Equitan live-react (Lais of Marie de France)
Yeeeah. Did you know you're essentially high when you're in the limerent state or in new relationship energy? That early in-love stage that lasts, oh, between 6 and 24 months usually? Sometimes shorter. So many endorphins going absolutely haywire. I can't stand that stage, I want it to be over so I can see the person and relationship clearly.
This better not be another clever competent servant type who I like better than any of the protagonists but is just a side character who disappears midway through the story.
….oh no. Welp. Seneschal's doomed. Equitan's gonna betray his own vassal and go after his wife. It's Igraine and Gorlois and Uther all over again.
Oh good. Our title character has at least some morals.
I'm not 100% sure I understand the next bit:
Are we talking about the kind of courtly love where two people who cannot be together love each other from afar yet don't act on it? I know that was seen as very romantic and chivalric and all that, at one point in time.
Or is he talking about nonmonogamy, some kind of V arrangement?
Or is he literally talking about an affair?
This also seems to imply that extramarital affairs were just... normal. I know I've read about the idea in that era that you did not love your marriage partner, and weren't even really expected to; love was to be found elsewhere, but quietly. Is that basically what this is saying? That it would be a pity if the lady didn't get to have a lover outside her marriage?
Well done. Nicely stated awareness of power dynamics and abuses of power! Dang. "The love affair would not be equally shared between us two. Since you are a powerful king and my husband holds his lands from you, you would expect, I imagine, to have dominion in love. Love is not worthy if it is not equal."
The king is currently trying to convince her by basically saying "I'm not fickle like those people you describe, I'm different." And not to consider him a king, but as the lady's vassal and lover, and he's totally going to die if she doesn't get with him.
…really crossing my fingers that the lady and the king don't get together. Because yuck.
…damnit. C'mon now. (Why did I expect anything else.)
I am having a hard time figuring out if the narrative is condoning this sort of behavior and dynamic, praising it, or decrying it. Though in the introduction, the translator did say "A reader who takes the Lais in their Harley 978 (manuscript) order is alerted from the beginning that each lai must be read on its own terms and assessed independently with the help of the reader's judgment", so maybe this is not being presented with the writer's judgment, but left to the reader to judge. That would indeed explain why the writer's opinion of the situation is very unclear. As evidenced in this next bit:
"In the end they died of it" suggests potential negative judgment, but the writer also seems to validate the sincerity of the love between the lady and the king. So perhaps it's an attempt to provide a neutral telling of the situation, and let the reader pass any judgment that they might.
Waters (the translator) also says in the introduction that Marie de France's Prologue "implies the need to read the ensuing stories as an instructive group - without, however, laying out any explicit program for how to do so. It combines the effects of control and receptiveness, authority and flexibility, that are evident throughout the Lais: readers are, to use Marie's famous phrase, encouraged to 'supply the rest through their understanding' of what they read, but without any insistence about what the result should be".
Guigemar didn't hit this tension for me, it felt more straightforward and clear-cut about what the desirable outcome was. But Equitan is really pinging the "reader must supply the rest through their own understanding" element.
The poem continues on: the king and lady are carrying on their affair in private, the king claims he is undergoing leeching privately when they're together so that no one will dare to walk in on them. But he loves the lady above all others, and doesn't want any other women, or to even hear marriage spoken of, which everyone else is Very Upset about and complains to the seneschal's wife about. Which of course bothers her a lot.
She weeps to him and expresses fear that he'll take a wife appropriate to his station and leave her, and then she'll want to die. The king, well… here's where the doom begins:
So the seneschal's wife has the Very Sensible reaction of "great! I'll kill my husband!" But in a more genteel way of course: "arrange for her husband's death", which will be easy, if the king helps out.
Her plan is to… boil the seneschal alive in a bathtub?
No, really. The king is supposed to visit her husband's castle, the king requests his company for bathing and dining, and the wife is going to have the seneschal's bath "so hot and so boiling / there is living man under heaven / who would not be scalded and destroyed / as soon as he sat in it", and then the king should bring his men over and show them how the seneschal just "died suddenly" in the bath. Tragic accident and all that.
Well, as you might imagine, this plan doesn't work. As soon as the seneschal goes off to take his back, the lady and the king start getting physically intimate. The seneschal comes back, breaks down the door, and finds the king and his wife together. The king sees the seneschal coming and jumps into the tub to… "disguise his wickedness"? Pretend he was just disrobing for the bath, I guess?
But apparently his tub was as scalding as the seneschal's, so he dies from the boiling hot water. And the seneschal sees this and shoves his wife's head into the bath so that she dies too.
Marie de France makes a judgment here at last. Not of the adultery or the lovers or any of that, just on "pursuing another's harm". The reader can decide for themself the morality of the affair, but trying to kill people is Definitely Bad.
