“A dont, dist de le bouche, du cuer le pensement;
Et je veu et prometh à Dieu omnipotent,
Et à sa douche mére que de beauté resplent,
Qu’il n’est jamais ouvers, pour oré, ne pour vent,
Pour mal, ne pour martire, ne pour encombrement,
Si seray dedans Franche, où il a bonne gent,
Et si aray le fu bouté entièrement
Et serai combatus à grand efforchement
Contre les gens Philype, qui tant a hardement.
… Or, aviegne qu’aviegne, car il n’est autrement.
A donc osta son doit la puchelle au cors gent,
Et li iex clos demeure, si ques virent la gent.”[1]
The literary motif is not without a real foundation. Froissart actually saw English gentlemen who had covered one eye with a piece of cloth, to redeem a pledge to use only one eye, till they should have achieved some deed of bravery in France.
The extreme of savagery is reached in the vow of the queen, which ends the series in The Vow of the Heron. She takes an oath not to give birth to the child of which she is pregnant before the king has taken her to the enemy’s country and to kill herself “with a big steel knife,” if the confinement announces itself too early.
“I shall have lost my soul and the fruit will perish.”
Le Vœu du Héron shows us the literary conception of these vows, the barbarous and primitive character they had in‘the minds of that time. Their magical element betrays itself in the part which the hair and the beard play in them, as in the case of Benedict XIII, imprisoned at Avignon, who made the very archaic vow not to have his beard shaved before he recovered his liberty.
In making a vow, people imposed some privation upon themselves as a spur to the accomplishment of the actions they were pledged to perform. Most frequently the privation concerns food. The first of the knights whom Philippe de Mézières admitted to his Chivalry of the Passion was a Pole, who during
- ↑ Well then, he said by the mouth the thought of the heart; And I vow and I promise to Almighty God, And to his sweet mother of resplendent beauty, That it will never be opened, for storm nor for wind, By evil, nor by torture, nor by hindrance, Until I shall be in France, where there are good people, And until I shall have lighted the fire And I shall have battled with great exertion Against the people of Philip who is so hardy…. Now come what may, for it is not otherwise. Then the gentle girl took away her finger And the eye remained shut, as people saw.
