Chivalry | Page 4

that to them Heaven is a place as actual and
tangible as we consider Alaska or Algiers to be, and that their living is
a conscious journeying toward this actual place. The point is that the

Father is a real father, and not a word spelt with capital letters in the
Church Service; not an abstraction, not a sort of a something vaguely
describable as "the Life Force," but a very famous kinsman, of whom
one is naïvely proud, and whom one is on the way to visit.... The point,
in brief, is that His honor and yours are inextricably blended, and are
both implicated in your behavior on the journey.
We nowadays can just cloudily imagine this viewing of life as a sort of
boarding-school from which one eventually goes home, with an official
report as to progress and deportment: and in retaliation for being
debarred from the comforts of this view, the psychoanalysts have no
doubt invented for it some opprobrious explanation. At all events, this
Chivalry was a pragmatic hypothesis: it "worked," and served society
for a long while, not faultlessly of course, but by creating, like all the
other codes of human conduct which men have yet tried, a tragi-comic
mêlée wherein contended "courtesy and humanity, friendliness,
hardihood, love and friendship, and murder, hate, and virtue, and sin."
3
For the rest, since good wine needs no bush, and an inferior beverage is
not likely to be bettered by arboreal adornment, I elect to piece out my
exordium (however lamely) with "The Printer's Preface." And it runs in
this fashion:
"Here begins the volume called and entitled the Dizain of Queens,
composed and extracted from divers chronicles and other sources of
information, by that extremely venerable person and worshipful man,
Messire Nicolas de Caen, priest and chaplain to the right noble,
glorious and mighty prince in his time, Philippe, Duke of Burgundy, of
Brabant, etc., in the year of the Incarnation of our Lord God a thousand
four hundred and seventy: and imprinted by me, Colard Mansion, at
Bruges, in the year of our said Lord God a thousand four hundred and
seventy-one; at the commandment of the right high, mighty and
virtuous Princess, my redoubted Lady, Isabella of Portugal, by the
grace of God Duchess of Burgundy and Lotharingia, of Brabant and
Limbourg, of Luxembourg and of Gueldres, Countess of Flanders, of
Artois, and of Burgundy, Palatine of Hainault, of Holland, of Zealand

and of Namur, Marquesse of the Holy Empire, and Lady of Frisia, of
Salins and of Mechlin; whom I beseech Almighty God less to increase
than to continue in her virtuous disposition in this world, and after our
poor fleet existence to receive eternally. Amen."

THE PROLOGUE
"_Afin que les entreprises honorables et les nobles aventures et faicts
d'armes soyent noblement enregistrés et conservés, je vais traiter et
raconter et inventer ung galimatias_."
THE DIZAIN OF QUEENS OF THAT NOBLE MAKER IN THE
FRENCH TONGUE, MESSIRE NICOLAS DE CAEN, DEDICATED
TO THE MOST ILLUSTRIOUS ISABELLA OF PORTUGAL, OF
THE HOUSE OF THE INDOMITABLE ALFONSO HENRIQUES,
AND DUCHESS DOWAGER OF BURGUNDY. HERE BEGINS IN
AUSPICIOUS WISE THE PROLOGUE.

The Prologue
A Sa Dame
Inasmuch as it was by your command, illustrious and exalted lady, that
I have gathered together these stories to form the present little book,
you should the less readily suppose I have presumed to dedicate to your
Serenity this trivial offering because of my esteeming it to be not
undeserving of your acceptance. The truth is otherwise: your postulant
approaches not spurred toward you by vainglory, but rather by equity,
and equity's plain need to acknowledge that he who seeks to write of
noble ladies must necessarily implore at outset the patronage of her
who is the light and mainstay of our age. I humbly bring my book to
you as Phidyle approached another and less sacred shrine, farre pio et
saliente mica, and lay before you this my valueless mean tribute not as
appropriate to you but as the best I have to offer.

It is a little book wherein I treat of divers queens and of their
love-business; and with necessitated candor I concede my chosen field
to have been harvested, and scrupulously gleaned, by many writers of
innumerable conditions. Since Dares Phrygius wrote of Queen Heleine,
and Virgil (that shrewd necromancer) of Queen Dido, a preponderating
mass of clerks, in casting about for high and serious matter, have
chosen, as though it were by common instinct, to dilate upon the
amours of royal women. Even in romance we scribblers must contrive
it so that the fair Nicolete shall be discovered in the end to be no less
than the King's daughter of Carthage, and that Sir Doön of Mayence
shall never sink in his love affairs beneath the