
lor remoustra moult doucement les paroles toutes itelles que chi
devant sont dittes et recitées; et leur dist bien que aultrement ne
pooit estre, et euissent sur ce avis et brief consel, car il en couvenoit
faire response. Qant il oïrent ce raport, il conmenchièrent tout et
toutes à criier et à plorer si tenrement et si amerement que il ne fust
si durs coers ou monde, se il les veist et oïst euls demener, qui n’en
euist pité. Et n’orent pour l’eure nul pooir de respondre ne de parler;
et meismement mesires Jehans de Viane en avoit telle pité que il en
larmioit moult tenrement.
Une espace apriès, se leva en piés li plus rices bourgois de la ville
de Calais et de plus grande reconmendation, que on clamoit sire
Ustasse de Saint Pière, et dist devant tous et toutes ensi: «Bonnes
gens, grans pités et grans meschiés seroit de laissier morir un tel
peuple que chi a, par famine ou aultrement, qant on i puet trouver
auqun moiien; et si seroit grande ausmonne et grant grace enviers
Nostre Signeur, qui de tel mesciés les poroit garder et esqiever. Je,
endroit de moi, ai si grande esperance d’avoir grace et pardon
enviers Nostre Signeur, se je muir pour che peuple sauver, que je
voel estre li premiers; et me meterai volentiers en purs ma cemise, à
nu chief et à nu piés, la hart ou col, en la merchi dou gentil roi
d’Engleterre.»
Qant sires Ustasses de Saint Pière ot dit ceste parole, tout honme
le alèrent aourer de pité, et pluisseurs honmes et fenmes se jettèrent
en genouls à ses piés, tendrement plorant. Ce estoit grans pités de
là estre et euls oïr et regarder.
Secondement, uns aultres très honestes bourgois et de grant
afaire, et liquels avoit deus damoiselles à filles, jones, belles et
gratieuses, se leva et dist tout ensi, et que il feroit compagnie en ce
cas à son compère et cousin sire Ustasse de Saint Pière, et se
nonmoit li dis bourgois Jehans d’Aire.
Apriès se leva li tiers bourgois de Calais qui se nonmoit sires
Jaquemes de Wisant, qui moult estoit rices homs de meubles et
d’iretages dedens Calais et au dehors de Calais, et se ofri aler en lor
compagnie; et aussi fist sire Pières de Wisant, son frère. Li
chienqimes fu sire Jehans de Fiennes et li sisimes sires Andrieus
d’Ardre.
Tout chil siis bourgois avoient esté en la ville de Calais li plus rice
et li plus manant, et qui plus avoient d’iretage ens et hors Calais, et
dont la ville par mer et par terre s’estoit le plus estofée; mais pour
pité et pour sauver lors fenmes et lors enfans et le demorant de la
ville, il se offrirent tout de bonne volenté et dissent à lor chapitainne:
«Sire, delivrés vous et nous enmenés deviers le roi d’Engleterre, ou
point et en l’estat que vostres trettiés devise; car nous volons tout
morir se nous sonmes à ce destiné, et prenderons la mort en bon
gré.»
Messires Jehans de Viane avoit si grant pité de ce que il veoit et
ooit, que il ploroit ausi tenrement que donc que il veist tous ses amis
en bière. Toutes fois, pour abregier la besongne, puisque faire le
couvenoit, il les fist desvestir en la halle en purs lors braies et lors
cemisses, nus piés et nus chiefs; et là furent aportées toutes les
clefs des portes et des guicès de la ville de Calais et celles dou
chastiel ensi. Et furent à ces siis honestes bourgois mis les hars ou
col; et en cel estat tout siis il se departirent de la halle et dou
marchiet de Calais, mesire Jehan de Viane qui ploroit moult
tendrement devant euls, et aussi faisoient tout li chevalier et li
esquier qui là estoient, de la grande pité que il avoient. Honmes et
fenmes et enfans honestes de la nation de la ville les sievoient et
crioient et braioient si hault que ce estoit grans pités au considerer.
Li siis bourgois, par avis assés liement, en aloient et avoient petite
esperance de retourner, et pour reconforter le peuple, il disoient:
«Bonnes gens, ne plorés point. Ce que nous faisons, c’est en
istance de bien, et pour sauver le demorant de la ville. Trop mieuls
vault que nous morons, puis que il fault qu’il soit ensi, que toutes les
bonnes gens de la ville soient peri, et Dieus auera merchi de nos
ames.»
Ensi en plours et en cris et en grans angousses de cuers dolereus
les amena mesires Jehans de Viane jusques à la porte et le fist
ouvrir. Et qant ils et li siis bourgois furent dehors, il le fist reclore et
se mist entre les bailles et la porte, et là trouva mesire Gautier de
Mauni qui l’atendoit, et liquels s’apoioit sus les bailles par dedens la
ville de Calais. Avoit et ot, qant on vei issir des portes ces siis
bourgois, et il se retournèrent deviers la ville et les gens et il dissent:
«Adieu, bonnes gens, priiés pour nous», et la porte fu reclose, si très
grande plorrie, brairie et criie des fenmes et enfans et des amis de
ces bonnes gens que grans hisdeurs estoit à l’oïr et considerer; et
meismement messires Gautiers de Mauni en entendi bien la vois et
en ot pité.
Qant mesires Jehans de Viane fu venus jusques à lui, il li dist:
«Mesire Gautier, je vous delivre conme chapitainne de Calais, par le
consentement dou povre peuple d’iceli ville, ces siis bourgois, et
vous jure que ce sont et estoient aujourd’ui li plus honnourable et
notable honme de corps, de cavanche et d’ancesserie de la ditte
ville de Calais, et portent avoecques euls toutes les clefs de la ville
et dou chastiel de Calais. Si vous pri, chiers sires, en nom d’amour
et de gentillèce, que vous voelliés priier pour euls au gentil roi
d’Engleterre, à la fin que il en ait pité et compacion, et que il ne
soient point mort.» Donc respondi messires Gautiers de Mauni et
dist: «Je ne sçai que li rois mon signeur en vodra faire; mais je vous
creance et couvenence que je en ferai mon pooir.»
Adonc fu la barrière ouverte, et passèrent oultre li siis bourgois et
en alèrent en cel estat que je vous di, avoecques mesire Gautier de
Mauni, liquels les amena tout bellement jusques à l’ostel dou roi. Et
messires Jehans de Viane rentra en la ville de Calais par le guichet.
Li rois d’Engleterre estoit à celle heure en la salle de son hostel,
bien acompagniés de contes et de barons, liquel estoient là venu
pour veoir l’ordenance de ceuls de Calais; et meismement la roine i
vint, mais ce ne fu pas si tos. Qant on dist au roi: «Sire, vechi mesire
Gautier de Mauni qui amainne ceuls de Calais,» adonc issi li rois de
son hostel et vint en la place, et tout chil signeur apriès lui, et
encores grant fuisson qui i sourvinrent, pour veoir ceuls de Calais et
conment il finneroient; et la roine d’Engleterre, qui moult ençainte
estoit, sievi le roi son signeur. Evous messire Gautier de Mauni venu
et les bourgois dalés li, qui le sievoient, et descendi de une basse
hagenée que il cevauçoit. En la place toutes gens se ouvrirent à
rencontre de li. Si passèrent oultre messires Gautiers et li siis
bourgois, et s’en vint devant le roi et li dist en langage englois: «Très
chiers sires, vechi la representation de la ville de Calais à vostre
ordenance.» Li rois se taisi tous quois et regarda moult fellement sus
euls, car moult les haioit et tous les habitans de Calais, pour les
grans damages et contraires que dou temps passet li avoient fait.
Chil siis bourgois se missent tantos en genouls devant le roi, et
dissent ensi en joindant lors mains; «Gentils sires et nobles rois,
veés nous chi siis, qui avons esté d’ancesserie bourgois de Calais et
grans marceans par mer et par terre, et vous aportons les clefs de la
ville et dou chastiel de Calais, et les vous rendons à vostre plaisir, et
nous mettons en tel point que vous nous veés en vostre pure
volenté, pour sauver le demorant dou peuple de Calais qui souffert a
moult de grietés. Si voelliés de nous avoir pité et merchi par vostre
haute noblèce.» Certes il ni ot adonc en la place, conte, baron, ne
chevalier, ne vaillant honme qui se peuist astenir de plorer de droite
pité, ne qui peuist parler en grant pièce. Li rois regarda sus euls très
crueusement, car il avoit le coer si dur et si enfellonniiet de grans
courous, que il ne pot parler; et qant il parla, il conmanda en langage
englois que on lor copast les testes tantos. Tout li baron et li
chevalier qui là estoient, en plorant prioient, si acertes que faire
pooient, au roi que il en vosist avoir pité et merchi; mès il n’i voloit
entendre.
Adonc parla li gentils chevaliers mesires Gautiers de Mauni et dist:
«Ha! gentils sires, voelliés rafrener vostre corage. Vous avés le nom
et renonmée de souverainne gentillèce et noblèce. Or ne voelliés
donc faire cose par quoi elle soit noient amenrie, ne que on puist
parler sur vous en nulle cruauté ne vilennie. Se vous n’avés pité de
ces honmes qui sont en vostre merchi, toutes aultres gens diront
que ce sera grans cruaultés, se vous faites morir ces honestes
bourgois, qui de lor propre volenté se sont mis en vostre ordenance
pour les aultres sauver.» Adonc se grigna li rois et dist: «Mauni,
Mauni, soufrés vous. Il ne sera aultrement.» Mesires Gautiers de
Mauni[299].... et n’osa plus parler, car li rois dist moult ireusement:
«On fache venir là cope teste. Chil de Calais ont fait morir tant de
mes honmes que il couvient ceuls morir aussi.»
Adonc fist la noble roine d’Engleterre grande humelité, qui estoit
durement enchainte, et ploroit si tendrement de pité que on ne le
pooit soustenir. La vaillans et bonne dame se jetta en genouls par
devant le roi son signeur et dist: «Ha! très chiers sires, puis que je
apassai par deçà la mer en grant peril, ensi que vous savés, je ne
vous ai requis ne don demandet. Or vous prie je humlement et reqier
en propre don que, pour le Fil à sainte Marie et pour l’amour de mi,
vous voelliés avoir de ces siis honmes merchi.»
Li rois atendi un petit à parler et regarda la bonne dame sa fenme
qui moult estoit enchainte et ploroit devant lui en genouls moult
tenrement. Se li amolia li coers, car envis l’euist courouchiet ens ou
point là où elle estoit; et qant il parla, il dist: «Ha! dame, je amaisse
trop mieuls que vous fuissiés d’autre part que chi. Vous priiés si
acertes que je ne vous ose escondire le don que vous me
demandés; et conment que je le face envis, tenés, je les vous
donne, et en faites vostre plaisir.» La vaillans dame dist:
«Monsigneur, très grant merchis.»
Lors se leva la roine et fist lever les siis bourgois, et lor fist oster
les cevestres d’entours lors cols, et les enmena avoecques lui en
son hostel et les fist revestir et donner à disner et tenir tout aise ce
jour. Et au matin elle fist donner à casqun siis nobles et les fist
conduire hors de l’oost par mesire Sanse d’Aubrecicourt et mesire
Paon de Ruet, si avant que il vorrent, et que il fu avis as deus
chevaliers que il estoient hors dou peril; et au departir il les
conmandèrent à Dieu. Et retournèrent li chevalier en l’oost, et li
bourgois alèrent à Saint Omer. Fº 143 à 144 vº.
P. 57, l. 31: crestiaus.—Mss A 1 à 6, 11 à 14, 15 à 17, 18 à 22:
creneaulx. Fº 168 vº.—Mss. A 8 à 10: creniaux. Fº 149.—Ms. A 7:
carniaux. Fº 159.—Ms. B 3: carneaux. Fº 149.
P. 58, l. 11: response.—Ms. A 29: Lors commencèrent à plorer
moult amerement, à crier et à souspirer, à detordre leurs mains et à
faire maints piteux regrets, toutes manières de gens, et à demener
tel dueil qu’il n’est si dur coer, qui les veist ou ouist, qu’il n’en eust
grant pitié; et mesmement monseigneur Jehan de Vienne en
larmoyoit tendrement. Quand monseigneur Jehan de Vienne,
capitaine de Calais, eut declaré au peuple de Calais ce qu’on povoit
exploitter de grace au roy d’Engleterre, après se leva....
P. 58, l. 30: en pur.—Mss. A 1 à 6: en pour. Fº 169.—Mss. A 15 à
17: en pure. Fº 166 vº.—Ms. B 3: en. Fº 149.
P. 59, l. 8: filles.—Les mss. A 15 à 17 ajoutent: mais que maigres
estoient de faim. Fº 166 vº.
P. 59, l. 10: d’Aire.—Mss. A 8 à 10: d’Arie. Fº 149 vº.—Mss. A 15 à
17: d’Ayres. Fº 166 vº.
P. 59, l. 11: Jakemes.—Mss. A 1 à 14: Jaques. Fº 169.—Mss. A 15
à 17: Pierres. Fº 166 vº.
P. 59, l. 14: Pières.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Jaques.
P. 60, l. 6: d’ancisserie.—Ms. B 3: d’ancienneté. Fº 149.
P. 61, l. 1: fellement.—Mss. A 1 à 6: felonneusement. Fº 169 vº.—
Mss. A 15 à 17: felonnessement. Fº 166 vº.—Ms. B 3: felonnement.
Fº 149 vº.
P. 62, l. 2: grigna.—Mss. A 20 à 29: grigna le roy les dens.
Fº 239 vº.—Mss. A 7, 30 à 33: grigna. Fº 198 vº.—Ms. B 3: se renga.
Fº 150.
P. 62, l. 31: six nobles.—Ms. B 6: quarante cinq estrelins. Fº 406.
P. 62, l. 32: sauveté.—Les mss. A 15 à 17 ajoutent: et s’en alèrent
habiter et demourer en plusieurs villes de Picardie. Fº 166 vº.

§ 313. P. 63, l. 1: Ensi fu.—Ms. d’Amiens: Si envoya li rois


(d’Angleterre) prendre le saisinne de Callais par ses marescaux. Et
furent pris prisonnier tout li chevalier qui là estoient, et envoiiet en
Engleterre. Et li roys et la royne entrèrent en Callais à grant feste. Si
furent bouté hors de Callais touttez mannierrez de gens, hommes,
femmez et enfans; et perdirent tout le leur et leur hiretaiges, et
allèrent demorer là où il peurent. Et le repeupla li roys englèz de
nouvellez gens d’Engleterre. Fº 98.
—Ms. de Rome: Ensi fu la forte ville de Calais assegie par le roi
Edouwart d’Engleterre en l’an de grace Nostre Signeur mil trois cens
quarante siis, environ la Saint Jehan decolasse, ou mois d’aout; et fu
conquise en l’an de grace Nostre Signeur mil trois cens quarante
sept, ou mois de septembre.
Qant li rois d’Engleterre ot fait sa volenté des siis bourgois de
Calais et il les ot donnés à la roine sa fenme, ensi que chi desus est
dit, il appella messire Gautier de Mauni et ses mareschaus le conte
de Warvich et mesire Richart de Stanfort et leur dist: «Signeur,
prenés ces clefs de la ville et dou chastiel de Calais. Si en alés
prendre la saisine et posession, et prenés tous les chevaliers qui là
dedens sont et les metés en prison ou faites leur jurer et fiancier
prison. Il sont gentilhonme, on les recrera bien sus lors fois; et tout le
demorant, saudoiiers et aultres, faites les partir: je les quite.» Chil
doi baron, avoecques mesire Gautier de Mauni, respondirent: «Il
sera fait.»
Si s’en vinrent li doi marescal et mesires Gautiers de Mauni, à
cent hommes et deus cens archiers tant seullement, en la ville de
Calais, et trouvèrent mesire Jehan de Viane, mesire Ernoul
d’Audrehen, mesire Jehan de Surie et les chevaliers, qui les
atendoient à l’entrée de la porte, qui estoit toute close, horsmis le
guicet. Chil chevalier françois requellièrent ces chevaliers
d’Engleterre bellement et lor demandèrent des siis bourgois conment
il avoient finet, et se li rois les avoit pris à merchi. Il respondirent:
«Oïl, à la priière madame la roine d’Engleterre.» De ce furent il tout
resjoï.
Les portes et les bailles de Calais furent ouvertes: les Englois
entrèrent dedens et se saisirent de la ville et dou chastiel. Et furent
mis en prison courtoise mesires Jehans de Viane et tout li chevalier
de France, et toutes aultres gens, honmes, fenmes, enfans, mis
hors. Chil qui passèrent parmi l’ost d’Engleterre, li chevalier englois
et li vaillant honme en avoient pité et lor donnoient à disner, et
encores de l’argent à lor departement; et il s’en aloient, ensi que
gens esgarés, pour querir lors mieuls aillours. Il en i ot aussi auquns
qui passèrent parmi l’ost des Flamens qui gissoient entre Gravelines
et Calais. Aussi les Flamens par pité lor fissent des douçours et des
courtoisies assés. Ensi s’espardirent ces povres gens de Calais,
mais la grignour partie se retraissent à Saint Omer, et orent là
biaucop de recouvrances.
Les marescaus d’Engleterre et mesires Gautiers de Mauni, qui
furent envoiiet de par le roi en la ville de Calais, le fissent toute et
tantos, et le chastiel aussi, netoiier, ordonner et apparillier, ensi que
pour le roi et la roine recevoir. Qant il orent tout ce fait et le chastiel
ordonné pour logier le roi et la roine, et tout li aultre hostel furent
widié et apparilliet pour recevoir les gens dou roi, on le segnefia au
roi. Adonc monta il à ceval et fist monter la roine et leur fil le prince,
les barons et les chevaliers; et cevauchièrent à grant glore deviers
Calais et entrèrent dedens la ville à si grant fuisson de
menestrandies, de tronpes, de tabours, de claronchiaus, de muses
et de canemelles que grant plaisance estoit à considerer et regarder.
Et chevaucièrent ensi jusques au chastiel; et là descendirent li rois,
la roine, li princes, li contes Derbi et li signeur. Les auquns
demorèrent avoecques le roi, qui logiet ou chastiel estoient; et les
aultres se traissent as hostels, lesquels on avoit ordonné pour euls.
Et donna li rois, ce premier jour que il entra en Calais, à disner ens
ou chastiel de Calais, la roine, les dames et les damoiselles, les
contes, les barons et les chevaliers, et non pas de pourveances de
la ville, mais de celles de lor hoost qui lor estoient venues et
venoient encores tous les jours de Flandres et d’Engleterre. Et
devés savoir que, le siège estant devant Calais, il vinrent en l’oost le
roi d’Engleterre moult de biens et de larguèces par mer et par terre
dou pais de Flandres; et euissent eu les Englois des defautes assés,
se les Flamens n’euissent esté. Che jour furent toutes les portes de
Calais ouvertes, et vinrent moult de Flamens veoir l’estat dou roi
d’Engleterre. Et estoient toutes les cambres dou chastiel de Calais,
la salle et les alées encourtinées et parées de draps de haute lice, si
ricement conme as estas dou roi et de la roine apertenoit. Et aussi
estoient les hostels des contes et des barons d’Engleterre, qui se
tenoient en la ville, et perseverèrent ce jour, en grant joie et en grant
reviel.
Le second jour, apriès que li rois d’Engleterre entra en Calais, il
donna à disner ens ou chastiel de Calais tous les plus notables
bourgois de Flandres des conmunautés des bonnes viles, par
laquelle promotion les honmes de Flandres estoient là venu servir le
roi. Et fu li disners biaus et grans et bien estofés; et au congiet
prendre au roi, li dis rois les remercia grandement dou service que
fait li avoient. Et retournèrent les Flamens en lor hoost, et à
l’endemain il se departirent tout et retournèrent en leurs lieus. Ensi
se portèrent les besongnes de Calais. Et donna li rois d’Engleterre
congiet à toutes manières de gens d’armes et archiers pour
retourner en Engleterre, et ne retint que son fil, le prince de Galles,
et son consel, et sa fenme la roine, dames et damoiselles et lor
estat, et son cousin le conte Derbi.
Et donna li rois as pluisseurs de ses barons des biaus hostels de
Calais, à casqun selonc son estat, pour euls tenir, demorer et logier,
qant il vodroient passer la mer d’Engleterre à Calais. Et furent les
dons, les auquns à hiretage, et les aultres à la volenté dou roi. Et
furent tout li manant en la ville de Calais, au jour que elle fu rendue,
bouté hors. Et ne furent retenu tant seullement que euls trois
anciiens honmes, lesquels savoient les usages et les coustumes de
la ville, entre lesquels il i avoit un prestre pour rasener les
maniemens des hiretages, ensi conme il se portoient. Car ce estoit li
intension dou roi et de son consel que elle seroit redefie et raemplie
de purs Englois, et que on i envoieroit de la chité de Londres douse
bourgois notables, rices honmes et bons marceans, et encores des
chités et bonnes villes d’Engleterre vingt quatre bourgois et
avoecques ces trente siis, fenmes, enfans et toutes lors familles, et
en desous de euls, aultres honmes, ouvriers de tous estas, par quoi
la ville se refourmeroit toute de purs Englois. Et seroit à Calais li
estaples des lainnes d’Engleterre, dou plonc et de l’estain; et se
venroient ces trois marceandises coustumer à Calais, et feraient là
le qai et le havene.
Li rois d’Engleterre, pour toutes ces coses ordonner et mettre à lor
devoir, se tint à Calais sans retourner en Engleterre bien un quartier
de un an, et tant que la roine sa fenme i fu acouchie et ralevée de
une belle fille, laquelle ot nom Margerite, et fu depuis, contesse de
Pennebruq, mais elle morut jone. Le roi d’Engleterre estant à Calais,
tout fu remparet et raparilliet ce qui desemparet estoit. Et furent
envoiiet en Engleterre mesires Jehans de Viane et mesires Ernouls
d’Audrehen et les chevaliers qui dedens Calais estoient au jour que
elle fu rendue, et avant que li rois d’Engleterre se departesist de
Calais. Fos 144 vº et 145.
P. 63, l. 3: decolasse.—Ms. B 6: à l’isue du mois d’auoust. Fº 406.
P. 63, l. 8: femme.—Ms. B 9: il envia ses marisaulx monseigneur
Gautier de Mauny, messire Renault de Gobehen. Fº 406.
P. 63, l. 9: le baron.—Mss. A 1 à 6, 11 à 14, 18 à 33: le conte.
Fº 170 vº.
P. 63, l. 17: partir.—Ms. B 6: en leurs simples draps sans plus.
Fº 406.
P. 63, l. 24: Viane.—Les mss. A omettent: Ernoul d’Audrehen.
P. 63, l. 26: Bauduin.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Baudin. Fº 240.—Mss. A
23 à 33: Jehan. Fº 185.
P. 64, l. 3: hiretages.—Ms. A 29: Quand le peuple de Calais,
hommes, femmes et enfans, eurent vuidé la ville, les troys chevaliers
firent très honnestement ordonner le chastel pour loger le roy et la
royne, puis vindrent sur le marché; et si appareillèrent tous les bons
hostels pour loger les comtes, barons et chevaliers, chascun selon
son estat. Et ainsi fut ordonné pour recevoir en Calais le roy et sa
chevalerie. Quant ce fut fait, le roy monta à cheval et fit monter la
royne sur son chariot, qui fut moult grandement acompagnée de
dames et damoiselles; puis montèrent sur bons destriers, comtes,
barons, chevaliers et escuyers.
P. 64, l. 11: tabours.—Les mss. A 1 à 7, 11 à 14, 18 à 33 ajoutent:
de nacaires. Fº 170 vº.—Les mss. A 8 à 10 ajoutent: de nacaires, de
chalemies. Fº 150 vº.—Les mss. A 15 à 17 ajoutent: de nacaires, de
chalemies, de vielles, cistolles et autres talleraires. Fº 168.—Le ms.
B 3 ajoute: de menestriers, de trompètes, tabourins, chalumelles et
tous autres instrumens qu’on pourrait nommer.—Le ms. B 4 ajoute:
de canemelles. Fº 141.
P. 64, l. 27: Bietremieu de Brues.—Mss. A 1 à 6: Berthelemi de
Bruues. Fº 171.—Ms. A 7: Bertremieu de Breuues. Fº 161.—Mss. A
8 à 10: Berthelemi de Bruhes. Fº 151.—Mss. A 11 à 14, 18, 19:
Berthelemi de Breuues. Fº 159 vº.—Mss. A 15 à 17: Berthelemieu
de Brunes. Fº 168.—Mss. A 20 à 22: Bartholomieu de Bruues.
Fº 240 vº.—Mss. A 23 à 33: Berthelemy de Brunes. Fº 185 vº.—Ms.
B 3: Bartolemy de Bruges. Fº 150 vº.—Ms. B 4: Bertremieu de
Bruhes. Fº 141.
P. 65, l. 7: deffaite.—Ms. B 6: et fist abatre et oster le grant castiel
de bos qui estoit sur les dunes à l’endroit du havre. Fº 407.
P. 65, l. 12: fait.—Ms. B 6: Et demora là à tout grans gens d’armes
par l’espasse de trois sepmaines. Fº 407.
P. 65, l. 13: Viane.—Le ms. A 29 ajoute: monseigneur Jehan de
Surie.
P. 65, l. 15: raençon.—Les mss. A 15 à 17 ajoutent: assez
courtoise. Fº 168.
§ 314. P. 65, l. 16: Or me samble.—Ms. d’Amiens: En celle année
fu acordée une trieuwe entre le roy de France et le roy d’Engleterre,
à durer deus ans, par le pourcach dou cardinal de Boulongne, qui
estoit en Franche. Et retourna li roys d’Engleterre arrière en son
pays, quant il eut bien pourveu le ville de Callais, et la roynne, sa
femme, avoecq lui. Fº 98.
—Ms. de Rome: Or m’est avis que c’est grande imagination de
piteusement penser et osi considerer que chil grant bourgois et ces
nobles bourgoises et lors biaus enfans, qui d’estoc et d’estration
avoient demoret, et lor predicessour, en la ville de Calais, devinrent,
des quels il i avoit grant fuisson, au jour que elle fu rendue. Ce fit
grans pités, qant il lor couvint guerpir lors biaus hostels et lors
hiretages, lors meubles et lors avoirs, car riens n’enportèrent; et si
n’en orent onques restorier ne recouvrier dou roi de France pour qui
il avoient tout perdu. Je m’en passerai de euls briefment à parler: il
fissent au mieuls que il porent, mais la grignour partie de euls se
traist en la ville de Saint Omer.
Encores se tenoit li rois d’Engleterre à Calais, pour entendre le
plus parfaitement as besongnes de la ville, et li rois Phelippes de
France, en la bonne chité d’Amiens. Et estoit dalés lui nouvellement
venus uns siens cousins cardinauls, mesires Guis de Boulongne, en
très grant estat. Et l’avoit papes Clemens, qui resgnoit pour ce
temps, envoiiet d’Avignon en France. Et tenoit chils dis cardinauls
trop grandement biel estat et estofet, et aloit sus les biens de l’Eglise
à plus de deus cens chevaus. Onques sains Pières, ne sains Pols,
ne sains Andrieus n’i alèrent ensi.
Chils cardinauls de Boulongne, à sa bienvenue deviers le roi de
France, quist voie et moiien et amis deviers le roi d’Engleterre
conment il vint à Calais; et lui là venu, il procura tant deviers le dit roi
et son consel le conte Derbi, mesire Renault de Gobehem, mesire
Richart de Stanfort et mesire Gautier de Mauni, que unes trieuves
furent prises entre les deus rois de France et d’Engleterre et de tous
lors ahers et aidans, à durer deus ans par mer et par terre. Et furent
reservet et exceptet en celle trieuve les deus dames de Bretagne, la
fenme à mesire Carle de Blois et la contesse de Montfort; et tinrent
toutdis ces deus dames en Bretagne la guerre li une contre l’autre.

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