"Those Were the Days": The Ubi Sunt Topos in La Vie de Saint Alexis, Yvain, and Le Bel Inconnu

"Those Were the Days": The Ubi Sunt Topos in La Vie de Saint Alexis, Yvain, and Le Bel Inconnu Debora B. Schwartz Arizona State University Medieval romance, as developed and practiced in twelfth-century France, was a genre that privileged inter-textual commentary and exchange. An Old French poem might include elements drawn from a large number of Latin and vernacular sources, which were freely combined, modified, and reworked by the poet. Inter-textual references —indeed, wholesale borrowing and adaptation—were common. The poem was valued not for its originality, but for the skill with which disparate elements were combined into a pleasing and artful whole. Thus, Chrétien de Troyes freely admits that the subject of his first romance is not original: D'Erec, le fil Lac, est Ii contes que devant rois et devant contes depecier et corronpre suelent cil qui de conter vivre vuelent.(E 19-22)' This is the tale of Erec, son of Lac, which those who try to live by storytelling customarily mangle and corrupt before kings and counts.(Carroll 37) His considerable pride in his achievement—he boasts that his poem will be remembered "tant con durra crest'iantez" 'As long as Christendom lasts' (E 25; Carroll 37)—is founded not upon originality , but upon craft, the skill with which he has transformed the disjointed pieces ofhis source into a beautiful and meaningful whole, or bele conjointure.2 Indeed, the very notion of "originality" is at odds with the Romance poet's conception of literature. Texts were understood less as products than as parts of a process of textual transmission and regeneration, linking poet and poem to a collective literary past. The classical auctores taught in the Cathedral schools: it is thus not surprising , then, that the first "romances" were adaptations of Latin works into the French vernacular, or romanz—a word that came to be applied to any French narrative. 27 28Rocky Mountain Review In these mid-twelfth-century adaptations, the connection of Romance to its classical sources was clear and obvious.3 But even as the next generation of poets began turning to non-Latin sources for inspiration, a sense of continuity with the Latin tradition was maintained . Thus, while Marie de France asserts that she deliberately decided against translating from the Latin when she began writing her Lais (ca. 1160), she still emphasizes the essential clerkliness of her writing project.4 She refers to the anciens, Precïens (Priscian), and Ii philesophe in her Prologue, implicitly inviting her readers to approach her vernacular work as seriously as they would a Latin text.5 Marie presents her work as part of a dynamic literary tradition governed by the principle of translatio studii, the transfer of literary legitimacy from the Ancients (Greece and Rome) to the Moderns (twelfth-century France).6 The concepts of translatio studii and its thematic twin, translatio imperii, are explicitly formulated in the Prologue to Cligés, the second extant romance of Chrétien de Troyes (ca. 1176): Par les livres que nos avons les fez des anciens savons et del siegle qui fu jadis. Ce nos ont nostre livre apris qu' an Grèce ot de chevalerie le premier los et de clergie. Puis vint chevalerie a Rome et de la clergie la some, qui or est an France venue. Dex doint qu'ele i soit maintenue et que Ii leus Ii abelisse tant queja mes de France n'isse Tenors qui s'i est arestee.(C 25-37) Through the books we have, we learn of the deeds of ancient peoples and of bygone days. Our books have taught us that chivalry and learning first flourished in Greece; then to Rome came chivalry and the sum of knowledge, which now has come to France. May God grant that they be maintained here and may He be pleased enough with this land that the glory now in France may never leave. (Kibler 123) Translatio imperii, the connection between "modern" (i.e. Arthurian) and classical chevalerie, is illustrated by Chretien's subject matter, the story of the Greco-Arthurian knight Cligés, "un vaslet qui an Grèce fu / del linage le roi Artu" 'a youth who, in...