The author / authority
The authority
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| Lacteur
Lacteur
O creature roysonnable
Qui desires vie eternelle.
Tu as cy doctrine notable:
Pour bien finer vie mortelle.
La dance macabre sappelle:
Que chascun a danser apprant.
A homme et femme est naturelle.
Mort nespargne petit ne grant.
En ce miroer chascun peut lire
Qui le conuient ainsi danser.
Saige est celuy qui bien si mire.
Le mort le vif fait auancer.
Tu vois les plus grans commancer
Car il nest nul que mort ne fiere:
Cest piteuse chose y panser.
Tout est forgie dune matiere.
(Miroer salutaire, 1486)
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The authority
Oh rational creature,(1)
who desire eternal life.
Here you have wisdom, worth noting:
to properly end your mortal life.
It's called the dance macabre,
which everyone will learn to dance.
For man and woman(2) it's natural,
Death spares neither small nor great [persons].
In this mirror(3) everyone can read
that he will dance likewise.
Sage is he who mirrors himself well.
Death(4) makes the living [one] advance,
You will see the greatest begin [= lead the dance]
for there is nobody whom Death does not smite.
It's a pitiable thing to consider.
All are forged out of the same material.
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The dance is introduced by the author / authority, just as
the dances in
Tallinn
and
Basel
are introduced by a preacher.
The authority was present from the start.
Not only in the first printed version from 1485,
but also in the manuscripts from the 15th century, although
the various headlines cannot agree
whether he should be called "L'acteur", "Un maistre", "Le docteur" or even
"Macabre le docteur".
The Authority and the angel
Authority used from 1491 onwards
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Le romant de la rose (1521)
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Many books in those days were introduced and concluded by an author/authority.
Lydgate lets an auctour introduce his "The pilgrimage of the life of man":
»Her be-gynneth the prologue of the auctour«.
Chaucer ends (very abruptly) his "House of fame" after having introduced a
»Man of Gret Auctorite«.
Many contempary books show an authority at his writing desk, but what makes this particular authority special
is that an angel holds a scroll with a Latin text.
After a while all of Guy Marchant's woodcuts ended up in Troyes,
but not the authority. Instead the publishers in Troyes used a number of other woodcuts of an authority in front of his desk,
particularly the one to the left. None of these authorities had an angel, so the angel's two lines in Latin were no longer a part of the text.
The picture to the right is from another book published by another company in Paris in 1521.
Evidently this particular woodcut had been left behind in Paris.
The angel's scroll has been blanked out.
Variations in the Text
There are only a few variations in the first verse.
The biggest difference is in the
headings: whether the authority
should be called "L'acteur", "Le docteur" or "L'autheur".
Apart from this there are only divergence of spelling, but this can be interesting enough
when it comes to the name of the dance itself, "La dance macabre", in line 5.
The various sources vacillate between "danse" and "dance", while
BL Add. 38858 calls the dance
"Le danse macabre".
The name vacillates between "macabre", "machabre" and "Macabrey"
(with La Danse Machabray on the front page).
In the second verse there is a great variation in the 11th line. All our printed sources
(with the exception of La Danse Machabray)
state that he who mirrors himself in the dance is wise:
»Saige est celuy qui bien si mire«,
while all the manuscripts (and La Danse Machabray) regard such a person as happy:
»Cilz est heureux qui bien sy mire«.
In the 12th line the cadaver is called "le mort" (the dead man).
It's only in later sources
(Jean Belot,
Oudot and
Baillieu), that the cadaver has become
"la mort", Death itself.
In the 14th line Baillieu writes "tiere" instead of "fiere",
but this is probably a typo.
Various Artists
(1497)
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Le Noir (1521)
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Footnotes:
(1)
(2)
(3)
(4)
For man and woman... Quite possibly -
but there are no women in the dance of death in Cimetière des Innocents.
Admittedly the text says "
Le Mort" and not "
La mort", so maybe
a more correct translation would be:
"
The dead one makes the living [one] advance".
The text was reproduced in many versions - and the different source variate between
"Le Mort" and "La Mort".
See Death's Dance, or Line of the Dead.
Dances of death
Danse macabre
Men
The authority
