The Battle of the Bedrooms: Le Bel Inconnu as a rewriting of Partonopeu de Blois

One of the most significant contributions to our understanding and appreciation of medieval romance in the last two decades has been the focus on the process of rewriting as fundamental to poetic composition.¹ The work of scholars like Douglas Kelly on the influence of Latin authors, taught in the schools, has opened up our view of many twelfth-and thirteenth-century romances, both well known and less so. For example, one of the principal assumptions underlying Penny Eley’s recent study of Partonopeu de Blois is that a culture of rewriting was present even as Old French romance writing emerged as a literary form (Eley 9). As Kelly reminds us in his analysis of the art of medieval romance, “vernacular authors knew that they were attempting something new, both by rewriting in the vernacular and by adapting their art to a new language” (Kelly The Medieval Opus 2–3). This holds especially true for Le Bel Inconnu by Renaut de Bâgé and can be seen in its opening Prologue:

Cele qui m’a en sa baillie, cui ja d’amors sans trecerie m’a doné sens de cançon faire– por li veul un roumant estraire d’un molt biel conte d’aventure. Por celi c’aim outre mesure vos vel l’istoire comencier. En poi d’eure puet Dius aidier; por cho n’en prenc trop grant esmai, mais mostrer vel que faire sai.

(BI 1–10)²

“Roumant” in verse 4 has the sense both of the literary form and of the language in which the poet is writing, and the sense of a challenging enterprise emerges from verse 10, even allowing for a measure of captatio benevolentiae here. Indeed, the entire romance can be seen as a microcosm of the process of composition, constantly rewriting itself as poet, inscribed narrator and audience take it in new narrative directions, culminating in the deliberate non-ending of the work. The two heroines and the rival endings which they imply for Renaut’s story are humorously matched, as Alice Colby-Hall has demonstrated, in the use of a familiar narrative convention, that of the stereotypical portrait of female beauty. Renaut engages in a “portrait contest” between the two ladies in the romance, multiplying the occurrences of this familiar element, awarding “points” sometimes to one lady, sometimes to the other, such that its function in singling out the true heroine is confused. From the score and detail of the portraits, however, it emerges clearly that the victrix is the Pucele as Blancs Mains, Guinglain’s true love, but not his wife.

This “battle of the portraits” may also be seen an example of another kind of rewriting, involving not a familiar generic topos but the rewriting of a specific well-known scene from an earlier romance model. This is the “beauty contest” which occurs at the close of the Three Day Tournament in Partonopeu de Blois (hereafter PB), in which the eponymous hero and the Sultan of Persia are equally matched in the fighting, and the only way to choose who is the winner of the heroine’s hand is to see who is the better looking (PB 10373 ff.).³ In a humorous and definitely eroticised scene, the two men remove their armor and submit to the appraising gaze of the audience, before Partonopeu is declared victorious and finally united with his beloved Melior. Penny Eley and I have argued that this scene represents a subversive doubling of the portrait of the hero at the start of the romance; moreover it also involves a subversive gender reversal, in which the male is subjected to a female gaze, in keeping with the process of undermining the hero’s masculinity seen throughout the romance. Since previous studies have shown that Partonopeu de Blois serves as an intertext for Le Bel Inconnu,⁴ I want to explore the possibility that PB’s undercutting of the portrait motif serves as a model for Renaut’s own play with this topos. In order to support this thesis, I propose...