47. the King: Malte's account in this part of the notebooks is of King Charles VI (1368–1422) of France, who reigned from 1380 and was afflicted with severe mental disorders. Theologian Jean Charlier de Gerson (1363–1429) was Chancellor of the University of Paris. The parva regina (little queen) was Odette de Champdivers, for some time the King's concubine. Others referred to in the following paragraphs include Jean Juvénal des Ursins, one of Charles's most able and loyal administrators; the King's brother, Louis, Duke of Orléans (1372–1407), whose murder by the Duke of Burgundy's assassin precipitated civil war; and Louis' widow Valentina, daughter of the Duke of Milan. Malte also mentions the Brotherhood of the Passion, an association of ‘mission brothers’ founded in 1402 under a charter drawn up by the King himself, for the purpose of performing mystery plays.
48. Roosbecke: In this battle (1382), Charles won a bloody victory over a Flemish uprising.
49. the stag with the collar of gold in the forest of Senlis: This dream or vision of Charles's is reported by Jean Froissart (c.1337–c.1405), from whose Chroniques Rilke derived some of the material in this section, and by Juvénal's son, Jean Juvénal des Ursins (1388–1473), later archbishop of Reims, who wrote a history of Charles VI's reign, to which Rilke adheres more closely in this paragraph. Another source on which he drew heavily was the Chroniques of Charles VI's reign by the nameless monk known as Le Religieux de Saint-Denis.
50. Christine de Pisan's little book… dedicated to him: Christine de Pisan was the prolific writer, born about 1363 and dying at an unknown date in the 1430s, who is widely regarded as the first French femme savante, and quite possibly the first woman to earn a living by writing. She dedicated The Road of Long Study to Charles VI and presented it to the Duc de Berry in March 1403.
51. Cumaean: The Cumaean sibyl – guardian of the shrine of Apollo at Cumae in southern Italy – who guides Aeneas into the Underworld in Virgil's Aeneid.
52. Emperor Wenceslaus: Wenceslaus (1361–1419) was Holy Roman Emperor, and King of Bohemia. He and Charles VI had met in 1397.
53. several popes… familiar with Avignon: There were ‘several popes’ (at the time of the Papal Schism that took place between 1378 and 1417) because the election of Urban VI had been declared void by the College of Cardinals, and Clement VII elected in his place. Clement resided in the papal palace at Avignon, which had been the residence of the popes since 1309; Urban resided in Rome. (Both popes were deposed by the Council of Pisa in 1409; a satisfactory resolution of the situation was not achieved until 1417.) Rilke spent over a fortnight in Avignon in the early autumn of 1909. (He visited Orange and Les Baux, important in later pages of the novel, during the same sojourn in Provence.)
54. John the Twenty-Second: Pope John XXII, Jacques Duèse (of Cahors; 1245–1334), was the second pope to reside at Avignon. In the sermon he is described as preaching in the following paragraph, on All Saints' Day 1331, he pronounced that the souls of the blessed did not enter paradise immediately after death but had to wait until the Last Judgement; he enlarged upon this new doctrine in further sermons on 15 December and 5 January 1332. Replying on 10 November 1925 to questions put by his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, Rilke wrote: ‘Imagine just what it meant to Christendom at that time, to learn that nobody in the afterlife had yet entered into a state of salvation, that this would not occur until the Last Judgement, that there, as here, it was all a matter of standing waiting in trepidation!’ John XXII recanted his doctrine on 3 December 1334.
55. the piece of unicorn was discoloured: In the same responses to Witold von Hulewicz (see previous note), Rilke reported: ‘From the dishes that were set before great lords, a piece of the horn of a unicorn often hung by a chain, to be dipped into food before eating or drink before drinking; it was believed that the horn would become discoloured if the food or drink had been poisoned.’
56. Napoleone Orsini: Cardinal Orsini (1263–1342), a bitter opponent of John XXII (see note 54 above).
57. the son of the Count of Ligny… in an ecstasy of consummation: The story of this young Luxembourg prince's death, who was made a cardinal at eleven and died at eighteen, is told by both Froissart and the monk of Saint-Denis (see note 49 above).
58. brother fell upon brother… wrath governing over his heart: The Comte de Vendôme and the Comte de la Marche, whose fifteenth-century story Rilke found in the monk of Saint-Denis' chronicles (see note 49).
59. Count de Foix, Gaston Phoebus… this exhausted boy: Gaston (1331–91) accidentally killed his own son; Rilke found the story in Froissart (see note 49 above).
60. tragic woman: Eleonora Duse (1859–1924), the great Italian actress. Rilke saw her perform, and met her on several occasions.
61. Mariana Alcoforado: See note 29.
62. Byblis… swiftly flowing spring: The story of Byblis, who loved her twin brother, Caunus, is told in Book IX of Ovid's Metamorphoses.
63. Portuguese woman… Marie-Anne de Clermont: This paragraph includes some names of great women lovers in Rilke's pantheon that have already been mentioned in the novel (for the ‘Portuguese woman’ and Gaspara Stampa, see note 29 above; for Héloïse, see note 45 above), and adds the Countess of Die, a twelfth-century Provençal poet; the thirteenth-century Provençal poet Clara d'Anduze; Louise Labé (1526–66), a French Renaissance poet, some of whose sonnets Rilke translated; Marceline Desbordes-Valmore (1786–1859; Rilke gives only her maiden name), actress, singer and writer, and subject of a 1927 novel by Stefan Zweig; French poet Elisa Mercœur (1809–35); Aïssé (1694–1733), who was bought at the age of four, in the slave market at Constantinople, by the French ambassador, and brought by him to Paris, where she became an attraction in fashionable society; Julie de Lespinasse (1723–76), salon hostess close to d'Alembert and other French Enlightenment intellectuals; and Marie-Anne de Bourbon-Condé, Princesse de Clermont (1697–1741), who was heartbroken when the Duke she had secretly married was killed in a hunting accident.
64. Clémence de Bourges: De Bourges (1535–61) was the friend and correspondent of Louise Labé (see previous note); in 1556, the poet dedicated her complete works to her. De Bourges reportedly died of a broken heart following the death of her fiancé.
65. Jean de Tournes: Printer in sixteenth-century Lyons. The ‘little book’ would be the works of Louise Labé (see previous note).
66. Diké and Anaktoria, Gyrinno and Atthis: Companions of Sappho (see note 45 above), named or addressed in her poems.
67. Ridinger engravings of equestrian subjects: Johann Elias Ridinger (1698–1769) was a prolific German artist whose work consisted mainly of animal and hunting scenes.
68. those fragments of Sappho's poetry that have come down to us: Only two poems by Sappho (see note 45 above) survive in full; the remainder consists of fragments.
69. Galen… ‘the poetess’: Galen is the great Greek physician of the second century AD. The ‘poetess’ is Sappho (see note 45 above).
70. Benedicte von Qualen… Baggesen's life: Jens Baggesen, the Danish poet to whom Malte has already referred (see note 41), proposed to von Qualen (1774–1813) after the death of his wife. She turned him down.
71. Mechthild… Blessed Rose of Lima: These ‘loving women’ are: the thirteenth-century German mystic Mechthild von Magdeburg; Teresa of Avila (1515–82), the great Spanish mystic and reformer of the Carmelite order; and Rose of Lima (1586–1617), the first native of the Americas to be canonized.
72. Princess Amalie Galitzin: Galitzin (1748–1806) was – with her husband, Prince Dmitri Alexeievich Galitzin, Catherine II's ambassador to France – close to Voltaire and other French Enlightenment writers, and later celebrated as a salon hostess in Westphalia.
73. the Prodigal Son: See Luke 15: 11–32.
74. Deodatus of Gozon: Fourteenth-century knight of the Order of St John, who was said to have killed a dragon on Rhodes.
75. Les Baux… tombs of the resurrected: During his visit to Provence in the autumn of 1909, Rilke spent a single day at the extraordi
nary ruined castle and village of Les Baux in a rocky, remote part of the region. It made a powerful impression on him, and on 23 October he wrote a detailed account to Lou Andreas-Salomé (see Introduction), giving a history of the dynasty which had ruled there as well as a striking description of the location and of himself, strolling about in near-silence with a shepherd, amid grazing sheep and the scent of thyme. The dynasty, Rilke noted, traced its origins back to a descendant of Balthasar, one of the three biblical magi (which led the lords of Baux to use the sixteen-pointed Star of Bethlehem on their coat of arms); they also appear to have had a superstition about the numbers seven and three. Les Alyscamps, where Malte also pictures the prodigal, is an ancient burial ground at Arles, with numerous sarcophagi. Rilke would have seen the site for himself, but may also have been familiar with the paintings Vincent van Gogh did of it in November 1888. To his wife, Clara, Rilke wrote on 4 October 1907: ‘in his most fearful times [van Gogh] painted the most fearful of things. How else could he have survived?’
76. ‘sa patience de supporter une âme’: Rilke told his Polish translator, Witold von Hulewicz, that he thought the words (which mean ‘his patience in enduring a soul’) were from St Teresa of Avila (see note 71).
*The draft of a letter.
*Written in the margin of the manuscript.
*Death, death.
*Written in the margin of the manuscript.
*Written in the margin of the manuscript.
*Written in the margin of the manuscript.
*Written in the margin of the manuscript.
*Written in the margin of the manuscript.
Table of Contents
About the Author
Title Page
Copyright Page
Contents
Chronology
Introduction
Further Reading
A Note on the Text
THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE
Notes
Footnotes
THE NOTEBOOKS OF MALTE LAURIDS BRIGGE
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Rainer Maria Rilke, The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge
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