The Querelle in the Marketplace: Bonaventure Des Periers and the Fishwife's Rhetoric

Bonaventure Des Périers, a French author of the first half of the sixteenth-century, owes most of his critical acclaim to the Lucianic dialogues entitled Cymbalum Mundi, generally attributed to him. Critics from the sixteenth century onward have found in these cryptic dialogues evidence of many, mutually exclusive, but always sophisticated theological posturings. Even those who accept the common authorship of the Cymbalum Mundi and a collection of tales, Nouvelles Récréations et Joyeux Devis, fail to perceive anything as innovative or unsettling in the latter work. Except for a few critics who have written on the narrative and linguistic aspects of the tales, contemporary readers have dismissed them as belonging to a frivolous genre whose only use to scholars lies in their historical documentation of everyday life. In focusing on one tale from the collection, I hope to suggest that the interest in the tales lies elsewhere, in Des Périers's subtle explorations of literary language, rhetoric, and gendered discourse.

At first glance, tale 63 of the Nouvelles Récréations et Joyeux Devis seems to consist simply of an amusing arrangement of commonplace elements from the nouvelle genre: a female character demonstrates a vulgar gift of the gab that reminds the reader of the uncontrollable temper and sharp tongue commonly associated with women, while the pedantic schoolmaster is humiliated for his inappropriate use of language. In fact, Des Périers's manipulation of these narrative conventions partakes in serious contemporary debates on rhetoric while also transforming the stock character of the Parisian tradeswoman in some startling ways.

The plot is as follows: on the Petit Pont in Paris, a female herring-seller insults a student who haggles with her over her prices. Hoping to avenge his insulted pride, the student threatens to call his schoolmaster to his aid. The fishmonger is undaunted and invites them both to return together. Told of her challenge, the schoolmaster selects a linguistic weapon, what the narrator ironically labels "de belles et gentilles injures."¹ Although confident that his eloquence is capable of defeating that of the fishmonger, he nonetheless prepares himself for the confrontation: consulting his colleagues, composing two lists of derogatory names, memorizing one of them, and then drinking to muster up the necessary courage. He does not assume that his gender or his education ensure the supremacy of his discourse. The fishmonger and the schoolmaster indeed prove worthy opponents for each other, until the scholar begins to run short of injurious epithets. To keep the battle of tongues going, he is forced to rely on a last recourse, the list of more erudite insults with which he is less familiar than with his collegial jargon. In the hopes of confounding the fishmonger, he throws out several derogatory names at once, but she does not weaken under the attack of this pseudo-literary discourse. First she refuses to recognize its authority, disqualifying it instead as inappropriate for the setting of their duel and then reproaches him for his unfamiliarity with this unmemorized list of insults. Finally, the schoolmaster must beat a hasty retreat to the Collège de Montaigu. The narrator postulates that even with several dictionaries, manuals, and a treasury of curses, the pedant would not have been able to defeat this female devil of a fishmonger.

Tale 63 does not have any obvious literary models and has therefore been considered even more "realistic" by critics than other tales in the collection. Despite his careful research on the sources and analogues of the Nouvelles Récréations et Joyeux Devis tales, James Woodrow Hassell Jr., too, lets himself fantasize about the source of inspiration for this particular story: "Perhaps Des Périers had actually bargained on the Petit Pont for a fish; at any rate, he must surely have watched with interest and amusement the haggling which went on there."² The encounter between two such overdetermined figures as a fishwife and a pedant from the Collège de Montaigu cannot, however, simply be confused with a realistic scene of everyday life, witnessed by Des Périers and...