The Poet at the Mirror: René d’Anjou and

Authorial Doubling in the “Livre du Cœur

d’Amour épris”
Nicholas Ealy

Before the allegorical dream narrative that comprises most of the Livre du
Cœur d’Amour épris (Book of the Love-Smitten Heart) (1457), René d’Anjou,
Duke of the Angevine territories and King of Sicily, addresses a prose
complaint to his nephew and cousin, Jean de Bourbon. Hopelessly in love
with a woman he calls Sweet Mercy (Douce Merci), who does not appear
to reciprocate the sentiment, René cannot decide whether to blame Fortune,
Love, or his own destiny for the torment that has befallen his forlorn heart:
“pource que l’un des trois si m’a si griefment mis en soulcy et tourment que
ne le sauroye dire, ne lequel au vray prendre pour en baillier la charge ne
lui en donner la coulpe” [for one of the three has so grievously cast me into
affliction and torment, and, truly, I do not know which to charge with the
1
crime or the guilt]. Describing the genesis of this love to Jean, René
explains that one day Fortune brought him unknowingly to an unnamed
beautiful and noble lady, Love shot an arrow from her gaze into his heart,
and now destiny will not allow his memory any repose or respite. In agony
and thinking only of her, he is unable to live fully healed of this amorous
wound and yet at the same time cannot die, held in perpetual limbo
between suffering and death.
The book he has begun, René declares, arises from this conflicted state of
being and that here, in the outpouring of unresolved emotions, he hopes his
addressee will read and offer some consolation to his tortured situation. In
order to explain the initial encounter with Sweet Mercy as if it were a real-life
event, René creates for himself a literary counterpart who exists within and
frames the fantastical landscape of the text. Casting an autobiographical
shadow over the entire work, this alter-ego becomes the catalyst for a quest
that, René hopes, will allow him to explore the cruel desire that has struck
him so unexpectedly. At the mercy of Fortune’s and Love’s allegorized
actions, this “textual René,” who suffers to the point of martyrdom, must
naturally be a perfect double of the author, bearing his name, sharing his best
qualities, and resembling him in every aspect. Since René claims that the
image of the king within the work truly replicates his experiences, scholars
have long commented upon the innate specular qualities of the text. As if a
mirror, he presents the Livre du Cœur as a reflection of his personalized story,
its ensuing dream credible, and its sentiment true: “Et ainsi languissant
18 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

demeure sans garir ne sans pouoir mourir, en faczon telle et estat proprement,
comme par paraboles en ce livret ycy vous pourrez au vray veoir, s’il vous
plaist a le lire” [Thus languishing I remain, neither healing nor capable of
dying, in such a way and state you will be able to see truly and properly
2
through parables in this book, if it pleases you to read it].
With this appeal to “see truly” into the text, the specular power of
René’s writing, in the tradition of the Roman de la Rose, becomes even more
evident as the nocturnal vision properly begins. One night, while his
double remains asleep in bed, his personified heart, separated from the rest
of his body, arises and journeys with Desire toward a longed-for meeting
with Sweet Mercy. Amidst numerous oneiric adventures, Heart undergoes
a series of tests put forth by Fortune and Love, the same figures whose
actions allegorize the violent innamoramento René experiences as he gazes
upon his beloved. First at the Fountain of Fortune and then at the Diamond
Mirror of Love’s abode, Heart must confront images of himself that
highlight both the theme of doubling within the text and the melancholic
nature of his love. These scenes, though, I argue, also serve to obscure the
one-to-one relationship the monarch attempts to establish with his textual
alter-ego and the clarity with which he wishes to convey this double as a
representative of his desire.
Specific studies on authorial imagery in the Livre du Cœur, such as those
by Joël Blanchard and Susanne Rinne, explore the various roles of the
author, yet give little attention to the problems arising from the confusion
3
associated with René and his textual reflection/s. In my reading, René’s
fascination with his double stems from the mistaken identification of extra-
textual author for textual protagonist, a fundamental misrecognition that
continues into Heart’s adventures with his own reflection. I accomplish this
objective through a close analysis of three specific scenes, with corresponding
illustrations from the Vienna and Paris manuscripts of the Livre du Cœur,
4
that significantly reference the trope of the double in the text. These
include (1) the introduction of René’s textual counterpart at the start of the
dream, (2) Heart’s experience with the melancholic waters of the Fountain
of Fortune, and (3) the double’s gaze into the Diamond Mirror at the Castle
of Pleasure. To help me in this endeavor, I use as a point of departure
Claire Nouvet’s work on Ovid’s myth of Narcissus and her analysis
concerning the ways in which the classical tale influences authorial doubling
in the Roman de la Rose. Additionally, Giorgio Agamben’s writing on
phantasmatic love and its connection to the medieval psychophysiology of
vision as well as Simon Gaunt’s scholarship on self-sacrifice in troubadour
lyric will further be shown as essential in my investigation into the authorial
doubling of the Livre du Cœur.
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 19

Doubling and Imagery

In the erotic literature of the Middle Ages, the fountain and mirror typically
evoke the beginning of love as a visual process by which a male lover
becomes enamored with the reflection seen on either of their surfaces. For
instance, in the Roman de la Rose, from which the Livre du Cœur borrows
heavily in both form and content, the God of Love lives near a mirrored
fountain. Here the lover, an oneiric double of the romance’s author, falls
desperately in love with the image of a rosebud duplicated upon the
fountain’s crystalline surface, the very place, he learns, where Narcissus died:
C’est li miroërs perilleus,
ou Narcisus, li orgueilleus
mira sa face et ses ieuz vers,
dont il jut puis morz tout envers. (vv. 1569–72)
[It is the perilous mirror in which proud Narcissus gazed at his
face and his shining eyes; on account of this mirror he afterward
5
lay backwards, dead.]
The effect the mirror has upon Narcissus, which causes him to lie envers
(“backwards”) upon his death, has a direct correlation to the acts of both
writing and authorial doubling. As David Hult argues, the word used to
convey this movement can be separated into its Old French correlative, en
vers, a reading supported by the visual rhyme in the preceding line.
Narcissus’s fall, then, is not solely a descent into the fountain but also one,
6
he purports, en vers: into “poetic verse.” Expounding on this interpretation,
Claire Nouvet links the self-reflection the youth experiences at the perilous
mirror to the doubling of the romance’s author. The writer, like his mythic
predecessor, has created his own alter-ego who exists en vers, in the literary
world of the dream; just “as Narcissus reflects himself in the mirror-image
of the pool so does the lyric poet reflect himself in the persona he inscribes
7
on the surface of his text.”
René presents his doubled likeness within the same narcissistic para-
digm. Existing en vers, this persona appears to be the true literary manifesta-
tion of the monarch’s tormented experiences with love. As evident in the
Roman de la Rose, the primary tool René uses to bridge the textual and
extratextual world is the first-person pronoun which, present from the start
8
of his complaint to Jean, serves to highlight his individualized grief. From a
literary angle, this subjective point of view echoes an entire tradition of
personalized longing inherited from what critics, basing themselves in large
part upon Frederick Goldin’s seminal work on narcissism in fin’amor, have
9
come to refer to as the lyric I of medieval literature. First employed by the
20 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

troubadours as a means of adding a singular voice to the experience

portrayed in their literary output, subsequent writers such as Juan Ruiz,
Guillaume de Lorris, Dante, and René d’Anjou came to adopt the lyric I in
their pseudo-autobiographical texts. Collectively, these authors become for
all intents and purposes the “subject” of their own works, using this lyric I
in order to uncover the relationship between themselves, their writing, and
the love felt for the women of their affections.
At the start of the dream, René continues his tale from this particular
perspective, describing the torment he feels while languishing in bed:
Une nuyt en ce mois passé,
Travaillé, tourmenté, lassé,
Forment pensifz ou lit me mis,
Comme homme las qui a si mis,
Son cueur en la mercy d’Amours
Que ma vie en plains et en plours
La pluspart use en pourchassant
Ung doulx octroy ouquel chassant
Ja piecza si n’a peu souffire
Plus de painë et de martire
Qu’oncques corps d’amant si souffrit. (vv. 1–11)
[One night this month now past I retired to bed, anxious,
tormented, fatigued, and deeply pensive, like a weary man who
has so placed his heart at Love’s mercy my life by plaints and
tears I greatly consume, pursuing a sweet gift, which pursuing,
long hence could not suffice. Never did a lover’s body more
10
sorrow and torment suffer.]
Almost at the point of death, René’s double progresses seamlessly into the
world of dreams where, “without lying,” he states, Love comes into his
bedchamber and removes the heart from his body. Desire, also present in
the room, receives the organ from Love and begins speaking about the
honor to be achieved in rescuing Sweet Mercy, presently held captive by
Danger, Shame, and Fear. The newly personified Heart, as the lyric I testifies,
immediately departs on this adventure to free his beloved.
The authorial doubling present in the opening scene proliferates
quickly, splitting the lyric I into three distinct personae (the narrator,
dreamer, and dreamt I ) who, despite René’s best efforts, cannot all be the
same. Instead, the monarch has created a text that refracts his image the
further the reader gets into the book’s plot. Nouvet, who recognizes this
same phenomenon in the Roman de la Rose, states that:
[T]he protagonist of the dream, the dreamt “I,” is not the “same
person” as the dreamer, first, because he is not a person but an
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 21

image, a disembodied simulacrum, and second, because the image

11
cannot be conceived of as a mimetic reflection of the dreamer.
For René to claim that his textual double and he are one is not only to
reenact this error of the romance, but also the one Narcissus commits at the
fountain. As the adolescent gazes down into the pool, he beholds a
beautifully statuesque composite of starry eyes, flowing hair, and marble
skin that he mistakes for a flesh-and-blood boy. Despite the popular inter-
pretation that Narcissus falls in love with himself, the young man is not,
Ovid makes clear, the same as the image (umbra or “shadow” in the original
Latin) mirrored upon the surface of the fountain’s waters:
credule, quid frustra simulacra fugacia captas?
quod petis, est nusquam; quod amas, avertere, perdes!
ista repercussae, quam cernis, imaginis umbra est. (vv. 432–34)
[Poor misguided boy! Why clutch so vainly (a)t such a brittle
figment? What you hope (t)o lay hold of has no existence. Look
12
away and what you love is nowhere. This is your own shadow.]
Analogous to Narcissus’s error, to see a person within a written and artistic
creation where there is but a literary and painted persona is the
fundamentally unavoidable misrecognition René must undergo if he is to
claim the Livre du Cœur as a manifestation of his personal experiences.
This mistake though is not met with any hint of acknowledgement on
René’s part. In fact, the impetus within the Livre du Cœur is for even more
doubling with the creation of further reflections for the lyric I. The
illustration of the text’s opening scene from folio two of the Vienna
manuscript (Figure 1) beautifully depicts this by showing the moment the
nocturnal vision of René’s textual alter-ego begins. Visited by the god of
Love, the dreamer, prominently displayed behind a red curtain and white
bed sheets, has his left hand propping up his head, the traditional manner
13
of representing the dreaming subject within medieval illuminations. Love,
portrayed as a hunter with large blue-gray wings and golden curls, holds
the sleeper’s disembodied heart out to Desire, who accepts the offering with
outstretched arms. As the central focus of the image, the heart, with its
brilliant crimson hue, embodies the desire felt for Sweet Mercy:
Car mon doloreux cueur s’i frit
Si fort en ardant desirer
Qu’il n’a pouoir de s’empirer
Pour pire avoir sa maladie.
Que voulez vous que je vous dye? (vv. 12–16)
22 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

[For my grieving heart strongly burns in ardent desire(.) It has

no power by which to worsen and suffer its sickness more
14
grievously. What do you wish me to say to you?]
Within these opening verses of the Livre du Cœur, desire thus manifests
itself in two different places, embodied by both the allegorical persona
Desire and the heart containing the dreamer’s fiery passion. This duality of
representations is not only symptomatic of the doubling endemic to the
narrative but also serves as a metaphor for desire itself. Narcissus, for
instance, experiences the same “split” in his longing as he attempts to call
out to and embrace the boy he sees. Believing to witness signs of recogni-
tion from this reflection, he hopes the likeness will confirm and reciprocate
his appeals for love:
spem mihi nescio quam vultu promittis amico,
cumque ego porrexi tibi bracchia, porrigis ultro,
cum risi, adrides; lacrimas quoque saepe notavi
me lacrimante tuas; nutu quoque signa remittis
et, quantum motu formosi suspicor oris,
verba refers aures non pervenientia nostras!
iste ego sum: sensi, nec me mea fallit imago. (vv. 457–63)
[Your face is full of love as your eyes look into my eyes. I see it,
and my hope shakes me. I stretch my arms to you, you stretch
yours as eagerly to me. You laugh when I laugh. I have watched
your tears through my tears. When I tell you my love I see your
lips seeming to tell me yours — though I cannot hear it. You are
15
me. Now I see that. I see through my own reflection.]
Upon realizing that the image is but his reflection, he also sees that the
principles it represents define the nature of his desire. Holding the promise
of a reciprocal acknowledgement, the image reveals that any erotic
fulfillment he might receive must come, not from within him, but rather
from without. The mirrored pool thus doubles the longing he experiences
into both his “self” and his “image,” denying him the role as an integral and
singular source of his own desire. For these reasons, Narcissus becomes
fascinated with his likeness, trying to capture and conform to it at any cost,
even to the point of self-sacrifice, in order to ensure the “oneness” he craves.
The Livre du Cœur, due to this same rationale, exhibits a proliferation of
authorial simulacra; each new double is yet another of René’s attempts to
fulfill his yearning which, within this narcissistic paradigm, is always
divided between the self’s lack of wholeness and the image’s embodiment
16
of desire from beyond the self. Within the logic of the dream, the desire of
René’s dreamt I is split exactly like Narcissus’s, doubled between the
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 23

allegorical figures of Heart, who represents the unfulfilled self, and Desire,
its disembodied counterpart. The two thus travel together, each one a
representation of the lover’s aspirations.
If desire in medieval literature is to be understood, as Erin Labbie
explains, as the uncontrollable libidinal drive that has no specified aim,
something felt but whose object is not completely seen, it is love that attempts
17
to impose “a contract as well as a construct” on such yearning. Nonethe-
less, the divisive nature of desire upsets this supposedly felicitous symbiosis.
Searching for fulfillment with Sweet Mercy, René finds that his longing is
constantly beyond his reach. As evident in the opening illustration of the
dream, Desire willingly accepts Love’s directive to receive — by touch —
and accompany the heart, locus of René’s internal pining. The mutual gaze
though between the two figures, mimicking the innamoramento that took
place as the monarch first saw Sweet Mercy, is less assured. In visual terms
the artist has allegorized the longing from within (Love with the heart)
gazing at the longing from without (Desire). In this rendering though, the
face of Desire, depicted in profile and obscured by darkness, is hidden from
view. This character’s gaze, that longed-for recognition from without, is a
metaphor for the wholeness offered through the beloved’s acknowledgement
that René hopes to achieve in the extratextual world. In a reenactment of
Narcissus’s longing before his reflection, this concealed glance from the
image is the very thing Heart will seek during his adventures in order to
have his desire reciprocatively validated. Meeting his own double in the
representation of a perfected lover, he will attempt to capture this gaze at
the Fountain of Fortune and Diamond Mirror of Love.

Doubling at the Fountain of Fortune

Beginning his adventures with Desire, Heart first comes to a lush meadow
on the edge of a great forest. Here before a beautiful pavilion, he catches
sight of a jasper column displaying an engraved proclamation:
O vous tous, cueurs gentilz et gracïeux
Qui conquerir voulez, pour valoir mieulx,
Du dieu d’Amours et de vo dame aussi
Doulce gracë et eureuse mercy,
N’ayez en vous changement de pensee
Pour delaissier voz premieres amours.
Soiez loyaulx sans varïer tousjours;
Pitié pour vous ne sera ja lassee. (vv. 75–82)
[All you noble and gracious hearts who to increase your merit
seek to win from the god of Love and your lady as well sweet
24 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

grace and happy mercy, have in you no changing thought to

leave aside your first affections. Be loyal and ever unvarying:
18
pity will never fail you.]
This scene of reading, in the form of universal instruction to all lovers,
mimics René’s claim that he has established the text as a reflection of his
own experience in love. Just as the monarch purports to witness his desire
mirrored in the linguistic double of the text, Heart sees within the words on
the column a representation of his own idealized double. This alter-ego, a
steadfast lover who constantly focuses all mental attention upon his beloved,
will eventually achieve his desired recompense.
The language that conflates lover with beloved, forming a beautiful
image of perfected unity, attracts Heart’s attention and sparks his curiosity. In
his first mirror scene of the journey, Heart freezes in contemplation before
these ancient letters while wondering who has carved the column’s message.
It is not until Lady Hope emerges from the pavilion and grasps the bridle of
his horse, thereby symbolically capturing him, that Heart’s concentration is
19
broken. During the ensuing conversation with her, where the knight admits
to having been in profound thought before what he saw and read, he learns
that Love left the words long ago for his vassals. Such a moment of static
contemplation matched by Hope’s entrance not only marks Heart’s fascina-
tion with the image but also reveals the forceful hold it has over him; on a
quest to capture Sweet Mercy’s affection, he finds himself captured by the
20
glorious double representing the very love he seeks. This mirror becomes a
trap like the perilous fountain of Narcissus whose own likeness ensnares him
on the spot. Paralleling the misrecognition of his mythic predecessor, Heart
reads this generic representation of a lover receiving reward from a beloved
as reflective of his personal reality. Finding himself within the same double
bind as René, Heart sees a textual alter-ego that he both mistakes for himself
and believes to hold the promise of his fulfillment.
True to her name, Lady Hope admits that the words on the stone are
intended to comfort those seeking love and give them the will to conquer
all adversity in their quest for erotic fulfillment. Continuously held out as
an attainable “end point” to Heart’s quest, such oneness through love with
Sweet Mercy heightens his conformity to the beautiful image on the
column. Nonetheless, Love’s message also poses a challenge to his loyalty.
Immediately after giving her consolatory interpretation of the engraving,
Hope instructs the knight errant in an itinerary of tests that Love, who does
not care whether his subjects succeed or fail, requires as proof of fidelity.
The first trial, Heart learns, is the Fountain of Fortune, from which he will
drink in spite of the fact, Hope states, that its effect is not the same for all.
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 25

This brief mention shrouds the fountain in an aura of mystery as its

ensuing adventure builds in what is a masterstroke of anticipatory story-
telling. The text’s narrator, slowly revealing the secrets of the fountain,
recounts the episode in three interwoven steps: (1) the initial encounter
with the fountain at night, (2) the ensuing dream it sparks, and (3) the
discovery of its meaning the following morning.
It is nighttime when Desire and Heart, weary after traveling all day
across the Forest of Long Waiting, arrive at a clearing where they see a
great and ominous black marble stone. Discovering a fountain at its base,
they decide to quench their thirst, despite not knowing whether the water is
troubled or clear. Heart, though, after drinking, accidentally spills some
water onto the marble rock, immediately causing thunder, lightning, hail,
and heavy rain to erupt in the starry sky. The intensity of the storm
heightens his melancholia and, while waiting underneath an aspen until the
tempest passes, he reveals the doubts he harbors to his companion. Desire,
who must now console Heart, reminds the young knight of his great
strength, courtesy, and goodness, affirming that he will have fulfillment at
the conclusion of his hardships:
Car si tu seuffres malle nuyt,
Encores auras grant deduyt.
Si pense au bien que recevras
Quant tu Doulce Mercy auras. (vv. 265–68)
[For though you suffer a bad night, you shall yet enjoy great
delight. Think thus of the good you shall receive when you win
21
Sweet Mercy.]
These words mimic in a personalizing manner the universal message of the
jasper stone, further concretizing the image Heart holds of himself. Now
spurred on to action, he declares that he would rather die than appear to
represent anything less than the lofty ideals of the column’s inscription.
Heart’s overwhelming drive to conform to the image stems from what
Giorgio Agamben refers to as the “phantasmatic circle,” the medieval
theory of narcissistic fin’amor based solely upon such fictional shades. These
images or phantasms, in addition to containing the constant promise of
erotic fulfillment, are ever-present, never leaving those who have seen
them. First imprinted on the eye, which acts as an aqueous mirror, they are
then reflected into the seer’s memory. In daydreams or nocturnal visions,
the seer can recall and remember them, thereby increasing his desire for
22
and fidelity to this object of affection. Working in tandem with the brain,
the heart as locus of emotions plays a central role in this process, storing
the likenesses that arrive via the mental qualities of perception, imagination,
26 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

23
and judgment. This tradition is, Agamben claims, “one of [the] most fertile
legacies [of the Middle Ages] in Western culture [in which love is conceived]
as an essentially phantasmatic process, involving both imagery and memory
in an assiduous, tormented circling around an image painted or reflected in
24
the deepest self.”
Heart, smitten with the idealized message of the column, has experienced
this very phantasmatic process; Desire, encouraging its permanence in his
companion’s memory, reminds Heart to think continuously about the reward
he will receive. In a scene where the phantasm thus proves so crucial, it is no
surprise that the knight, upon falling asleep, enters the world of nocturnal
imagery. In this marvelous dream Heart’s horse, led against its will, brings its
rider to a long, narrow, and unsound bridge beneath which flows a river of
blackened, troubled water. Having arrived at the middle of the bridge, Heart’s
oneiric double sees a large threatening bull, “bruyant comme tempeste”
25
[thundering like a tempest], charging toward him with all its might. Hitting
him and his horse with brute force, the bull knocks them both from the
bridge and into the river below where the knight, due to his heavy armor,
immediately begins to drown. A lovely blonde mermaid emerges incredibly
from the depths of the water, holds her arms out, pulls him up, “et par façon
l’embrassa tellement qu’elle l’emporta sain et saulvé au bort en telle maniere
qu’il n’eut mal ne mehaing” [embraced him and bore him safely to shore in
26
such a way he suffered neither pain nor harm].
Although critics have focused on the intertextual, semiotic, and prophetic
nature of the dream, a reassessment of this nocturnal vision is required
within the context of the melancholic love and narcissistic doubling that
27
occurs at the Fountain of Fortune. The commonality of Heart’s dream
and the fountain is their aquatic nature; the water of the river within the
nocturnal vision, “laide, noire et trouble” [foul, black, and troubled], is
strikingly comparable to that of the fountain which, Heart discovers upon
waking the following morning, is “noire, hideuse et malnecte” [black . . . so
28
foul and filthy]. Thinking that he never would have drunk the water had
he seen its dark color the night before, he reads the inscription on the stone
from which the liquid springs:
Droit cy devant soubz ce perron
De marbre noir comme charbon
Sourt la fontaine de Fortune,
Ou il n’y a qu’elle nesune,
Et la fist compasser et faire
Ung grant joyant de faulx affaire
Qui de cest pays cy fut seigneur [. . .]
Ce joyant ycy fut nommé
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 27

Desespoir, par tout renommé.

Femmes et hommes il mengeoit,
Bestial et tout qu’il tenoit;
Et qui bura a la fontaine,
Il en souffrera puis grant paine [. . .]
Par quoy, quant aucun tastera
De ladicte eaue et gictera
L’avance sur ce perron cy,
Tantost sera l’air tout nercy,
Car quelque beau temps que face,
Couvient qu’a coup y se desface. (vv. 303–9, 314–18, 321–26)
[Right here before you, beneath this block of marble black as
coal, flows the Fountain of Fortune, of which it is the only one.
A great giant of false dealings who was lord of this land had it
measured and made (. . .) This giant was named Despair, and
was renowned in all places: Women and men he devoured,
beasts and all he possessed. He who shall drink of this fountain
will then suffer from it great anguish, (. . .) For this reason,
when any shall touch this water and cast it forward here upon
this marble block, thereupon the air shall quite blacken: for
whatever lovely weather prevails, it is fitting that with one blow
29
it be undone.]
The fountain, Heart learns, is the reason for not only the storm but the
heightened despair he experiences as well, its dark waters directing him to
negative thoughts that render unity in love elusive. When Desire awakens,
Heart shows him the inscription and the two, now cognizant of Fortune’s
warning, follow the stream produced by the fountain until it becomes a
hideous river, not unlike that of the dream, flowing past Melancholy’s
house. The connection raised by the Livre du Cœur between these troubled
waters and this allegorical persona is not by chance. As Agamben explains,
melancholy and lovesickness, considered identical ailments in the medical
literature of the Middle Ages, were believed to result from an excess of
30
black bile (melania chole in Greek) within the body. The darkened waters
Heart drinks, this very humor of lovesickness, thus mark the Fountain of
Fortune and the ensuing storm as physical manifestations of melancholy,
31
the violent nature of love, and its resulting mental instability.
Even as the black bile of the fountain causes Heart to focus on the idea
that erotic fulfillment is an impossible wish, it nevertheless has useful
properties for him. In the young knight’s dejected state, these negative
thoughts create a space where union with Sweet Mercy becomes a constant
fixation. Recognizing this occurrence, the text’s narrator states that Heart
changes his mind after reading the fountain’s warning. Had he known the
28 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

danger of its waters the night before, he would have still drunk from them:
“Mais de s’en garder de boire pour doubte de mal ou de paine qu’il lui en
deust advenir, il ne l’eust fait en nulle maniere, car il lui eust esté tourné en
recreandise et mauvaistié” [But to keep himself from drinking for fear of
harm or difficulty that should thereby come upon him he would have in no
32
way done, for that would have turned him towards slothfulness and evil].
The image of oneness in love, even in its effacement, remains ever-present
and firmly rooted in his memory.
Melancholy, as evidenced within the Livre du Cœur, demonstrates its
influence over the ambiguous nature of images, present within memory
while absent in reality. As with the message of the perfected lover from the
jasper column, the Fountain of Fortune offers Heart an enticing double that
ensnares him in its appeal for erotic permanency. Not surprisingly then,
there is a strong impetus to make the image also present in reality, as the
actions of both travelers attest; Desire first concretizes in his comforting
speech union with Sweet Mercy as a definitive eventuality and Heart,
willing to drink the black water, desires to capture the illusory promise of
love’s rewards. Melancholic obsession has the power to collapse the in-
herently ambiguous nature of the image, rendering a disembodied hope
“present” in the world of tangible objects. By making the unreal seem real,
melancholy simultaneously transforms everything the phantasm lacks into
a fictional untruth, eradicating its divisive nature. The problems of narcissistic
33
misrecognition and the double’s elusive gaze thereby vanish.
Because melancholy has this power to transpose reality and fantasy, the
lovesick affliction Heart undergoes to achieve and realize the image is a
welcomed torture. Longing for validation from the disembodied hope and
willing to do anything for the simulacrum, even to the point of death, Heart
finds himself in the same fatal situation as Narcissus. Affirming this at the
beginning of his journey, he “jura ses bons dieux qu’il ne arresteroit en
nesung lieu ferme jucques il eust par prouesse conquis la tresdoulce mercy
de sa tresgente dame, ou senon, sans faulte mourroit en la paine” [swore he
would halt in no place until through courage he had conquered the most
sweet mercy of his very noble lady, or, if not, he would unfailingly die
34
trying]. This perpetual martyrdom not only ensures fidelity to the double
but also serves to guarantee that fulfillment in love ultimately does exist.
Simon Gaunt, in his discussion of suffering in troubadour poetry,
comments upon this phenomenon of self-sacrifice, even to the point of
death, that the lyric I will undergo for love:
The trauma that the logic of sacrifice conceals, then, is the
possibility that the [image] does not have the power the subject
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 29

imagines to confer recognition, and the trauma that the [image]

itself may be lacking. Sacrifice denies this trauma because it
35
presupposes that the [image] does exist, and that it lacks nothing.
The myth of Narcissus dramatically presents this notion of self-sacrifice
for the image when the boy, after realizing that his reflection is an elusive
shade, tears at his own flesh in desperation while crying out for recognition:
cumque suos manibus percusserat ille lacertos [. . .]
ultima vox solitam fuit haec spectantis in undam:
“heu frustra dilecte puer!” (vv. 497, 499–500)
[His last words, as he gazed into the dark pool, “Farewell, you
36
incomparable boy, I have loved you in vain.”]
While not as succinct as Ovid, the Roman de la Rose is nevertheless
remarkable. Approaching to drink, the boy comes to Love’s fountain where
a new deadly craving arises within him once he sees the likeness there:
Sus la fontaine toz adenz
se mist lors por boivre dedenz,
si vit en l’eve clere et nete
son vis, son nés et sa bouchete;
et cil maintenant s’esbahi,
car ses ombres l’avoit traï,
qu’il cuida voair la figure
d’un esfant bel a’ desmesure. (vv. 1479–86)
[Lying flat on his stomach on the fountain, he began to drink
from inside it and saw his face, his nose and mouth, clear and
sharp. Then he was struck with wonder, for these shadows so
deceived him that he saw the face of a child beautiful beyond
37
measure.]
At first “sus la fontaine” [on the fountain], it appears that the boy ends up
“dedanz” [in it], thereby enacting, as Nouvet explains, the “drowning of
38
Narcissus in the pool and more precisely in the image that it reflects.” In
his desire to be one with the image, the boy, quite literally, falls into his
reflection and dies, ensnared in the water.
A similar death in the image appears to be inevitable for Heart’s
somnial double. Led to the water by a wayward horse and blocked by the
tempestuous bull and flimsy bridge, to fall is the only solution. His
plummet into the black waters of the dream, a simulacrum of the Fountain
of Fortune’s bile, mimics Narcissus’s descent into the perilous mirror. In the
dream, though, Heart’s double is unlike his mythic predecessor in two
obvious ways: he does not fall into a lifeless image nor does he drown.
30 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

Instead, just when all seems lost, he lands quite incredibly into the saving
arms of a lovely aquatic woman. It is as if she were destined to arrive there
just for him. To be recognized by a living being who comes up from the
depths of the water — is this not the stark realization of Narcissus’s wish?
Heart’s dream is thus a concretization of the boy’s error, who in both
Ovid’s myth and the Roman de la Rose does not realize at first that what he
sees is an image, mistaking it for a real person who is someone else. Were the
reflection alive, his hope is that it would rise up out of the pool and render
his desire complete with a welcoming embrace. Narcissus’s misrecognition
nonetheless, Nouvet argues, reveals a fundamental truth; the beloved other,
even when another living person, can only reveal her- or himself within the
paradigm of “self” and “image”:
L’amour courtois [. . .] ne s’oppose pas à l’amour narcissique. Il
en développe la possibilité. L’aimée apparaît à la place où le moi
devrait apparaître parce qu’elle en tient lieu et en donne la
glorieuse figure [. . .] On peut aimer dans l’autre l’image de soi,
non tel que l’on est, mais tel que l’on désire être.
[Courtly love (. . .) is not opposed to narcissistic love. It expands
its possibilities. The beloved appears where the self should
appear because it stands in for the self, making of it a glorious
figure (. . .) One can love in the other the image of the self, not
39
as one is, but as one desires to be.]
When Heart’s somnial double falls into the melancholic bile of the black
river, immersed in the very substance that transforms fantasy into truth,
the narcissistic structure of fin’amor allows for the blonde mermaid to rescue
him in the very place where a lifeless simulacrum should signal his demise.
Within the logic of the dream, the near-death experience of this oneiric
double marks sacrifice as a worth-while endeavor and Heart, in his awakened
state, will continue forward in his search for recognition, at any cost, before
the Castle of Pleasure on the Island of Love.

Doubling at the Mirror of Love

Approaching the Castle of Pleasure on foot, Heart, Desire, and Largesse, a

new companion, see above its main gate a Diamond Mirror flanked by two
statues representing Imagination and Fantasy. The mirror, as explained in a
textual accompaniment, will confront all who dare to look in it with a peri-
lous test, potentially revealing an unfavorable image to the beholder and
expose, in a most radical way, his true nature:
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 31

S’en ce mirouër nul se mire

Qui ne soit voir loyal amant,
Le dieu d’Amours si lui fait dire
Qu’il s’en repentira briefment;
Car ceulx la auront dueil et ire
Qui en amours font faulcement,
Et verra l’en entierement
Leur barat la et leurs faulx tours,
Leur tricherie evidenment.
Or s’en garde qui aura paours! (vv. 1853–62)
[If any shall look within this mirror who is truly not a faithful
lover, the god of Love shall make it speak so that he shall soon
repent of it: for they who are unfaithful in love will know
sorrow and anger, and in it shall see all their corruption, false
dealings, and treachery most evidently. Beware of it, he who
40
fears to see this!]
Crossing the castle’s drawbridge, Heart, so transfixed by what he sees, feels
compelled to look yet again at the statues and inscription: “ne se pot tenir le
Cueur de lire les lectres qui dessus le mirouer estoient, et prenoit si tresgrant
plaisir a veoir et regarder les deux belles ymaiges qu’il n’en pouoit oster ses
yeulx” [Heart could not keep from rereading the letters above the mirror,
and took such very great pleasure in seeing and looking upon the two
41
lovely statues he could not take his eyes off them]. The diamond, another
example of the already familiar textual trap set for the victims of love in the
Livre du Cœur, causes Desire to notice that his companion has been ensnared
yet again in this latest incarnation of Narcissus’s fountain.
Even though the mirror is a test of loyalty, it offers a message that
seems ultimately consolatory; capable of disclosing the lover’s perfidy, the
mirror also has the power to transform him into a faithful vassal of Love.
Were he to look within and see only deceit and treason, the viewer, moved
by his own shame, could not help but change. Many critics purport that
Heart has a positive experience before the mirror, something the narrator
seems to confirm when he states that “se y mira tant le Cueur que moult lui
tardoit d’estre dedans le bel chastel et de faire hommaige au dieu d’Amours”
[Heart gazed upon them so long he became impatient to go inside the castle
42
to do homage to the god of Love]. If the jasper pillar and Fountain of
Fortune are any indication, it appears the representation of an already-
perfected lover fascinates Heart as he mirrors the ideal qualities that
encapsulate the impetus of his quest.
Nonetheless, given the emphasis upon both waking and nocturnal
vision throughout the Livre du Cœur, it is curious that the text does not
32 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

allow its audience access to the image Heart sees in the mirror. This silence
proves even more intriguing given that the narrator has attempted to relate
as truthfully as possible the events of this allegorical journey, transmitting
to the best of his abilities an objective portrait of Heart’s unwaveringly
faithful nature and the fantastical landscape about which he moves. The
Castle of Pleasure is a perfect example of such detail. With an eye toward
Love’s overwhelmingly intricate dwelling, the narrator admits that
although impossible to describe in totality, he nevertheless feels compelled
to comment at length on the precious materials and gemstones adorning the
castle. As if of the narrative’s own volition, the story demands at the very
least a partial rendering before returning to the adventure at hand: “Et
combien qu’il n’est langue qui peust fournir a diviser les grans richesses,
merveilles et beaultez du beau chastel, touteffoiz le conte s’entremectra d’en
diviser aucunes choses, non pas toutes, car il ne sauroit, mais partie” [And
though there is no tongue that could relate the castle’s great richness,
wonder, and beauty, the story nevertheless shall endeavor to tell of certain
43
things — not everything, for it could not do so, but in part.]
The importance of vision in this scene begins just before the narrator’s
description of the Castle of Pleasure while Heart, Desire, and Largesse are
still at a distance from Love’s abode. Raising their sights toward the jeweled
fortress, they are immediately struck down, to the point of losing con-
sciousness, by the sun’s rays shining off its walls. The castle, as a structure
capable of reflecting such overwhelming light, serves as a mirror powerfully
dazzling anyone who looks in its direction. Its walls, the narrator states, are
made of crystal, which not only gives them their specular luster but also a
particularly optic quality. Medieval theories of vision, Kenneth Knoespel
demonstrates, link crystals to the crystalline humor, the substance that
44
gives the eye both its aqueous, mirrored appearance and visual capability.
As he points out, the Liber de oculis, known in Europe from the late eleventh
century, makes this connection between the crystalline humor and vision:
“The eye is composed of many different parts. Vision, however, arises from
only one of these parts which is called the crystalline humor [. . .] It is white
45
and shiny so that it may quietly receive a variety of colors.”
The Castle of Pleasure, as a crystal eye reflecting the sun’s gaze upon
the travelers, comes to embody the enlightenment Heart has pursued since
the beginning of the dream. In his analysis of the Vienna manuscript
miniatures for the Livre du Cœur, Jean Arrouye equates this quest for light,
traditional symbol of purity and goodness, to Heart’s search for Sweet
Mercy. Beginning at night in the darkened bedchamber of René’s dreaming
alter-ego, the traveler has gone from discovering the secret of the fountain
at daybreak here to the Castle of Pleasure, where the sun is already well
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 33
46
into the sky. The hope of Sweet Mercy’s recognition, until now out of
reach, finally seems to appear as true in front of the Castle of Pleasure,
striking him in an array of overpowering brilliance.
The light emitted from this crystal mirror though is anything but
enlightening, rendering Heart and his companions blind and temporarily
unable to continue their journey. The scene in fact recalls the opening
complaint to Jean de Bourbon: Love first used an arrow to strike René’s eye,
but the god now uses the sun’s rays on Heart to achieve the same end. In the
illustration for the Fountain of Fortune from folio fifteen of the Vienna
manuscript (Figure 2), Arrouye points out that the sun is inside a dark halo, a
sign, he contends, of the scene’s continuing enchantment, now made
47
permanent by the light that shines everywhere. The artist who, as most critics
believe, worked in tandem with René, has thus shown the sun emitting light
filtered through the same color as the fountain’s marble stone and its waters.
Casting melancholic rays upon Heart’s adventures, the sun consequently
enshrouds all he perceives within an aura of lovesickness. His journey toward
light has also been a journey into the properties of its black humor.
Identical to melancholy in the Livre du Coeur, light also has the ability to
transpose reality and fantasy. As Heart stands in rapt attention before the
jasper column, Fountain of Fortune, and Diamond Mirror, the sun permits
him to see specular likenesses upon their surfaces. He willingly undergoes
this ensnarement because light thus illuminates a brilliant image of oneness
with Sweet Mercy, a fantasy that allows for an illusory reciprocation of
desiring gazes promoting the hope of erotic wholeness. Nonetheless, the
very medium that allows him to see simultaneously blinds him to the truth:
the image, required for the genesis and maintenance of love, is itself
intangible and lifeless. The stone does not reciprocate a gaze of unity in
love because it cannot project any. Heart’s own unsatisfied desirous gaze
can only return to him as incomplete; his doubling of “self” and “image”
will not become one. This is the blinding reality Heart cannot accept, for to
do so means that he would know the goal of his entire quest with all its
torturous ordeals as an impossible hope.
The literal blinding that occurs before the Castle of Pleasure thus
foreshadows the symbolic blinding before the mirror above its portal. The
narrator remains silent about the beautiful albeit illusory image Heart sees
in the Diamond Mirror because he, in his fidelity to this reflected double,
remains oblivious to its nonexistent gaze. Such unavoidable blindness is not
new within the Livre du Cœur but has existed ever since René’s textual
double mistook Heart as the embodiment of his own needs. Evident in the
opening miniature of the Vienna manuscript, the dreamer’s closed eyes, in
addition to marking him as the sleeping monarch, also connote this
34 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

inability to see the truth when confronted with a lacking representation of

desire. In order to maintain the melancholic fantasy, the artist has portrayed
Desire’s embrace, an iteration of both Narcissus’s and the mermaid’s, ready
to receive the heart with open arms. Love though has already removed
René’s heart, placing his “internal longing” outside his body, beyond his
reach, and unalterably alien to him in the face of Desire whose own gaze is
obscured from sight.
While the crystal Castle of Pleasure functions as an eye that blinds
vision, the rock upon which Love’s abode is constructed works simul-
taneously as a mirror that gives insight. Made of emerald, this jewel, as
noted in the Lapidaire en prose, a popular fourteenth-century treatise on
gemstones, is known for its connection to vision:
Esmeraude amende les ieuls et garde la veue d’ampirier. A celui
qui en bonne creance l’esgarde moult est bone esmeraude a
esgarder et a mirer. Noirons en ot un mireor ou il se miroit, et
savoit par la force de ceste pierre ce qu’il voloit enquerre.
[The emerald enriches the eyes and keeps vision from
deteriorating. To him who in good faith looks at it greatly, this is
a good emerald to see and reflect upon. Nero had a mirror of
emeralds where he would look at himself reflected, and by the
48
strength of this stone he knew what he sought to know.]
This gem, the lapidary states, hinders blindness because it is a good stone
[“a mirer”]. From the Latin mirare, meaning “to look attentively,” the word
implies among other things in Old French both recognition and the process
49
of mirroring or reflecting. Referencing Nero, whom Pliny believed to have
a green mirror made of emeralds in which he would watch the likenesses of
fighting gladiators, the Lapidaire makes an obvious link between the mirror,
the emperor’s visual reflection on it, and the knowledge he receives from
50
this speculation. Able to see his own image in the emerald, evidenced here
by the reflexive construction “il se miroit” [he would look at himself
(reflected)], the text professes that he gains understanding about himself
precisely because he sees himself as an image.
The deadly knowledge Narcissus attains before the mirror is precisely this
cognizance of his “self” as a simulacrum. Realizing that he is the embodiment
of the lacking qualities the image’s nonexistent gaze projects, he comes to learn
that the doubling of “self” and “image” is in truth a horrific symbiosis of two
51
images imitating each other in their mutual incompleteness. Heart, hoping
for unity with the image on the Island of Love, must be subjected to the same
fate as his mythic predecessor. Even before he looks into the Diamond
Mirror, the text highlights his status as image with the emergence of a shadow
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 35

that blocks out the blinding light of the sun: “Ilz [. . .] vindrent jucques au pont
dormant, la ou il y avoit bel umbre car le souleil luisoit a l’opposite de la porte,
parquoy il rendoit grant umbre, mais c’estoit ung umbre tresplaisant” [They . . .
came to the fixed bridge where lovely shade was cast, for the sun was shining
against the gate’s other side, whence it cast a great shadow. But it was most
52
pleasing shadow]. The illustration of the Fountain of Fortune mimics this
emphasis upon the shadow, where the artist has depicted in careful detail the
darkened silhouettes cast by the trees, Heart, Desire, and the marble stone
over the black water. Commenting on a similar phenomenon at the fountain
in the Roman de la Rose, Nouvet argues that the shadow appearing before the
lover looks into the mirror, in its original Ovidian context, references both the
umbra Narcissus sees in the fountain and the lover’s “transformation” into an
53
image.
The shadow appears pleasing, though, and the false relief it brings
indicates that Heart will not comprehend his terrible metamorphosis before
the Diamond Mirror. As critics have pointed out, this gemstone, dyamant in
Middle French, introduces a play on words into the scene before the lover
ever looks within the mirror; able to distinguish between the loyal and
disloyal disciple, they argue, it reveals the dy-amant, or dual lover (faithful /
54
unfaithful) in its reflection. The Diamond Mirror though more radically
exposes, not the dual lover, but the doubled lover. This is the true dy-amant,
split between the lifeless image in the mirror and the lacking image of the
“self” that it defines. The narrator has constructed the entire scene around
this very doubling, with the dual mirrors of crystal and emerald along with
the shade appearing before the castle. Even the statues of Fantasy and
Imagination, always referred to as “deux ymages” [two images], expose
what Heart will witness in the deadly truth of the Diamond Mirror; the
very notion of an autonomous, complete and fulfilled “self” capable of
directing and controlling its desire is an imaginary fantasy reflected from
another imaginary fantasy.
The scene, pictured on folio 103 of the Paris manuscript of the Livre du
Cœur (Figure 3), depicts this very doubling before the Diamond Mirror. In
the bottom right corner of the image, the travelers are pictured from afar as
they approach the Castle of Pleasure. While Desire and Largesse look ahead,
only Heart looks up to the statues, mirror, and inscription. The three are
present again directly before the portal as the knight gazes above for a second
time. His gaze though, obstructed by the helmet, connotes the blindness he
experiences during this horrific metamorphosis. The mirror and the two
renderings of Heart, all along the same trajectory within the illustration, form
a visual representation of the doubling he undergoes, making him the dy-
amant of the scene. Nonetheless, Desire and Largesse are not immune from
36 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

the mirror’s inescapably terrifying power. The diamond’s invisible strength,

portrayed as visible rays around the castle door, blinds them to its truth as
the mirror reaches out and transforms them as well into dy-amants.
Symbolically cast upon immovable stones such as jasper and marble in
the Livre du Cœur, the image and its effect on Heart are fixed and permanent.
The diamond, strongest of the gems, most perfectly reveals the reflection’s
mortifying stability in a demand for faithfulness. The warning above the
castle’s portal is stern because to be an unfaithful lover is to know that erotic
fulfillment is illusory, something which would be, in essence, not to love at all;
“unfaithful lover” is oxymoronic. True to its name, the diamond, from the
55
Greek adamas, is unalterable, unbreakable, untamable, and unconquerable.
One must love and conform in blind submission to the phantasm; fidelity to
Love and fidelity to the image are synonymous. As a mirror, the diamond
transmits its properties onto Heart, transforming him forevermore into an
unalterable simulacrum. Nevertheless, the mirror above the portal is not the
only diamond here. While Heart and his companions climb the emerald
toward the castle, they encounter myriads of diamonds scattered throughout
the crevasses of this hill. Stronger than the emerald, the diamonds obstruct the
truth this green stone attempts to transmit. The dy-amant is thus everywhere
and the self-as-image is hopelessly and forevermore fractured beyond repair,
proliferating endlessly throughout the dream’s landscape.
This exponential doubling at the Castle of Pleasure remains paradoxical,
as the very imagery that erotically charges everything around Heart simul-
taneously negates all hope of his fulfillment. Only existing because of love
for the image, it is this very love that destroys him. As the Diamond Mirror
demands, an unfaithful lover is not possible, but then neither is a faithful
one. When Heart tries to rescue Sweet Mercy, he simply receives a dis-
appointing kiss before Refusal attacks, punishing him for having attempted
to possess an intangible fantasy. After a violent and bloody fight, Lady Pity
finds Heart, fallen and mortally wounded. In order to preserve him from
prying eyes, she takes him to the shade of a nearby bush. His shadowy
double, present even here, reminds him that to love an image is to exist
only within the realm of the phantasm, outside of which there is no satisfac-
tion. Even in death the shadow of love is manifest; fidelity to the image
cannot be swayed.
This closing fall on the battlefield echoes Heart’s previous falls of the
text. As Nouvet purports, Narcissus’s descent into the fountain of the
Roman de la Rose signals the collapse of the self-as-image into the image,
56
where there remains no distinction between the two. The fall into the
black waters below the bridge of the dream and the fall before the Castle of
Pleasure in the blinding sun mark this collapse. The mermaid appears true
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 37

as she embraces the falling knight, but she is simply a faceless simulacrum
in a dream, her gaze never mentioned and her “reality” entombed by
fiction. Similarly, the light that renders Heart senseless is a representation of
the sun’s rays rebounding off the crystalline walls of the castle. Both
episodes mark the unavoidable sightlessness the lover experiences before
the phantasm that blinds him to his own vision.
The Livre du Cœur exists solely due to this lovesick transposition of seen
and unseen, real and unreal. As a microcosm of the entire text, the
manuscript illumination for the Fountain of Fortune perfectly demonstrates
this line of reasoning. The sun, bisecting the miniature, casts its blackened
rays down upon the entire landscape. On the right, Heart, blind to the
fictional reality of the image, stands before the stone, reads its inscription
and believes the words to be true. Desire, asleep with closed eyes on the
left, embodies the lacking gaze of the image that must be ignored in order
to realize the fiction of unity in love. René’s attempt through writing to
solve the paradox such melancholic doubling presents transforms the text
into an unbreakable phantasmatic cycle, where the imagery of its language
only serves to reinforce its already refractive and traumatizing effects. René,
like Heart, must become part of this “endless loop” in order to experience
an autobiographical reality where there is but a fictional allegory. His
appeal at the start of the text to “see truly” is now completely called into
question, as one must either remain blind to reality or witness to an
actualized falsehood.
As René claims to see his “self” in the face of this paradox, the text
responds by transforming him into a simulacrum that reflects its lacking
principles and then effaces him from its surface. The lyric I used to express
his personalized desire, already itself an unoriginal iteration from troubadour
poetry, is also the most anonymous of pronouns. Anyone, including the
reader, can and must claim this universalizing desire. The reading I though
cannot escape its eradicating consequences. Falling into the lyric I of the
Livre du Cœur, the reading I unavoidably commits the same error of mis-
recognition as the monarch. Like Heart, the audience becomes a dy-amant,
hopelessly divided by love.
If we are not aware of this, the text reminds us. In his description of the
Castle of Pleasure, the narrator states that: “Pour ce n’estoit pas merveille, a
la façon que le conte vous a divisé, c’il rendoit grant lueur quant le souleil
luisoit sus, combien que pas ne vous a divisé la moictié de la beaulté du
beau chastel” [It is therefore no wonder it so greatly glowed when the sun
shone upon it, as the story (h)as told you, though it has not told you half
57
the castle’s beauty]. To read the story with ourselves in the place of the
lyric I is to accept its hopeful message that erotic fulfillment is possible, and
38 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

this “le conte vous a divisé” [the story has told you]. Nonetheless, this
initial reading is not the entire message. The story can only relate half the
beauty of the castle because its other unseen half is terrifying. The attrac-
tive nature of the story and its illustrations, as that of the castle and the
image, blinds us to their horror. Like the Diamond Mirror, the text not
only refracts images but meaning as well, doubling the phrase which must
also be read as “the story has divided you.” In the Roman de la Rose, Narcissus
is envers, backwards, because he is dead in the face of the phantasm. The
initial doubling that occurs with René’s mistaken reflection en vers, in the
world of the text, coincides with his erasure. The reading I meets an
identically unavoidable fatal doubling before the enticing story. This has
already occurred and, in the mirror of the Livre du Cœur d’Amour épris, we find
ourselves inevitably falling toward our own double, becoming like it a
disembodied simulacrum with no hope of fulfillment.
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 39

Figure 1: Love delivers King René’s heart to Desire. Codex Vindobonensis

2597, folio 2. Vienna: Österreischische Nationalbibliothek.
40 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

Figure 2: Heart reads the engraved inscription on the Fountain of Fortune.

Codex Vindobonensis 2597, folio 15. Vienna: Österreischische National-
bibliothek.
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 41

Figure 3: Before the Castle of Pleasure. Ms. fr. 24399, folio 103. Paris:
Bibliothèque Nationale de France.
42 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)

Notes
1
René d’Anjou, Le Livre du Cœur d’Amour épris, ed. Florence Bouchet (Paris: Librairie
Générale Française, 2003), 86. All quotations from the Livre du Cœur d’Amour épris
are taken from this edition, cited by page and verse if applicable. René of Anjou,
The Book of the Love-Smitten Heart, ed. and trans. Stephanie Viereck Gibbs and
Kathryn Karczenska (New York: Routledge, 2001), 3. All English translations from
the Livre du Cœur d’Amour épris are taken from this edition, omitting line breaks if
applicable, and cited by page.
2
Cœur, 86. Heart, 3.
3
For previous scholarship on authorial imagery within the Livre du Cœur, see: Joël
Blanchard, “L’Effet autobiographique dans la tradition: Le Livre du Cuer d’Amours
Espris de René d’Anjou,” in Courtly Literature: Culture and Context, ed. Keith Busby and
Erik Kooper (Amsterdam-Philadelphia: John Benjamins Publishing Company, 1990),
11–21; Susanne Rinne, “René d’Anjou and his Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris: The Role
of Author, Narrator, and Protagonist,” Fifteenth-Century Studies 12 (1987): 145–63.
4
The Livre du Cœur d’Amour épris exists in seven manuscripts, three of which contain
miniatures. The Vienna manuscript (Österreischische Nationalbibliothek, Cod.
Vind. 2597), an unfinished codex housed in the Austrian National Library, has 127
folios measuring 290 x 207 mm, dates from approximately 1460, and contains
sixteen framed miniatures in its first fifty-six pages. Beautifully decorated most
likely by Barthélemy Van Eyck (also known as the Heart Master), each miniature
is situated within a blue and gold frame, surrounded by accompanying text as well
as ornate and intricate floral border decorations. Probably the oldest surviving
illustrated version of the Livre du Cœur, the Vienna manuscript is most likely the
source for the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris manuscript 24399, which has 137
folios measuring 310 x 215 mm. This manuscript contains seventy miniatures, the
last twelve of which complete the unfinished miniatures of the Vienna manuscript.
The third illustrated Livre du Cœur codex, the Bibliothèque Nationale de Paris
manuscript 1509, containing twenty-four miniatures, will not be considered in this
project. All measurements for the Vienna and Paris manuscripts of the Livre du
Cœur come from: Shira Schwam-Baird, “Text and Image in Le Mortifiement de Vaine
Plaisance and Le Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris by René d’Anjou: Toward a Semiotics
of Medieval Manuscript Illumination” (Ph.D. diss., Tulane University, 1994).
5
Guillaume de Lorris and Jean de Meun, Le Roman de la Rose, vol. 1, ed. Félix Lecoy
(Paris: Librairie Honoré Champion, 1968), 49. All quotations from the Roman de la
Rose are taken from this edition, cited by page and verse. Guillaume de Lorris and
Jean de Meun, The Romance of the Rose, trans. Charles Dahlberg (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971), 52 (translation modified). All English transla-
tions from the Roman de la Rose are taken from this edition, cited by page.
6
David F. Hult, Self-Fulfilling Prophecies: Readership and Authority in the First “Roman de
la Rose” (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986), 297.
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 43
7
Claire Nouvet, “A Reversing Mirror: Guillaume de Lorris’ Romance of the Rose,”
189–205 in Translatio Studii, ed. Renate Blumenfeld-Kosinski et al. (Amsterdam:
Rodopi, 2000), 194.
8
René appropriates the pronoun “je” for himself in the opening sentence of the
complaint and continues to use it until the narrator takes over just after the dream
begins.
9
For an in-depth discussion concerning the “I” of lyric poetry, see chapter two of:
Frederick Goldin, The Mirror of Narcissus in the Courtly Love Lyric (Ithaca: Cornell
University Press, 1967).
10
Cœur, 88. Heart, 5.
11
Nouvet, “Reversing Mirror,” 190.
12
Ovid, Metamorphoses, vol. 1, ed. E. Capps et al., trans. Frank Justus Miller
(Cambridge: University of Harvard Press, 1916), 154. All quotations from
Metamorphoses are taken from this edition, cited by verse and page. Also: Ovid, Tales
from Ovid, trans. Ted Hughes (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1997), 74. All
English translations from Metamorphoses are taken from this edition, omitting line
breaks, and cited by page.
13
François Garnier, Le Langage de l’image au Moyen Age: signification et symbolique (Paris:
Léopard d’or, 1982), 117.
14
Cœur, 88. Heart, 5.
15
Metamorphoses, 156. Ovid, 76.
16
My reading of the Narcissus myth here is influenced by Claire Nouvet’s
discussion of “iste ego sum.” See Enfances narcisse (Paris: Galilée, 2009), 104–5.
17
Erin Felicia Labbie, Lacan’s Medievalism (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 2006), 128.
18
Cœur, 100. Heart, 11 (translation modified).
19
Bouchet explains that to take the bridle of one’s horse is a symbolic gesture of
entrapment. See: note to Cœur, 103.
20
Bouchet points out that René takes a cue here from Chrétien de Troyes’s Conte du
Graal where Perceval is similarly enraptured before an image composed of blood
and snow. In turn, Michelle Freeman demonstrates how Chrétien borrows heavily
from Ovid’s myth of Narcissus in both vocabulary and imagery in his composition
of this scene. See: Bouchet, note to Cœur, 103; Michelle Freeman, “Problems in
Romance Composition: Ovid, Chrétien de Troyes, and the Romance of the Rose,”
Romance Philology 30 (1976): 158–68.
21
Cœur, 124. Heart, 27.
22
Giorgio Agamben, Stanzas: Word and Phantasm in Western Culture, trans. Ronald L.
Martinez (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 82.
23
Mary Frances Wack, Lovesickness in the Middle Ages: The Viaticum and its Commentaries
(Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1990), 194.
24
Agamben, Stanzas, 81.
44 Fifteenth-Century Studies 37 (2012)
25
Cœur, 130. Heart, 31.
26
Ibid., Ibid.
27
For a discussion of the dream within these contexts, see: Sally Tartline Carden,
“‘Forment pensifz ou lit me mis’: Le Songe dans le Livre du Cuer d’Amours espris,”
Lettres Romanes 49 (1995): 21–36; Monty R. Laycox, An Intertextual Study of the “Livre
du cuer d’amours espris” by Fifteenth-Century French Author René d’Anjou (Lewiston, N.Y.:
The Edwin Mellen Press, 2007), 113–29.
28
Cœur, 128–30. Heart, 31.
29
Ibid., 131–32. Ibid., 31–33.
30
For an in-depth discussion of melancholy and its relation to the phantasm, see
chapters two through five of Agamben, Stanzas, 11–28.
31
As numerous critics have pointed out, such a storm-inducing stone immediately
evokes the Fountain of Brocéliande from Chrétien de Troyes’s Chevalier au lion.
Marie Luce Chénerie points out that this fountain, while introducing a mythical
component to Yvain’s adventures, also serves as a mirror referencing absence and
melancholy. For more on this, see her article: “Le motif de la fontaine dans les
e e
romans arthuriens en vers des XII et XIII siècles,” 99–104 in Mélanges de langue et
littérature françaises du Moyen Age et de la Renaissance, ed. Charles Foulon (Rennes:
Université de Haute-Bretagne, 1980).
32
Cœur, 132–34. Heart, 33.
33
See note 30 above.
34
Cœur, 98. Heart, 9. In the French text, “[f.4]” is listed after the wording “jura ses
bons.” This references the beginning of a new folio in the manuscript.
35
Simon Gaunt, Martyrs to Love: Love and Death in Medieval French and Occitan Courtly
Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 30. I have taken the liberty of
changing “Other” to “image” in the citation as a means of maintaining lexical
consistency throughout my argument. Within the psychoanalytic framework Gaunt
uses, the narcissistic image and Lacanian Other are one and the same. He states:
“[F]or Lacan, love is always Narcissistic in that the subject’s desire is directed
towards an acknowledgement of himself in the love of the Other” (28).
36
Metamorphoses, 158. Ovid, 77.
37
Roman, 46. Romance, 50 (translation modified).
38
Nouvet, “Reversing Mirror,” 194.
39
Nouvet, Enfances, 144 (translation mine).
40
Cœur, 400–2. Heart, 201 (translation modified).
41
Ibid., 402. Ibid., 201.
42
Ibid., 404. Ibid., 203.
43
Ibid., 394. Ibid., 197.
44
Kenneth J. Knoespel, Narcissus and the Invention of Personal History (New York-
London: Garland Publishing Inc., 1985), 86.
45
Ibid., Op. Cit., 86.
 Ealy: René d’Anjou and Authorial Doubling 45
46
Jean Arrouye, “Le cœur et son paysage,” 27–42 in Le “Cuer” au moyen âge: Réalité et
Sénéfiance, ed. Margaret Bertrand (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1991),
36.
47
Ibid., 38.
48
Les lapidaires français du moyen âge des XII , XIII et XIV siècles, ed. Léopold Pannier
e e e

(Paris: F. Vieweg, 1882), 294 (translation mine).

49
“Mirer,” Dictionnaire de l’ancien français jusqu’au milieu du XV siècle, ed. A. J. Greimas
e

(Paris: Larousse, 2007).

50
For Pliny’s commentary on Nero’s emerald (smaragdus in Latin) in context, see:
Pliny, Pliny: Natural History X, ed. and trans. D. E. Eichholz (Cambridge, Mass.:
Loeb Classical Library, 1962), 212–15.
51
See note 16 above.
52
Cœur, 398 (emphasis mine). Heart, 199 (emphasis mine).
53
Nouvet, “Reversing Mirror,” 192–93.
54
For more on how critics have interpreted this play on words, see: Gilles Polizzi,
“‘Sens plastique’: Le Spectacle des merveilles dans le Livre du cuer d’amours espris,”
395–430 in De l’étranger à l’étrange ou la ‘conjointure’ de la merveille, ed. Marguerite
Rossi and Paul Bancourt (Aix-en-Provence: Université de Provence, 1988), 419–20;
Jean R. Scheidegger, “Couleurs, amour et fantaisie dans le Livre du cuer d’amours
espris de René d’Anjou,” 389–99 in Les Couleurs au Moyen Age (Aix-en-Provence:
Université de Provence, 1988), 392–93.
55
“¦δάμ-ας” and “δαμάζω,” A Greek-English Lexicon, ed. Henry George Liddell and
Robert Scott (Oxford: Carendon Press, 1940).
56
Nouvet, “Reversing Mirror,” 192–93.
57
Cœur, 398 (emphasis mine). Heart, 199.
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