Yvain and Lancelot: The Lion and the Cart

Chrétien's two greatest secular romances were probably composed interlocking, and they read as a diptych. In Le Chevalier au Lion, Yvain wins a magic-fountain bride, loses her by overstaying a leave granted for tournament-going, and — hearing his failure proclaimed before the court — goes mad: he tears his clothes and flees to the forest, living naked on raw game until a hermit's bread begins his long return. Here the wild-man pattern of Unit 6 surfaces inside courtly romance, reassigned from prophecy to penance; Yvain climbs back into personhood by anonymous service (as "The Knight with the Lion") until he has remade the name he broke. In Le Chevalier de la Charrette, Lancelot — pursuing the abducted queen Guinevere into the death-realm of Gorre, across the Sword Bridge — hesitates two steps before climbing into a criminal's cart that will carry him faster, and is later refused by the queen for precisely that hesitation: love's law admits no competing counsel, not even reason's.

The Charrette is the classic exhibit of fin'amor — the love-service that borrows the language of feudal homage and religious devotion (Lancelot bows on leaving the queen's bed "as if before an altar") — and Chrétien signed it strangely: he tells us Marie de Champagne supplied the matiere and the san (matter and meaning), and he left the poem for Godefroi de Lagny to finish. Scholars have argued ever since whether the poem celebrates its adulterous religion of love or holds it at arm's length. Read both poems asking Chrétien's own question: what may a knight worship? The Grail poem (Unit 15) is his last answer.