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9 Domnei
A Comedy of Woman-Worship
By
JAMES BRANCH CABELL
1920
"_En cor gentil domnei per mort no passa_."
TO
SARAH READ McADAMS
IN GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION
"The complication of opinions and ideas, of affections and habits,
which prompted the chevalier to devote himself to the service of a
lady, and by which he strove to prove to her his love, and to merit
hers in return, was expressed, in the language of the Troubadours, by a
single word, by the word _domnei_, a derivation of _domna_, which may
be regarded as an alteration of the Latin _domina_, lady, mistress."
--C. C. FAURIEL,
_History of Provencal Poetry_.
CONTENTS
CHAPTER
A PREFACE
CRITICAL COMMENT
THE ARGUMENT
PART ONE--PERION
I HOW PERION WAS UNMASKED
II HOW THE VICOMTE WAS VERY GAY
III HOW MELICENT WOOED
IV HOW THE BISHOP AIDED PERION
V HOW MELICENT WEDDED
PART TWO--MELICENT
VI HOW MELICENT SOUGHT OVERSEA
VII HOW PERION WAS FREED
VIII HOW DEMETRIOS WAS AMUSED
IX HOW TIME SPED IN HEATHENRY
X HOW DEMETRIOS WOOED
PART THREE--DEMETRIOS
XI HOW TIME SPED WITH PERION
XII HOW DEMETRIOS WAS TAKEN
XIII HOW THEY PRAISED MELICENT
XIV HOW PERION BRAVED THEODORET.
XV HOW PERION FOUGHT
XVI HOW DEMETRIOS MEDITATED.
XVII HOW A MINSTREL CAME
XVIII HOW THEY CRIED QUITS
XIX HOW FLAMBERGE WAS LOST
XX HOW PERION GOT AID
PART FOUR--AHASUERUS
XXI HOW DEMETRIOS HELD HIS CHATTEL
XXII HOW MISERY HELD NACUMERA.
XXIII HOW DEMETRIOS CRIED FAREWELL
XXIV HOW ORESTES RULED
XXV HOW WOMEN TALKED TOGETHER
XXVI HOW MEN ORDERED MATTERS
XXVII HOW AHASUERUS WAS CANDID
XXVIII HOW PERION SAW MELICENT
XXIX HOW A BARGAIN WAS CRIED
XXX HOW MELICENT CONQUERED
THE AFTERWORD
BIBLIOGRAPHY
A Preface
By
Joseph Hergesheimer
It would be absorbing to discover the present feminine attitude toward
the profoundest compliment ever paid women by the heart and mind of men
in league--the worshipping devotion conceived by Plato and elevated to
a living faith in mediaeval France. Through that renaissance of a
sublimated passion _domnei_ was regarded as a throne of alabaster by
the chosen figures of its service: Melicent, at Bellegarde, waiting for
her marriage with King Theodoret, held close an image of Perion made of
substance that time was powerless to destroy; and which, in a life of
singular violence, where blood hung scarlet before men's eyes like a
tapestry, burned in a silver flame untroubled by the fate of her body.
It was, to her, a magic that kept her inviolable, perpetually, in spite
of marauding fingers, a rose in the blanched perfection of its early
flowering.
The clearest possible case for that religion was that it transmuted the
individual subject of its adoration into the deathless splendor of a
Madonna unique and yet divisible in a mirage of earthly loveliness. It
was heaven come to Aquitaine, to the Courts of Love, in shapes of vivid
fragrant beauty, with delectable hair lying gold on white samite worked
in borders of blue petals. It chose not abstractions for its faith, but
the most desirable of all actual--yes, worldly--incentives: the sister,
it might be, of Count Emmerick of Poictesme. And, approaching beatitude
not so much through a symbol of agony as by the fragile grace of a
woman, raising Melicent to the stars, it fused, more completely than in
any other aspiration, the spirit and the flesh.
However, in its contact, its lovers' delight, it was no more than a
slow clasping and unclasping of the hands; the spirit and flesh,
merged, became spiritual; the height of stars was not a figment....
Here, since the conception of _domnei_ has so utterly vanished, the
break between the ages impassable, the sympathy born of understanding
is interrupted. Hardly a woman, to-day, would value a sigh the passion
which turned a man steadfastly away that he might be with her forever
beyond the parched forest of death. Now such emotion is held strictly
to the gains, the accountability, of life's immediate span; women have
left their cloudy magnificence for a footing on earth; but--at least in
warm graceful youth--their dreams are still of a Perion de la Foret.
These, clear-eyed, they disavow; yet their secret desire, the most
Elysian of all hopes, to burn at once with the body and the soul, mocks
what they find.
That vision, dominating Mr. Cabell's pages, the record of his revealed
idealism, brings specially to _Domnei_ a beauty finely escaping the
dusty confusion of any present. It is a book laid in a purity, a
serenity, of space above the vapors, the bigotry and engendered spite,
of dogma and creed. True to yesterday, it will be faithful of
to-morrow; for, in the evolution of humanity, not necessarily the turn
of a wheel upward, certain qualities have remained at the center,
undisturbed. And, of these, none is more fixed than an abstract love.
Different in men than in women, it is, for the former, an instinct, a
need, to serve rather than be served: their desire is for a shining
image superior, at best, to both lust and maternity. This
consciousness, grown so dim that it is scarcely perceptible, yet still
alive, is not extinguished with youth, but lingers hopeless of
satisfaction through the incongruous years of middle age. There is
never a man, gifted to any degree with imagination, but eternally
searches for an ultimate loveliness not disappearing in the circle of
his embrace--the instinctively Platonic gesture toward the only
immortality conceivable in terms of ecstasy.
A truth, now, in very low esteem! With the solidification of society,
of property, the bond of family has been tremendously exalted, the mere
fact of parenthood declared the last sanctity. Together with this,
naturally, the persistent errantry of men, so vulgarly misunderstood,
has become only a reprehensible paradox. The entire shelf of James
Branch Cabell's books, dedicated to an unquenchable masculine idealism,
has, as well, a paradoxical place in an age of material sentimentality.
Compared with the novels of the moment, _Domnei_ is an isolated, a
heroic fragment of a vastly deeper and higher structure. And, of its
many aspects, it is not impossible that the highest, rising over even
its heavenly vision, is the rare, the simple, fortitude of its
statement.
Whatever dissent the philosophy of Perion and Melicent may breed, no
one can fail to admire the steady courage with which it is upheld.
Aside from its special preoccupation, such independence in the face of
ponderable threat, such accepted isolation, has a rare stability in a
world treacherous with mental quicksands and evasions. This is a valor
not drawn from insensibility, but from the sharpest possible
recognition of all the evil and Cyclopean forces in existence, and a
deliberate engagement of them on their own ground. Nothing more, in
that direction, can be asked of Mr. Cabell, of anyone. While about the
story itself, the soul of Melicent, the form and incidental writing, it
is no longer necessary to speak.
The pages have the rich sparkle of a past like stained glass called to
life: the Confraternity of St. Medard presenting their masque of
Hercules; the claret colored walls adorned with gold cinquefoils of
Demetrios' court; his pavilion with porticoes of Andalusian copper;
Theodoret's capital, Megaris, ruddy with bonfires; the free port of
Narenta with its sails spread for the land of pagans; the
lichen-incrusted glade in the Forest of Columbiers; gardens with the
walks sprinkled with crocus and vermilion and powdered mica ... all are
at once real and bright with unreality, rayed with the splendor of an
antiquity built from webs and films of imagined wonder. The past is, at
its moment, the present, and that lost is valueless. Distilled by time,
only an imperishable romantic conception remains; a vision, where it is
significant, animated by the feelings, the men and women, which only,
at heart, are changeless.
They, the surcharged figures of _Domnei_, move vividly through their
stone galleries and closes, in procession, and--a far more difficult
accomplishment--alone. The lute of the Bishop of Montors, playing as he
rides in scarlet, sounds its Provencal refrain; the old man Theodoret,
a king, sits shabbily between a prie-dieu and the tarnished hangings of
his bed; Melusine, with the pale frosty hair of a child, spins the
melancholy of departed passion; Ahasuerus the Jew buys Melicent for a
hundred and two minae and enters her room past midnight for his act of
abnegation. And at the end, looking, perhaps, for a mortal woman,
Perion finds, in a flesh not unscarred by years, the rose beyond
destruction, the high silver flame of immortal happiness.
So much, then, everything in the inner questioning of beings condemned
to a glimpse of remote perfection, as though the sky had opened on a
city of pure bliss, transpires in _Domnei_; while the fact that it is
laid in Poictesme sharpens the thrust of its illusion. It is by that
much the easier of entry; it borders--rather than on the clamor of
mills--on the reaches men explore, leaving' weariness and dejection for
fancy--a geography for lonely sensibilities betrayed by chance into the
blind traps, the issueless barrens, of existence.
JOSEPH HERGESHEIMER.
CRITICAL COMMENT
_And Norman_ Nicolas _at hearte meant
(Pardie!) some subtle occupation
In making of his Tale of Melicent,
That stubbornly desired Perion.
What perils for to rollen up and down,
So long process, so many a sly cautel,
For to obtain a silly damosel!_
--THOMAS UPCLIFFE.
Nicolas de Caen, one of the most eminent of the early French writers of
romance, was born at Caen in Normandy early in the 15th century, and
was living in 1470. Little is known of his life, apart from the fact
that a portion of his youth was spent in England, where he was
connected in some minor capacity with the household of the Queen
Dowager, Joan of Navarre. In later life, from the fact that two of his
works are dedicated to Isabella of Portugal, third wife to Philip the
Good, Duke of Burgundy, it is conjectured that Nicolas was attached to
the court of that prince . . . . Nicolas de Caen was not greatly
esteemed nor highly praised by his contemporaries, or by writers of the
century following, but latterly has received the recognition due to his
unusual qualities of invention and conduct of narrative, together with
his considerable knowledge of men and manners, and occasional
remarkable modernity of thought. His books, therefore, apart from the
interest attached to them as specimens of early French romance, and in
spite of the difficulties and crudities of the unformed language in
which they are written, are still readable, and are rich in instructive
detail concerning the age that gave them birth . . . . Many romances
are attributed to Nicolas de Caen. Modern criticism has selected four
only as undoubtedly his. These are--(1) _Les Aventures d'Adhelmar de
Nointel_, a metrical romance, plainly of youthful composition,
containing some seven thousand verses; (2) _Le Roy Amaury_, well known
to English students in Watson's spirited translation; (3) _Le Roman de
Lusignan_, a re-handling of the Melusina myth, most of which is wholly
lost; (4) _Le Dizain des Reines_, a collection of quasi-historical
_novellino_ interspersed with lyrics. Six other romances are known to
have been written by Nicolas, but these have perished; and he is
credited with the authorship of _Le Cocu Rouge_, included by Hinsauf,
and of several Ovidian translations or imitations still unpublished.
The Satires formerly attributed to him Buelg has shown to be spurious
compositions of 17th century origin.
--E. Noel Codman,
_Handbook of Literary Pioneers._
Nicolas de Caen est un representant agreable, naif, et expressif de cet
age que nous aimons a nous representer de loin comme l'age d'or du bon
vieux temps ... Nicolas croyait a son Roy et a sa Dame, il croyait
surtout a son Dieu. Nicolas sentait que le monde etait seme a chaque
pas d'obscurites et d'embuches, et que l'inconnu etait partout; partout
aussi etait le protecteur invisible et le soutien; a chaque souffle qui
fremissait, Nicolas croyait le sentir comme derriere le rideau. Le ciel
par-dessus ce Nicolas de Caen etait ouvert, peuple en chaque point de
figures vivantes, de patrons attentifs et manifestes, d'une invocation
directe. Le plus intrepide guerrier alors marchait dans un melange
habituel de crainte et de confiance, comme un tout petit enfant. A
cette vue, les esprits les plus emancipes d'aujourd'hui ne sauraient
s'empecher de crier, en temperant leur sourire par le respect: _Sancta
simplicitas!_
--Paul Verville,
_Notice sur la vie de Nicolas de Caen._
THE ARGUMENT
_"Of how, through Woman-Worship, knaves compound
With honoure; Kings reck not of their domaine;
Proud Pontiffs sigh; & War-men world-renownd,
Toe win one Woman, all things else disdaine:
Since Melicent doth in herselfe contayne
All this world's Riches that may farre be found.
"If Saphyres ye desire, her eies are plaine;
If Rubies, loe, hir lips be Rubyes sound;
If Pearles, hir teeth be Pearles, both pure & round;
If Yvorie, her forehead Yvory weene;
If Gold, her locks with finest Gold abound;
If Silver, her faire hands have Silver's sheen.
"Yet that which fayrest is, but Few beholde,
Her Soul adornd with vertues manifold."_
--SIR WILLIAM ALLONBY.
THE ROMANCE OF LUSIGNAN OF
THAT FORGOTTEN MAKER IN THE
FRENCH TONGUE, MESSIRE NICOLAS
DE CAEN. HERE BEGINS THE TALE
WHICH THEY OF POICTESME NARRATE
CONCERNING DAME MELICENT,
THAT WAS DAUGHTER TO
THE GREAT COUNT MANUEL.
PART ONE
PERION
_How Perion, that stalwart was and gay,
Treadeth with sorrow on a holiday,
Since Melicent anon must wed a king:
How in his heart he hath vain love-longing,
For which he putteth life in forfeiture,
And would no longer in such wise endure;
For writhing Perion in Venus' fire
So burneth that he dieth for desire._
1.
_How Perion Was Unmasked_
Perion afterward remembered the two weeks spent at Bellegarde as in
recovery from illness a person might remember some long fever dream
which was all of an intolerable elvish brightness and of incessant
laughter everywhere. They made a deal of him in Count Emmerick's
pleasant home: day by day the outlaw was thrust into relations of mirth
with noblemen, proud ladies, and even with a king; and was all the
while half lightheaded through his singular knowledge as to how
precariously the self-styled Vicomte de Puysange now balanced himself,
as it were, upon a gilded stepping-stone from infamy to oblivion.
Now that King Theodoret had withdrawn his sinister presence, young
Perion spent some seven hours of every day alone, to all intent, with
Dame Melicent. There might be merry people within a stone's throw,
about this recreation or another, but these two seemed to watch
aloofly, as royal persons do the antics of their hired comedians,
without any condescension into open interest. They were together; and
the jostle of earthly happenings might hope, at most, to afford them
matter for incurious comment.
They sat, as Perion thought, for the last time together, part of an
audience before which the Confraternity of St. Medard was enacting a
masque of _The Birth of Hercules_. The Bishop of Montors had returned
to Bellegarde that evening with his brother, Count Gui, and the
pleasure-loving prelate had brought these mirth-makers in his train.
Clad in scarlet, he rode before them playing upon a lute--unclerical
conduct which shocked his preciser brother and surprised nobody.
In such circumstances Perion began to speak with an odd purpose,
because his reason was bedrugged by the beauty and purity of Melicent,
and perhaps a little by the slow and clutching music to whose progress
the chorus of Theban virgins was dancing. When he had made an end of
harsh whispering, Melicent sat for a while in scrupulous appraisement
of the rushes. The music was so sweet it seemed to Perion he must go
mad unless she spoke within the moment.
Then Melicent said:
"You tell me you are not the Vicomte de Puysange. You tell me you are,
instead, the late King Helmas' servitor, suspected of his murder. You
are the fellow that stole the royal jewels--the outlaw for whom half
Christendom is searching--"
Thus Melicent began to speak at last; and still he could not intercept
those huge and tender eyes whose purple made the thought of heaven
comprehensible.
The man replied:
"I am that widely hounded Perion of the Forest. The true vicomte is the
wounded rascal over whose delirium we marvelled only last Tuesday. Yes,
at the door of your home I attacked him, fought him--hah, but fairly,
madame!--and stole his brilliant garments and with them his papers.
Then in my desperate necessity I dared to masquerade. For I know enough
about dancing to estimate that to dance upon air must necessarily prove
to everybody a disgusting performance, but pre-eminently unpleasing to
the main actor. Two weeks of safety till the _Tranchemer_ sailed I
therefore valued at a perhaps preposterous rate. To-night, as I have
said, the ship lies at anchor off Manneville."
Melicent said an odd thing, asking, "Oh, can it be you are a less
despicable person than you are striving to appear!"
"Rather, I am a more unmitigated fool than even I suspected, since when
affairs were in a promising train I have elected to blurt out, of all
things, the naked and distasteful truth. Proclaim it now; and see the
late Vicomte de Puysange lugged out of this hall and after appropriate
torture hanged within the month." And with that Perion laughed.
Thereafter he was silent. As the masque went, Amphitryon had newly
returned from warfare, and was singing under Alcmena's window in the
terms of an aubade, a waking-song. "_Rei glorios, verais lums e
clardatz--" Amphitryon had begun. Dame Melicent heard him through.
And after many ages, as it seemed to Perion, the soft and brilliant and
exquisite mouth was pricked to motion.
"You have affronted, by an incredible imposture and beyond the reach of
mercy, every listener in this hall. You have injured me most deeply of
all persons here. Yet it is to me alone that you confess."
Perion leaned forward. You are to understand that, through the
incurrent necessities of every circumstance, each of them spoke in
whispers, even now. It was curious to note the candid mirth on either
side. Mercury was making his adieux to Alcmena's waiting-woman in the
middle of a jig.
"But you," sneered Perion, "are merciful in all things. Rogue that I
am, I dare to build on this notorious fact. I am snared in a hard
golden trap, I cannot get a guide to Manneville, I cannot even procure
a horse from Count Emmerick's stables without arousing fatal
suspicions; and I must be at Manneville by dawn or else be hanged.
Therefore I dare stake all upon one throw; and you must either save or
hang me with unwashed hands. As surely as God reigns, my future rests
with you. And as I am perfectly aware, you could not live comfortably
with a gnat's death upon your conscience. Eh, am I not a seasoned
rascal?"
"Do not remind me now that you are vile," said Melicent. "Ah, no, not
now!"
"Lackey, impostor, and thief!" he sternly answered. "There you have the
catalogue of all my rightful titles. And besides, it pleases me, for a
reason I cannot entirely fathom, to be unpardonably candid and to fling
my destiny into your lap. To-night, as I have said, the _Tranchemer_
lies off Manneville; keep counsel, get me a horse if you will, and
to-morrow I am embarked for desperate service under the harried Kaiser
of the Greeks, and for throat-cuttings from which I am not likely ever
to return. Speak, and I hang before the month is up."
Dame Melicent looked at him now, and within the moment Perion was
repaid, and bountifully, for every folly and misdeed of his entire
life.
"What harm have I ever done you, Messire de la Foret, that you should
shame me in this fashion? Until to-night I was not unhappy in the
belief I was loved by you. I may say that now without paltering, since
you are not the man I thought some day to love. You are but the rind of
him. And you would force me to cheat justice, to become a hunted
thief's accomplice, or else to murder you!"
"It comes to that, madame."
"Then I must help you preserve your life by any sorry stratagems you
may devise. I shall not hinder you. I will procure you a guide to
Manneville. I will even forgive you all save one offence, since
doubtless heaven made you the foul thing you are." The girl was in a
hot and splendid rage. "For you love me. Women know. You love me. You!"
"Undoubtedly, madame."
"Look into my face! and say what horrid writ of infamy you fancied was
apparent there, that my nails may destroy it."
"I am all base," he answered, "and yet not so profoundly base as you
suppose. Nay, believe me, I had never hoped to win even such scornful
kindness as you might accord your lapdog. I have but dared to peep at
heaven while I might, and only as lost Dives peeped. Ignoble as I am, I
never dreamed to squire an angel down toward the mire and filth which
is henceforward my inevitable kennel."
"The masque is done," said Melicent, "and yet you talk, and talk, and
talk, and mimic truth so cunningly--Well, I will send some trusty
person to you. And now, for God's sake!--nay, for the fiend's love who
is your patron!--let me not ever see you again, Messire de la Foret."
2.
_How the Vicomte Was Very Gay_
There was dancing afterward and a sumptuous supper. The Vicomte de
Puysange was generally accounted that evening the most excellent of
company. He mingled affably with the revellers and found a prosperous
answer for every jest they broke upon the projected marriage of Dame
Melicent and King Theodoret; and meanwhile hugged the reflection that
half the realm was hunting Perion de la Foret in the more customary
haunts of rascality. The springs of Perion's turbulent mirth were that
to-morrow every person in the room would discover how impudently every
person had been tricked, and that Melicent deliberated even now, and
could not but admire, the hunted outlaw's insolence, however much she
loathed its perpetrator; and over this thought in particular Perion
laughed like a madman.
"You are very gay to-night, Messire de Puysange," said the Bishop of
Montors.
This remarkable young man, it is necessary to repeat, had reached
Bellegarde that evening, coming from Brunbelois. It was he (as you have
heard) who had arranged the match with Theodoret. The bishop himself
loved his cousin Melicent; but, now that he was in holy orders and
possession of her had become impossible, he had cannily resolved to
utilise her beauty, as he did everything else, toward his own
preferment.
"Oh, sir," replied Perion, "you who are so fine a poet must surely know
that _gay_ rhymes with _to-day_ as patly as _sorrow_ goes with
_to-morrow_."
"Yet your gay laughter, Messire de Puysange, is after all but breath:
and _breath_ also"--the bishop's sharp eyes fixed Perion's--"has a
hackneyed rhyme."
"Indeed, it is the grim rhyme that rounds off and silences all our
rhyming," Perion assented. "I must laugh, then, without rhyme or
reason."
Still the young prelate talked rather oddly. "But," said he, "you have
an excellent reason, now that you sup so near to heaven." And his
glance at Melicent did not lack pith.
"No, no, I have quite another reason," Perion answered; "it is that
to-morrow I breakfast in hell."
"Well, they tell me the landlord of that place is used to cater to each
according to his merits," the bishop, shrugging, returned.
And Perion thought how true this was when, at the evening's end, he was
alone in his own room. His life was tolerably secure. He trusted
Ahasuerus the Jew to see to it that, about dawn, one of the ship's
boats would touch at Fomor Beach near Manneville, according to their
old agreement. Aboard the _Tranchemer_ the Free Companions awaited
their captain; and the savage land they were bound for was a thought
beyond the reach of a kingdom's lamentable curiosity concerning the
whereabouts of King Helmas' treasure. The worthless life of Perion was
safe.
For worthless, and far less than worthless, life seemed to Perion as he
thought of Melicent and waited for her messenger. He thought of her
beauty and purity and illimitable loving-kindness toward every person
in the world save only Perion of the Forest. He thought of how clean
she was in every thought and deed; of that, above all, he thought, and
he knew that he would never see her any more.
"Oh, but past any doubting," said Perion, "the devil caters to each
according to his merits."
3.
_How Melicent Wooed_
Then Perion knew that vain regret had turned his brain, very certainly,
for it seemed the door had opened and Dame Melicent herself had come,
warily, into the panelled gloomy room. It seemed that Melicent paused
in the convulsive brilliancy of the firelight, and stayed thus with
vaguely troubled eyes like those of a child newly wakened from sleep.
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