The Compleat Gentleman by Brad Miner

Author:Brad Miner
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Gateway Editions
Published: 2021-05-11T00:00:00+00:00

The Queen of Romance

The French have pretty much always had an international reputation as lovers. This is why the voice of actor Charles Boyer is today mimicked whenever Americans want to make light of the suave and stylish Continental lover, burlesqued even by kids who have never seen a Boyer film. That’s thanks to Pepé le Pew, the amorous skunk of all those Warner Brothers cartoons, whose voice is an imitation of Boyer’s. What’s marvelous about this is the echo of reality—a very distant echo, because the French probably did “invent” romantic love, almost a thousand years ago. And if you had to name one person as the inventor, it would be Eleanor of Aquitaine.

No single individual ever “invents” a powerful emotion, but Eleanor was among those who, with a kind of ferocious élan, encouraged the West to embrace of the idea of romance.

“Romance” is an interesting word. We use it almost exclusively to indicate the feeling of passionate wonder involved in wooing or courting, but originally it meant words, whether written or spoken, in vernacular French, as opposed to legal, literary, or ecclesiastical Latin. It meant the language of the common people—or the subject people, if you happened to be part of the Roman occupying force. One can easily be confused by the similarity between “Rome” and “romance.” The latter word is derived from the Latin Romanicus, essentially the language of the common people of Rome (as distinguished from Latinum), but it comes to us through the Old French, romanz. Many of the tongues of Western Europe (Italian, French, Spanish, Portuguese, and, further east, Romanian) are “Romance languages,” meaning that they were local and vernacular adaptations of spoken Latin.

Historians are divided in their opinions about Eleanor, who lived from 1122 to 1204. Nearly all agree that she was extraordinary, but they disagree about what made her so remarkable. Some declare, for instance, that the principles of chivalry and courtly love coalesced around this great lady. Others maintain that nobility, in the moral sense, was a stranger to her and her houses, and that we moderns who believe the tales of valiant knights and fair ladies are victims of some of the best and earliest press agentry. There is truth, I believe, in both views.

Eleanor’s story is pure prime-time soap opera, with bewildering convolutions of plot and character. The trouble begins with her country, Aquitaine, which at the time was not part of France. It comprised a huge chunk of what is today south-central France and included such vassal states as Gascony, Périgord, Poitou, and Limousin, but in no way did the Aquitanians, the Gascons, and the rest think of themselves as French. When we think of France, we think of the nation we know today, and when we read about the early kings of “France,” from Charles Martel right up through the many Louis, we can’t help imagining them all as sovereign over the geography that is modern France. But in and around the year 1100, “France” was just one among several dominions in the area, and it was neither the largest nor the strongest.

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