CHRISTINE DE PISAN 



had decreed otherwise. For Christine it re- 

 volved all too quickly. Two years after her 

 marriage the King died (1380), and her husband 

 and father lost their appointments. Gradually 

 anxiety and sorrow crept like some baneful 

 atmosphere into the once happy home. First 

 she lost her father, and then, two or three 

 years later, her husband died, leaving her, at the 

 age of twenty-five, with three children to provide 

 for. Like many another, she turned to letters 

 as both a material and a mental support. En- 

 dowed with an extraordinary gift of versification, 

 she began by writing short poems, chiefly on 

 the joys and sorrows of love, expressing some- 

 times her own sentiments, sometimes those of 

 others for whom she wrote. But she tells us 

 that often when she made merry she would fain 

 have wept. How many a one adown the 

 centuries has re-echoed the same sad note ! 



" Men must work and women must weep." 

 So says the poet. But life shows us that men 

 and women alike must needs do both. And so 

 the sad Christine set to work to fit herself, by 

 the study of the best ancient and modern writers, 

 to produce more serious matter than love-ballads, 

 turning, in her saddest moments, to Boethius 

 and Dante for inspiration and solace. " I betook 

 myself," she says, " like the child who at first is 

 set to learn its ABC, to ancient histories from 

 the beginning of the world histories of the 

 Hebrews and the Assyrians, of the Romans, the 

 French, the Bretons, and diverse others and 



121 





