argument has taken the form of a tableau vivant instead of a newspaper leader, as it would take with us. Evidently this was the way to create an impression, and it follows that allegory still had a suggestive force which we find it very hard to realize.
The "Burgher of Paris" in his diary is a prosaic man, who takes little trouble to ornament his style. Nevertheless, when he comes to the most horrible events he has to relate, that is to say, to the Burgundian murders in Paris, in June, 1418, he at once rises to allegory. "Then arose the goddess of Discord, who lived in the tower of Evil Counsel, and awoke Wrath, the mad woman, and Covetousness and Rage and Vengeance, and they took up arms of all sorts and cast out Reason, Justice, Remembrance of God and Moderation most shamefully." His narrative of the atrocities committed is entirely composed in the symbolic fashion. "Then Madness the enraged, and Murder and Slaughter killed, cut down, put to death, massacred all they found in the prisons . . . and Covetousness tucked up her skirts into her belt with Rapine, her daughter, and Larceny, her son. . . . Afterwards the aforesaid people went by the guidance of their goddesses, that is to say, Wrath, Covetousness and Vengeance, who led them through all the public prisons of Paris, etc."
Why does the author use allegory here? To give his narrative a more solemn tone than the one he uses for the daily events which he generally notes down in his diary. He feels the necessity of regarding these atrocious events as something more than the crimes of a few individual malefactors; allegory is his way of expressing his sense of tragedy.
It is just when allegory chafes us most that it fully reveals its dominion over the medieval mind. We can bear it more or less in a tableau vivant where conventional figures are draped in a fantastical and unreal apparel. The fifteenth century dresses up its allegorical figures, as well as its saints, in the costume of the time and has the faculty of creating new personages for each thought it wants to express. To tell the moral tale of a giddy young man, who is led to ruin by the life at court, Charles de Rochefort, in L'Abuzé en Court, invents a whole new series of personages, like those of the Rose, and these dim creations, Fol cuidier, Folle bombance (Foolish credulity,
