Antoine de la Sale

Antoine de La Sale (b. c. 1386–d. c. 1461) was born in Provence, the illegitimate son of a celebrated condottiero, Bernard de La Sale. He joined the court of the dukes of Anjou in 1402, probably as a page, and served as squire, soldier, and administrator, successively, to three dukes: Louis II, Louis III, and René. With Louis II, who laid claim to the kingdom of Sicily, he made visits to Italy, particularly to Sicily, traveling and exploring widely, and in 1415, taking part in a “crusade” against the Moors in the Portuguese colony of Ceuta, in North Africa (which figures briefly in Misrahi 1970). He recorded two of his more exciting adventures in his first book, La Salade (c. 1442–1444), a curious omnibus intended as a mirror for princes, but which also includes accounts of two of his own Sicilian adventures, to the cave of the Sibyl and to the Lipari Islands. His last post at the Angevin court was as gouverneur, tutor and mentor, to René’s son Jean de Calabre. In 1448 he left the service of the court of Anjou, and became gouverneur, this time to the sons of Louis de Luxembourg, count of St. Pol (thus entering the Burgundian sphere of influence, Louis being a distinguished member of their court). Here, he wrote a very miscellaneous series of works: La Sale (1451), another, and rather less alluring, pedagogical collection of moralizing anecdotes; Le Réconfort de Madame du Fresne (1458), a consolatio addressed to Catherine de Neufville, dame de Fresne, who had lost her son; Des anciens tournois et faictz d’armes (1458), a succinct but detailed treatise on the organization of tournaments and pas d’armes; La journee d’onneur et de prouesse (1459), an account in verse of an imaginary (and much idealized) tournament; and finally and most notably, Le Petit Jehan de Saintré (1456–1460), a chivalric romance, by far his best-known work and by far also his most commentated. Saintré in particular has given La Sale a reputation for wit and lightness of touch: accordingly, over the years, he has been credited with authorship of a number of 15th-century comic works: the Cent nouvelles nouvelles (he is named explicitly as author-narrator of nouvelle 50, but was sometimes thought compiler of the collection as a whole); the Quinze joyes de mariage; and the farce of Maistre Pierre Pathelin. None of these attributions is now thought plausible. La Sale is known for his profound admiration for the status and practices of chivalry, and for his wide-ranging pedagogic enthusiasms.