Domnei, James Branch Cabell [red scrolls of magic .TXT] 📗

Domnei

By James Branch Cabell.

Table of Contents Titlepage Imprint Epigraph I Dedication Epigraph II A Preface Critical Comment The Argument Domnei Incipit Part I: Perion I: How Perion Was Unmasked II: How the Vicomte Was Very Gay III: How Melicent Wooed IV: How the Bishop Aided Perion V: How Melicent Wedded Part II: Melicent VI: How Melicent Sought Oversea VII: How Perion Was Freed VIII: How Demetrios Was Amused IX: How Time Sped in Heathenry X: How Demetrios Wooed Part III: Demetrios XI: How Time Sped with Perion XII: How Demetrios Was Taken XIII: How They Praised Melicent XIV: How Perion Braved Theodoret XV: How Perion Fought XVI: How Demetrios Meditated XVII: How a Minstrel Came XVIII: How They Cried Quits XIX: How Flamberge Was Lost XX: How Perion Got Aid Part IV: Ahasuerus XXI: How Demetrios Held His Chattel XXII: How Misery Held Nacumera XXIII: How Demetrios Cried Farewell XXIV: How Orestes Ruled XXV: How Women Talked Together XXVI: How Men Ordered Matters XXVII: How Ahasuerus Was Candid XXVIII: How Perion Saw Melicent XXIX: How a Bargain Was Cried XXX: How Melicent Conquered The Afterword II III IV Bibliography Endnotes Colophon Uncopyright Imprint

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“En cor gentil domnei per mort no passa.”

To
Sarah Read McAdams
In Gratitude and Affection

“The complication of opinions and ideas, of affections and habits, which prompted the chevalier to devote himself to the service of a lady, and by which he strove to prove to her his love, and to merit hers in return, was expressed, in the language of the Troubadours, by a single word, by the word domnei, a derivation of domna, which may be regarded as an alteration of the Latin domina, lady, mistress.”

—⁠C. C. Fauriel, History of Provençal Poetry A Preface

It would be absorbing to discover the present feminine attitude toward the profoundest compliment ever paid women by the heart and mind of men in league⁠—the worshipping devotion conceived by Plato and elevated to a living faith in medieval France. Through that renaissance of a sublimated passion domnei was regarded as a throne of alabaster by the chosen figures of its service: Melicent, at Bellegarde, waiting for her marriage with King Theodoret, held close an image of Perion made of substance that time was powerless to destroy; and which, in a life of singular violence, where blood hung scarlet before men’s eyes like a tapestry, burned in a silver flame untroubled by the fate of her body. It was, to her, a magic that kept her inviolable, perpetually, in spite of marauding fingers, a rose in the blanched perfection of its early flowering.

The clearest possible case for that religion was that it transmuted the individual subject of its adoration into the deathless splendor of a Madonna unique and yet divisible in a mirage of earthly loveliness. It was heaven come to Aquitaine, to the Courts of Love, in shapes of vivid fragrant beauty, with delectable hair lying gold on white samite worked in borders of blue petals. It chose not abstractions for its faith, but the most desirable of all actual⁠—yes, worldly⁠—incentives: the sister, it might be, of Count Emmerick of Poictesme. And, approaching beatitude not so much through a symbol of agony as by the fragile grace of a woman, raising Melicent to the stars, it fused, more completely than in any other aspiration, the spirit and the flesh.

However, in its contact, its lovers’ delight, it was no more than a slow clasping and unclasping of the hands; the spirit and flesh, merged, became spiritual; the height of stars was not a figment.⁠ ⁠… Here, since the conception of domnei has so utterly vanished, the break between the ages impassable, the sympathy born of understanding is interrupted. Hardly a woman, today, would value a sigh the passion which turned a man steadfastly away that he might be with her forever beyond the parched forest of death. Now such emotion is held strictly to the gains, the accountability, of life’s immediate span; women have left their cloudy magnificence for a footing on earth; but⁠—at least in warm graceful youth⁠—their dreams are still of a Perion de la Forêt. These, clear-eyed, they disavow; yet their secret desire, the most Elysian of all hopes, to burn at once with the body and the soul, mocks what they find.

That vision, dominating Mr. Cabell’s pages, the record of his revealed idealism, brings specially to Domnei a beauty finely escaping the dusty confusion of any present. It is a book laid in a purity, a serenity, of space above the vapors, the bigotry and engendered spite, of dogma and creed. True to yesterday, it will be faithful of tomorrow; for, in the evolution of humanity,