So to such impious people do you make no answer at all, unless indeed you should elect to answer them by repetition of this song which I now make for you, my little book, at your departure from me. And the song runs in this fashion:
Depart, depart, my book! and live and die
Dependent on the idle fantasy
Of men who cannot view you, quite, as I.For I am fond, and willingly mistake
My book to be the book I meant to make,
And cannot judge you, for that phantom’s sake.Yet pardon me if I have wrought too ill
In making you, that never spared the will
To shape you perfectly, and lacked the skill.Ah, had I but the power, my book, then I
Had wrought in you some wizardry so high
That no man but had listened …They pass by,
And shrug—as we, who know that unto us
It has been granted never to fare thus,
And never to be strong and glorious.Is it denied me to perpetuate
What so much loving labor did create?—
I hear Oblivion tap upon the gate,
And acquiesce, not all disconsolate.For I have got such recompense
Of that high-hearted excellence
Which the contented craftsman knows,
Alone, that to loved labor goes,
And daily does the work he chose,
And counts all else impertinence!
Explicit Decas Reginarum
Endnotes
-
For this perplexing matter the curious may consult Paul Verville’s Notice sur la vie de Nicolas de Caen, p. 93 et seq. The indebtedness to Antoine Riczi is, of course, conceded by Nicolas in his “Epilogue.” ↩
-
She was the daughter of King Ferdinand of Leon and Castile, whose conversion to sainthood the inquisitive may find recorded elsewhere. ↩
-
Not without indulgence in anachronism. But Nicolas, be it repeated, was no Gradgrindian. ↩
-
Nicolas gives this ballad in full, but, for obvious reasons, his translator would prefer to do otherwise. ↩
-
Nicolas unaccountably omits to mention that during the French wars she had ruled England as Regent with signal capacity—although this fact, as you will see more lately, is the pivot of his chronicle. ↩
Colophon
Chivalry
was published in 1921 by
James Branch Cabell.
This ebook was produced for
Standard Ebooks
by
Jason Livermore,
and is based on a transcription produced in 2004 by
Suzanne Shell, Joris Van Dael, Susan Lucy, and The Online Distributed Proofreading Team
for
Project Gutenberg
and on digital scans from the
Internet Archive.
The cover page is adapted from
Chivalry, Book Illustration,
a painting completed in 1909 by
Howard Pyle.
The cover and title pages feature the
League Spartan and Sorts Mill Goudy
typefaces created in 2014 and 2009 by
The League of Moveable Type.
The first edition of this ebook was released on
February 5, 2024, 1:57 a.m.
You can check for updates to this ebook, view its revision history, or download it for different ereading systems at
standardebooks.org/ebooks/james-branch-cabell/chivalry.
The volunteer-driven Standard Ebooks project relies on readers like you to submit typos, corrections, and other improvements. Anyone can contribute at standardebooks.org.
Uncopyright
May you do good and not evil.
May you find forgiveness for yourself and forgive others.
May you share freely, never taking more than you give.
Copyright pages exist to tell you that you can’t do something. Unlike them, this Uncopyright page exists to tell you that the writing and artwork in this ebook are believed to be in the United States public domain; that is, they are believed to be free of copyright restrictions in the United States. The United States public domain represents our collective cultural heritage, and items in it are free for anyone in the United States to do almost anything at all with, without having to get permission.
Copyright laws are different all over the world, and the source text or artwork in this ebook may still be copyrighted in other countries. If you’re not located in the United States, you must check your local laws before using this ebook. Standard Ebooks makes no representations regarding the copyright status of the source text or artwork in this ebook in any country other than the United States.
Non-authorship activities performed on items that are in the public domain—so-called “sweat of the brow” work—don’t create a new copyright. That means that nobody can claim a new copyright on an item that is in the public domain for, among other things, work like digitization, markup, or typography. Regardless, the contributors to this ebook release their contributions under the terms in the CC0 1.0 Universal Public Domain Dedication, thus dedicating to the worldwide public domain all of the work they’ve done on this ebook, including but not limited to metadata, the titlepage, imprint, colophon, this Uncopyright, and any changes or enhancements to, or markup on, the original text and artwork. This dedication doesn’t change the copyright status of the source text or artwork. We make this dedication in the interest of enriching our global cultural heritage, to promote free and libre culture around the world, and to give back to the unrestricted culture that has given all of us so much.
