Cheer Three: Gossip as Literature

Cheer Three: Gossip as Literature

I. The Dark Ages of Gossip

Jane Goodall, guardian and student of chimpanzees, was watching one of her families scrambling around on an African hillside when she noticed one little fellow, a quite insignificant one, pick up an empty tin canister and let it roll downhill. As it bumped along, it made a varied and considerable noise, and every chimpanzee in the family stopped whatever it was doing at the moment and came running to watch it go and listen to its clattering music...The little chimpanzee ran after it, picked it up, took it back up the hill, rolled it down again. The family could not get enough of it. By the time he gave up from weariness or hunger, little Master Insignificant had amassed so much admiration and prestige the he rose at one bound from near the bottom to almost the top of the severely structured pecking order which rules all chimpanzee families. From this time forward he ranked only two or three rungs below the Dominant Male.

I doubt if the chimpanzee brain is genetically endowed with the ability to make a lifetime job out of canister-rolling, let alone pass the secrets of the trade on to future generations. The brains available to early humans, our ancestors, were made of richer stuff. In the daily round of gossip in some primeval cave or forest clearing, a clever gossiper might easily observe that one of the events he was recounting seemed to hold the interest of his hearers more than others, and he or another might observe that this did not depend so much on the nature of the event as on the way it was being told. He could then in the course of time work out the basic techniques of narrative that would be valid from those days to the days of Chekhov and Stephen King. Effect follows cause. Past leads to present and to future. Character molds action and is revealed by action. A story has to have a beginning a middle and an end, though not necessarily in that order. Pieces of information deliberately withheld increase suspense. Repetition adds emphasis. An axe picked up at the beginning of a story achieves its full dramatic effect when it crashes some neighbor's skull at the end.

It was the beginning of literary art, though literature in the technical sense would not appear until the invention of writing several hundred thousand years later. Oral or written, its first function was to tell a story.

A story, as the first story-tellers in forest or cave learned, is a form of magic. Events which occurred in another time, another place, are transferred by mysterious immaterial means like the sound of a human voice into the minds of those who hear or read the story, and can may arouse reactions of delight or grief or rage more intense than witnessing the original action might have done. It might affect their whole lives forever after. At the very least it could make the long dark nights in forest or cave less lonely, less threatening.

People would like to hear over and over again how grandpa killed that monstrous bear, what grandma learned from that ghost she met in the field of giant mushrooms. If the stories were spicy enough, they might be repeated over and over again, for generation after generation, being continually changed by the skill of different story-tellers to fit the changing environment of their audiences.

The ability to call up memories of common ancestors can be as important to the survival of a tribe as the ability to make rain, and it is no wonder that the story-teller has been always regarded with some awe, much like that aroused by Jane Goodall's canister-rolling chimpanzee, and acquired the same kind of social prestige.

Whether this was the first of all arts, or was preceded by dance or song or sculpture, is a question of only academic interest. All works of art that have survived to our day, whether they be cave paintings or stories of monkey-headed gods or dances to make the crops grow, however immeasurably old they may seem to us, are the end-product of hundreds of thousands of years of development and experimentation, distortion and improvisation. All artists, by the time they come into view in the historical record, are in highly specialized castes, with definite social functions and social privileges. From the earliest times we know of, story-tellers were clearly set off from the general run of mankind, as they still are in illiterate or semi-literate societies, from Tanzania to Wall Street.

While John Millington Synge was in the Aran Islands about a hundred years ago gathering material for his plays, a story-teller arrived from the mainland, a great event for the islanders. He had many tales to keep them enthralled, one of them about a Captain Connolly who lived far off down the coast. The captain's adventures were quite familiar to Synge, they came straight out of the plot of Shakespeare's Cymbeline King of Britain recast with Irish characters. A man who could tell stories like that was sure of a warm welcome, plenty of food and drink and a few coppers.

If he had been around a thousand years earlier, this raggedy old man would probably have been richly robed, and would have worn golden chains around his neck, his every word would have been treasured, he would have been a bard.

Since modern poets with a high opinion of their own insights, like William Blake, have described themselves as bards, the idea has caught on that bards were wild-eyed wild-haired men who like hippies of a bygone day wandered over suitably wind-swept landscapes chanting whatever profundities or whatever nonsense might go through their untamed minds. In fact, the ancient Irish bards were civil servants, receiving stipends fixed by law. They sat close to the King at table, and they sang for their supper. They operated under procedural rules as strict as those of any modern bureaucrat. They recited traditional tales of traditional heroes in rigidly traditional forms, or they recited tales of the great deeds of their living kings in the same traditional forms. Since they were responsible for keeping the king's exploits alive in a world beyond time, an Other World, where all the important decisions were made, they had immense prestige, and no battle between two bands of cattle-thieves was considered officially ended till bards from both sides had met and decided who would get the deathless glory of having won it.

It was not to be expected that a bard who sat at the king's table would be interested in workaday quotidian gossip. Adulteries that were going on before his eyes were of no concern to him, he sang only of how, far away and long ago, Queen Deirdre had been unfaithful to King Conchobar of Ulster, and how she and her lover Naissi after a happy life of sin in Scotland had come back home to meet their doom.

Story-tellers in other lands did not necessarily have the magical powers of the Irish bards, who could kill a man or make a woman uglywith a line of verse, or their exalted position in society, but everywhere they were a class apart, and the stories they told stood apart too. Against the artlessly spoken gossip of ordinary folk, they placed the solemn cadenced words of tradition which in the course of time would become the written word, Scripture. Any lowly camel-driver could entertain his fellows at night with rude and lively chatter about how the wily wife of a Bedouin chieftain tricked her senile husband into disinheriting his oldest son and leaving all his property to a younger one, her favorite, It was only when this story became attached, in solemnly cadenced prose, to Rebecca and Isaac and Esau and Jacob, and thus became a central event in the formation of the nation of Israel, that it began to be faithfully memorized and eventually written down.

That could take a long time, hundreds or thousands of years, and it is obviously impossible to hope to recreate the original gossip. So all those years, comprising all human history till the day before yesterday, must be regarded as the Dark Ages of Gossip.

"Dark Ages" is a literary term of abuse, which is applied by scholars to periods of which they disapprove because they find their manners uncouth or simply because there are too few surviving records to be studied in academically respectable depth. But the truth seems to be that humanity has always gone on developing through dark ages as well as light ones, though not necessarily in ways we approve of. The miserable arthritic humans who limped through the few poverty-stricken millennia of the Mesolithic Period learned how to domesticate the dog, which had been beyond the powers of their ancestors, the great artists of the long and glorious Paleolithic. The barbarians who destroyed Greco-Roman civilization in what are called the Dark Ages of Europe learned how to harness horses without choking them, something of which Aristotle and Julius Caesar were incapable. But no bard thought it worth his while to sing of such things however more important they may seem to serous folk today than the sorrows of Queen Deirdre.

Even in the absence of records, it seems reasonable to assume that, whatever the complexity or sophistication of their culture, people went on gossiping steadily about their families, their neighbors, their kings, the tribesmen from across the river whose cattle they stole, all the while improving their techniques as their societies and their languages grew in scope and capacity. Only, during all those interminable ages, gossip had no official sanction, no dignity.

Just as it had no place in official history, as we saw in the previous chapter. it had no place in the poems and prose destined to give pleasure to polite ears, it was definitely not part of Literature (a word derived from the letters of the alphabet, and for more than 99 percent of the history of mankind nobody had any idea of what an alphabet was). The alphabet was invented, it is believed, by Phoenian merchants to help them keep records of their transactions and make more money. But it was soon taken up by priests and kings for codifying and making permanent the rituals of which they depended to keep their exalted position in the world. A distinction could then be made between the stories of old, unofficial gossip, disdained and disregarded, best left untalked about, like any other naturl function, while the written word told immortal tales in the voice of the immortal gods.

The books of Ruth and Esther in the Bible, for example, are based on two bits of gossip, neither of them very edifying by contemporary standards. The Book of Ruth is about a Moabitish woman who chose to stay on as a Hebrew among the Hebrews with the family of her dead husband instead of going back to her homeland in Moab, and is rewarded by getting a chance to snare a rich new husband and thus becoming the great-grandmother of King David. The Book of Esther is about a Jewish woman in the harem of the royal palace of Persia who is manipulated by her uncle to win the favor of King Ahasuerus and influence him to call off a scheduled pogrom of his Jewish subjects and authorize the slaughter 75,810 anti-Semites. These stories were accepted as part of Scripture only because they could be used for ecclesiastical propaganda, one in favor of tolerance, one for keeping the holy people separate.

Almost all early literature is concerned with gods and demigods and monsters, or with kings and queens and heroes who behave exactly like gods and demigods and monsters. It deals with vast events on a vast scale, full of wonders, never with the petty affairs of daily life unless they impinge somehow on the lives of the heroes.

Similarly, so-called folk-tales, which are generally believed to be the degenerate offspring of ancient myths and rituals, never have anything to say about the life of the folk. If a woodcutter appears, he never chops wood. If Cinderella has to scrub the floor, it is only because she is on her way to becoming a princess. Kings in folktales never do what real-life kings customarily do: German folklore is full of characters like kings Etzel and Dietrich von Bern, who historians tell us were really Attila the Hun and Theodoric the Ostrogoth of Verona, but they never make wars or sign treaties or proclaim laws or scoop up virgins the way the flesh-and-blood Attila and Theodoric were expected to do. Instead, they have marvelous adventures, slay dragons, fall asleep for hundreds of years in caves.

The literature about them was originally composed by members of an ecclesiastical caste, which as civilization advances is replaced or supplemented by a secular writing class, whose function is entertainment rather than official relations with the supernatural. While members of this class may not be quite as exalted as they would wish, they still operate on a superior level, and what they are expected to write about is never ordinary life. They write epic poetry and drama dealing with heroes from a distant past having fabulous adventures like Odysseus, committing monstrous crimes like Clytemnestra and Orestes, or founding future empires like Aeneas. These heroes have wives and children, whom they sometimes murder, but they have no family life. They are constantly making wars in which hundreds of thousands of casualties may occur, but there is no detailed description of anything that happens in these wars, except single combat between champions on each side, David and Goliath or Hector and Achilles. When Israel fights Amalek in the Sinai Desert, there is no strategy and no tactics, the results are determined by how long the aged Moses can hold up his arms. Homer's Greeks lay siege to Troy for ten years before finally finagling their way inside its walls, but nothing at all happens in those ten years except a few brawls and quarrels between aristocratic chieftains over the booty left over from a gang rape.

This is because literature in what are called heroic ages deals only with the select individuals who, like the writers themselves, live on a superior social plane. They alone speak because they alone have something to say. The common folk are on stage only to cheer them on or provide a carpet of corpses they can ride over..

It is said that the first literary expression that can be ascribed to the individual common man is to be found in graffiti scrawled by Greek mercenary soldiers on the walls of monuments while they were on service in Egypt twenty-five in hundred or so years ago. Greek mercenaries were in great demand at that time because of their superior armament and tactics, and it might be thought that the life of any one of them, battling and plundering his way around the colorful and sanguinary Mediterranean of the first millennium BC, would be just as interesting as any tale of Jason and the Golden Fleece. It is the kind of thing that would automatically make the best-seller lists today. Ernest Hemingway wrote a notable short story, Today is Friday, in which some privates in the Roman army of occupation in Palestine in the year 788 after the founding of Rome gossip about their recent unpleasant assignment to oversee to the crucifixion of a Jewish trouble-maker on the hill of Calvary in Jerusalem. How happy we would all be today if, say, the secretary of Pontius Pilate, having followed a course in the Roman equivalent of the Columbia School of Journalism, had chosen to record what they actually did say that Friday. But no classical author of any description, or any other author until very recent times, would have dreamed of recording the disorderly ungrammatical ramblings of private soldiers for any other purpose than to make fun of them or reprimand them: Thersites in the Iliad makes some familiar and very-convincing lower-class sound when he tells the assembled Greek leaders that they are killing a lot of poor men in an utterly senseless war, but Odysseus soon beats the nonsense out of him; little boys in Samaria taunt the prophet Elisha, but God immediately sends two bears to eat up 42 of them; foot soldiers in Shakespeare's Henry V complain in terms very much like those of modern GI's, but Henry soon whips them back to duty with blank verse grandiloquence.

. So the Roman soldiers remain silent and all we know of the Greek mercenaries are those few signatures they scratched on the tombs of kings. Kilroy was there, saving the sum of things for pay, but no one knows exactly how he did it or how he felt about it.

Poetry in Greece and Rome and in the Far East came in time to permit expression of individual unconventional emotions, like the Greek poet Archilocus who boasted of having thrown his shield away and saved his life by running away from the battlefield, or Catullus analyzing his mixed feelings about his love. It would have occurred to none of them to describe how they spent their time on a typical day, like Mr. Bloom's day in June 1906 in Dublin. They would have recognized parallels to their own lives in the patterns and routines that are current in modern fiction, but they would have seen no excuse for paying attention to them. That would have been gossip, and gossip was something that concerned only inferior orders like women who were by definition illiterate.

Some literary conventions did leave a little room for the inferior orders, for comic effect. There is a famous scene in the Idylls of Theocritus which has two women in the Alexandria of the third century BC chatting about the husband and servant problems in terms that were undoubtedly as current in Alexandria as they are in the modern cities:

GORGO: Is Praxinoa at home?

PRAXINOA: Gorgo dear! Such a long time! She is at home -- I'm surprised you got here even now. Eunoa, see to a chair for her, and put a cushion on it.

G: It's fine as it is.

P: Do sit down.

G: Poor soul that I am! I hardly got here alive, Praxinoa, in all that crowd and so many carriages - everywhere hobnailed boots and men in cloaks; and the road is never-ending -- you live farther and farther away.

P. That's that lunatic! He comes to the ends of the earth and buys a cave, not a house, so that we can't be neighbors -- out of spite, the mean brute; he's always the same!

G: Don't talk like that about your husband Dinon, my dear, when the little one is here. See how he's looking at you, woman. Never mind, Zopyion, sweet child, she doesn't mean daddy.

P: That daddy, the other day, really just the other day, I said to him: Papa, go and get some soda and rouge at the stall. And he brought me back salt, the great lumbering brute!

G: Mine's just like that too, he throws money away. Yesterday for seven drachmas he bought five fleeces of dog's hair, shavings off old saddle-bags, nothing but dirt. But come, put on your shawl and your wrap. Let's go and see Adonis in king Ptolemy's palace. I'm told the queen is preparing something fine.

P: Everything's grand in grand houses.

G: When you've seen a thing, you can talk about it to others who haven 't. It's time to be going.

P: It's always holiday for the idle. Eunoa, pick up that thread and bring it back here, or I'll beat you. Cats like soft beds to sleep on. Move, and bring me some water at once. I need water first, and she brings me soap! Never mind, let me have it. Not so much, you thief. Now the water. You wretch, what are you wetting my dress for? That will do.

[COMMENT1] Tell me, what did the material cost you?

P: Don't remind me of that Gorgo; more than two minas of good money, and as for the work!

G: But it's just what you wanted.

P: That's true. Bring me my wrap and my sun-hat; put them on properly. I shan't take you, baby. Let's be going. Phrygia, take the little one, and call the dog in, and lock the front door.

This kind of TV-sitcom prattle was as far as ancient authors ever went in dealing with ordinary domestic life. Their fiction in general dealt with either fantastic adventures in mythical kingdoms or with the graphic grapplings of shepherds and shepherdesses who never came near a sheep.

Gossip does manage to bubble up from time to time in serious settings, for there is no way of keeping the old girl permanently down, but is never allowed an independent existence. It always has to serve some higher purpose.

Take away the philosophy from Plato's Symposium and you are left with very lively bits of gossip about some rich young men in Athens having a night on the town. Plato was a consummate literary artist who could have written first-class realistic fiction if he had wanted to. He had more important things on his mind.

Outside of historians, who are professionally bound to some reliance on random fact, classical writers preferred standard timeless situations in which lower-class people were allowed to make fools of themselves in more or less hilarious ways. Here is Petronius Arbiter, a Roman aristocrat and friend of the emperor Nero, who set the standards of taste at the imperial court:

He was still chattering away when the servants came in with an immense hog on a tray almost the size of the table. We were, of course, astounded at the chef's speed and swore it would have taken longer to roast an ordinary chicken, all the more since the pig looked even bigger than the one served to us earlier. Meanwhile, Trimalchio had been scrutinizing the pig very closely and suddenly roared, "What! What's this? By god, this hog hasn't even been gutted! Get that cook here on the double!"

Looking very miserable, the poor cook came shuffling up to the table and admitted that he had forgotten to gut the pig.

"You forgot?" bellowed Trimalchio."You forgot to gut a pig? And I suppose you thought that's the same thing as merely forgetting to add salt and pepper. Strip that man!"

The cook was promptly stripped and stood there stark naked between two bodyguards, utterly forlorn. The guests to a man, however, interceded for the chef. "Accidents happen," they said, "please don't whip him. If he ever does it again, we promise we won't say a word for him." My own reaction was anger, savage and unrelenting. I could hardly contain myself and leaning over, I whispered to Agamemnon, "Did you ever hear of anything worse? Who could forget to gut a pig? By god, you wouldn't catch me letting him off, not if it was just a fish he'd forgotten to clean."

Not so Trimalchio, however. He sat there, a great grin widening across his face, and said: "Well, since your memory's so bad, you can gut the pig here in front of us all " The cook was handed back his clothes, drew out his knife with a shaking hand and then slashed at the pig's belly with crisscross cuts. The slits widened out under the pressure from inside, and suddenly out poured, not the pig's bowels and guts, but link upon link of tumbling sausages and blood puddings.

The slaves saluted the success of the hoax with a rousing, "Long live Gaius!" The vindicated chef was presented with a silver crown and honored by the offer of a drink served on a platter of fabulous Corinthian bronze.

It is perfectly possible that this is genuine gossip and some bloated rich upstart like Trimalchio actually put on a performance like this in Rome. Self-made millionaires have never been noted for good taste. On the other hand, there is something a little labored about Petronius's manner, he is a little too anxious to show off his superiority to the vulgarians he is talking about. He could laugh at the buffooneries of self-made ex-slaves like Trimalchio the way New York millionaires today can make fun of millionaires in Beverly Hills. He could approach real life near enough to show a real cook roasting a real pig. The idea of treating it as anything but a joke was beyond him..

ii. Gossip Redux

It is perhaps unfair to ancient literature to say that it was totally impervious to the gossip of daily life. We really know very little ancient literature. Not only was writing the monopoly of a privileged caste, but it was the most pedantic and conventional members of that caste who decided how much of it would survive. Priests preserved whatever they thought was seemly in whatever was written down in Egypt or in Israel. Schoolmasters decided, as the Roman empire declined and fell, and sources of parchment and of literate scribes dried up, which of the texts of classical Greece and Rome were worth the effort of recopying. Uncounted masterpieces have been utterly lost and it may be that some of them would have contained genuine stretches of what the ancient Egyptians and Greeks were actually talking about among themselves.

I doubt that there would be much, however. Gossip can be great fun, but part of its appeal is that it is irresponsible, what you say today does not bind you to what you will say or do tomorrow. In illiterate cultures today as in ancient Egypt and Greece, there is a distinct line between what is bandied around for the moment and what is considered worthy of being repeated. Hundreds of private letters have been found, reserved by the desert sands of Egypt, and they show that family life under the Ptolemies and the Romans revolved among much the same fads and feuds as it does today, but no professional writer would have had any interest in using such material.

Anglo-Saxon soldiers getting drunk on beer in the hall of the King of Northumbria might have plenty of lively things to say about the Mercian skulls they cracked in the last battle with the King of Mercia, or how many Mercian girls remained to be picked up and raped in local villages. When a professional minstrel came to entertain them, they didn't want to hear about that, they wanted stories about ancestors like Beowulf who a long time ago had slaughtered monsters in Denmark.

In the so-called Dark Ages of Europe, only the clergy wrote, and most of these were monks writing in scattered monasteries with no connection to academies such as had once regulated taste in Athens or Rome. Most of the monks' time was spent copying older writings. Precisely because they were cut off from the libraries and academies, on the rare occasions when they had something to write for themselves, like lives of their patron saints, they had little to go on but what they knew in their isolated local communities, and so almost in spite of themselves they became the precursors of realistic fiction. Lives of the saints are mostly full of standard miracles set off in some featureless other world. At times, however, having little knowledge of what was going on in the great world, the monks had no choice but to put in some objects and people they were familiar with, local scenes, what we call local color.

A typical story is the one that was told to pilgrims when they made their way to the great basilica of Conques in the hill country of southwestern France, over the tortuous route through the mountains which led to the shrine of Santiago de Campostella in Spain. The aim of the story was to explain how the bones of Saint Foy, patron of the establishment, came to be brought from the prosperous Roman city of Agen, site of her martyrdom, to the monastery of Conques far up in the barren trackless hills.. The saint herself, a young Gallo-Roman girl named Fides, or Faith, had been arrested by the Roman authorities when her Christian conscience would not let her worship the emperor as a god. They stripped her naked in the amphitheater, and a cloud came down from heaven to shield her from their dirty eyes. Nevertheless, they tortured her and killed her and cut off her head. Her bones, piously collected by her fellow Christians were preserved in a shrine at a monastery in Agen, and there they soon began to work miracles. Over succeeding centuries, the lame and the blind and sufferers of all sorts flocked to the shrine, and their offerings made the monastery one of the richest in all Gaul.

A hundred miles or so away in the mountains, at Conques, there was another monastery, perched on a little ledge overlooking a savage ravine, and here the monks lived poorly in makeshift buildings with few visitors and little fame. They studied the situation carefully and groomed one of their more promising novices, whom they sent to Agen to enter the monastery there. He was soon marked out for his piety and zeal, and performed all the tasks assigned him with such modest and uncomplaining efficiency that he was rewarded by being made custodian of the bones of St. Foy.

That very night he put the bones in a sack and when everyone else was asleep, he climbed the wall and took off for the mountains. Search parties were not fast enough to catch up with him, and he made it safely back to Conques. The bones were put in a new shrine, and began working miracles on a scale which attracted pilgrims in ever-increasing numbers to the desolate ledge and eventually made it one of the greatest religious and cultural centers of medieval Christendom. Over the shrine enclosing the little girl's bones was built a noble and richly decorated church which is cherished as one of the glories of Romanesque art.

Modern readers coming upon this story for the first time are apt to think that it was a piece of malicious gossip put out by enemies of the monks of Conques and meant to discredit their monastery. In the 9th century, when the bones were said to have made their journey, there was a different way of looking at things. Ages of Faith are in many respects far more materialistic than Ages of Reason like our own, and for the practical minds of 9th-century monks it was clear that St. Foy had actively supported the whole operation. If she had not wanted her bones in Conques she would have struck the young man dead when he touched them. But look at all the valuable objects brought by pilgrims which began crowding the monastery, visible evidence Saint Foy was pleased with what had been done. The story was enthusiastically repeated to all comers, and still appears in the official guidebook to the splendid monument, without a word to suggest that it was anything but a record of sanctity in action.

The monks of Conques wanted a statue of St. Foy worthy of her glory and the glory of the basilica they had built around her bones. They had a carpenter among them who could shape a roughly rectangular body for her out of wood. But there was no one in that time and place who could make anything resembling a human head well enough to impress the worshipers. They searched around, and found one of the marble heads of Roman officials that were still lying among ancient ruins. It had great staring eyes and a jutting Mussoliniesque chin, it might have been a Roman emperor of the last period. They put the head on the body, covered both with jewels, and created one of the unforgettable works of medieval art.

Just so, lacking any of the traditional rhetorical devices which had been worked out by the classical schools, the only way they knew how to write about their Saint was to gossip about her, tell the story of what was called the Translation of the Bones in the same matter-of-fact way they told the story of the wicked knight who tried to rob the monastery and was promptly thrown off his horse by unseen hands, broke his head and was dragged down to hell.

It was a manner of story-telling that had no aspirations to literature, but had its own dignity and certainly its own popular appeal. By the time we get to the late Middle Ages, there is an unmistakable air of freedom in the literary air. Writers are writing less in schoolbook Latin and more in the national vernaculars, closer to the language in which people gossiped in the market place. The morality plays in which Adam and Eve, or the shepherds at the Nativity, joke and quarrel like the families and shepherds of French and English villages indicate a willingness to listen to everyday speech, copy its locutions and its rhythms, and above all, to take the people who use it seriously. They are not thrown in simply for comic relief.

Dame Gossip's voice is at last entering the public domain. She is still there in a subordinate capacity. She is an attendant to the sacred drama, part of the church's educational program to bring to the people the significance of the Fall of Man or the birth of Christ in Bethlehem.

I believe that the first large-scale attempt to use the techniques of gossip independently, for purely literary purposes - for entertainment rather than instruction - can be found at the very edge of the known world, Iceland, in the 12th and 13th centuries. It was then that most of the Icelandic sagas were written, though the original stories on which they had been based had surely been circulating by word of mouth for years or generations.

Iceland, the Thule of the ancients, the last outpost of the world, has always been a nurturing home for gossip. There is not much else to do in the long night that lasts all winter. The medieval Icelanders had particularly rich subject matter to occupy them. Their forefathers had come to this land only a few generations earlier, having built better boats and braved more dangerous seas than anyone in the previous history of mankind. They had grown rich on sheep-herding and on piracy, they went off on yearly plundering expeditions that might take them as far as Estonia or Constantinople, and so they had had a chance to see a great deal of the world.

"Saga" means simply something said. What they had to say to each other in those endless nights was partly ancient mythology, tales of gods and heroes like Odin and Sigurd the Volsung (who would later appear in caricatural form as Wotan and Siegfried in the Wagner operas), partly semi-reliable chronicles of the kings of Norway. These accounts are derived from very formalized verses in which everything is said and done in very traditional ways, but by the time they have been talked over for a couple of hundred years in Iceland, something of the living language breaks through. Here for instance is the reply of King Eystein, engaged in a traditional boasting match with his brother King Sigurd Jerusalemfarer, who has been away crusading and performing mighty feats on the banks of the Jordan while his brother sat quietly back home in Norway:

It is but little I have to set up against this. I have heard that you had several battles abroad, but it was more useful for the country what I was doing in the meantime here at home. In the north at Vaage I built fish-houses, so that all the poor people could earn a livelihood, and support themselves. I built there a priest's house, and endowed a church, where before all the people almost were heathen; and on this account I think all these people will remember that Eystein had been king in Norway The road from Drontheim goes over the Dovrefjelds, and many people had to sleep out of doors, and made a very severe journey; but I built hospices, and supported them with money; and all travelers know that Eystein has been king in Norway. Out at Agdaness was a barren waste, and no harbor, and many a ship was lost there; and now there is a good harbor and ship-station, and a church also built there. There I raised beacons on all the high fields, of which all the people in the interior enjoy the benefit....Now though all this that I have reckoned up be but small doings, yet I am not sure if the people of the country have not been better served by it than by your killing blue [Old Norse for some reason had no word for black] men in the land of the Saracens and sending them to hell.

The most popular, and powerful,.of the sagas are the so-called family sagas, which are supposed to be the stories of the great-great-grandparents of the story tellers, in the heroic years following the first settlements in Iceland. They are written in a style so clear and simple and straightforward that modern readers coming to them for the first time are almost always convinced that they are literal eyewitness accounts of what their authors saw and heard in the great days of the Vikings. Modern Icelanders, who all feel sure they are personally descended from the saga heroes (though there is a gap of several centuries in the genealogical records) are firmly convinced of the historical accuracy of their stories, and will take you to see the very spot where Njal Thorgeirsson and his family were burned to death, and where Gunnar Hamondson, warned that his enemies were closing in on him, stopped on his way to the ship that was ready to take him away to safety abroad and looked out over his land and found it "so fair that it has never seemed to me so fair," and stayed home and was killed.

Open a family saga almost anywhere, and you will come across a passage like this, near the beginning of the Njalsaga, or Saga of Burnt Njal:

Hoskuld told his daughter Hallgerd about the marriage deal. She said, "Now I have proof of what I have suspected for a long time: you do not love me as much as you have always said you do, since you did not think it worth while to ask me about this before hand. Besides, this is not as good a marriage as you have promised me." It was obvious that she thought she was marrying beneath her. "Your pride", said Hoskuld, "is not of such concern to me that I would let it interfere with any arrangements I make. I, and not you, will make the decisions whenever we differ." "Pride", said Hallgerd "is a thing you and your kinsmen have in plenty, so it is not surprising if I have some too."

The narrative goes on in this down-to-earth tone, as Hallgerd goes on to marry and murder her father's choice of a husband, and then a second one. She marries a third, Gunnar Hamondson, and the day comes when he is fighting off a whole army of foes who are attacking his home, keeping them at bay with his bow and arrows. His bowstring is cut, and he asks Hallgerd to cut off two locks of her long golden hair, which flows below her knees, so that she and his mother can twist a new string out of it.

"Does anything depend on it?" asked Hallgerd.

"My life depends on it", said Gunnar, "for they will never overcome me if I use my bow".

"In that case", said Hallgerd, "I shall now remind you of the slap you once gave me. I do not care in the least whether you hold out a long time or not."

"To each his own way of earning fame", said Gunnar. "You will not be asked again".

He goes on fighting with his axe against his assailants, wounding eight of them, but in the end weight of numbers kills him.

It is the kind of fierce fight and noble death associated with heroes since mankind first began to admire heroes. What is new and unusual in the Icelandic tales is that Hoskuld and Gunnar and all the other characters who turn up as the drama unfolds are not demigods or kings of Mycenae. They are hard‑working farmers, who may moonlight periodically as pirates, but who spend most of their time building fences and bringing in the hay. Yet the saga treats them and all the round of their daily lives with complete seriousness.

The author of this as of other sagas makes a great point of providing detailed genealogies for his characters and having them participate in well-known historical events like the adoption of Christianity in Iceland in 1000 (the only country in which it was ever done by popular vote) and the battle of Clontarf in Ireland. Spoilsport scholars have demonstrated pretty convincingly that the story of Gunnar and Hallgerd, like all the other stories in the family sagas are not really family tales transmitted intact from generation to generation. They are historical fiction, based partly on more or less genuine family traditions but mostly created by the saga writers themselves out of their own personal experiences, or their miscellaneous reading in the books that were imported into Iceland. In the saga of Eric the Red, the Norsemen who have just discovered America around the year 1000 run into a one-legged creature, a uniped, which has popped straight out of the pages of the Encyclopedia of the 6th century Spanish Bishop Isidore of Seville, a best-seller through most of the Middle Ages.

So many miraculous elements borrowed from old books appear in the stories of Eric the Red and his son Leif the Lucky that some of those spoilsports concluded that they were all idle romances, that Eric had never discovered Greenland or Leif North America. The discovery of Eric's farmhouse in Greenland, with a chapel set off at an uncomfortable distance just as the saga says the old heathen did to keep his wife from bothering him with her everlasting pious talk, and the discovery of Norse remains in Newfoundland indicate at least that the saga-writers had real people in mind.

As for the Icelanders who listened to the stories, hour after hour, week after week, sipping what they could get in the way of liquor, they were hardly concerned with academic accuracy. Life was hard in the 13th century in Iceland which was entering a period of long decline, with old institutions breaking down in an atmosphere of random violence. People responded readily to the possibly inaccurate but very relevant stories of, say, Egil Skallagrimsson from the days when, at the age of six, he buried an axe in the skull of a ten-year-old boy who had treated him roughly in a ball-game, to the day when, grown old and impotent, bullied by maidservants, he put all the gold he had plundered in his lifetime into a sack and had to be forcibly restrained from taking it to Thingvellir, where the Icelandic parliament was meeting, and scattering it among the crowds so that he could see one last bloody battle before he died.

One of the things most often cited as an example of how the sagas are not be trusted is the story of the priest who dug up Egil's skull 150 years after his death and swung an axe at it but failed to dent it. Now comes the Scientific American (January 1995) to tell us that the thickness and hardness of the skull, and the scalloped ridges on top of it, as well as various characteristics of Egil's unbalanced and violent behavior, are all characteristic of the scientifically respectable Paget's Disease, symptoms of which have been found in Egyptian skulls three thousand years old. It can be unwise to sell Dame Gossip short.

The population of Iceland sank to a few thousand at one point, in the "little Ice Age" of the 17th and 18th centuries, and there was talk of transporting the lot of them to Denmark. What held them together, they all say, was reading the magnificent gossip about Egil Skallagrimsson and their other ancestors. The day of most rejoicing in the recent history of the republic was the one when a Danish cruiser brought back the collection of saga manuscripts which had been carried off to Copenhagen long ago. It was surely one of Dame Gossip's finest hours.

The Icelandic sagas did not have any effect on European literature till they began to be printed from old manuscripts in the 19th century. The general change of they represented, however, must have been widespread, because a similar shift from formal literary patterns to looser gossipy structures can be observed increasingly on the continent toward the end of the Middle Ages. Boccaccio's Decameron may be a turning point in world literature. Here is a collection of piquant, often scabrous, bits of gossip, not about Hebrew kings or barbarian chieftains, but about more or less anonymous Italians: gullible husbands, sex-starved hermits, dishonest tradesmen, nymphomaniac housewives, quite ordinary civilians, getting their way into and sometimes out of the ordinary scrapes of ordinary life. There had been plenty of such collections before, ragtag collections of what could be heard wherever people gathered; the Arabian Nights was such a collection. This time the stories were told with self-conscious art. Boccaccio found it natural to treat his commonplace characters and their disreputable acts with the elegance of style and psychological finesse that Dante brought to more serious themes like sin and redemption.

Boccaccio on his death-bed repented of having written the Decameron, just as Chaucer would repent of having written the equally scabrous Canterbury Tales, but the world had taken their message to heart. Gossip had found its way into the respectable world of belles lettres.

Europe, and later the Europeanized two-thirds of the world has been getting richer, and, in its own opinion at any rate, more enlightened almost steadily year by year, certainly century by century. A sign of both is the spread of literacy to increasing levels of the population. One consequence is that literature is no longer a public art, designed to be declaimed on the stage, or from the pulpit, or before groups of admiring friends. It can be a private affair. Books could now be bought at a price within the reach of paupers, and they could be read in the privacy of the home, and every man (even on occasion woman) had free choice of the book to be picked off the shelves. It is possible for a man like Montaigne, though he was mayor of Bordeaux and had numerous important political missions to carry out, to spend a good part of his life alone in his study, noting down his own reflections on what he has seen and what he has read; gossiping with himself..

Another consequence of the new social order is that people who in previous cultures would not have known how to hold a pen can now write letters or keep diaries with no regard for the current rules of rhetoric. Petronius's Trimalchio would never bother to learn how to sign his own name. In 17th century London a young man named Samuel Pepys, who is going to make a distinguished and profitable career in government service but who starts off as an impecunious easily bribable civil servant of a low rank can jot down the events of each day as it passes by, events like the Great Fire of London, where he sees everything including "the poor pigeons, loth to leave their homes, but hovered about the windows and balconys till they were, some of them burned, some broke their wings, and fell down" or great events of state:

22d. To the 'Change, and there, being among the merchants, I hear fully the news of our being beaten to dirt at Guinny by De Ruyter with his fleete; it being most wholly to the utter ruin of our Royall Company, and reproach and shame to the whole nation

or little events like:

19th. Going to bed betimes last night we waked betimes, and from our people's being forced to take the key to go out to light a candle, I was very angry and began to find fault with my wife for not commanding her servants as she ought. Thereupon she giving me some cross answer I did strike her over her left eye such a blow as the poor wretch did cry out and was in great pain, but yet her spirit was such as to endeavour to bite and scratch me. But I coying with her made her leave crying, and sent for butter and parsley, and friends presently one with another, and I up, vexed at my heart to think what I had done, for she was forced to lay a poultice or something to her eye all day, and is black, and the people of the house observed it. But I was forced to rise, and up with Sir J. Minnes to White Hall, and there we waited on the Duke. Thence to the 'Change and there walked up and down, and then home. After going up to my wife (whose eye is very bad, but she is in very good temper to me), and after dinner, I to the 'Change, and there found Bagwell's wife waiting for me and took her away, and to an alehouse, and there I made much of her. Then away and I to the office. Thence to supper with my wife, very pleasant, and then a little to my office and to bed.

20th. Up and walked to Deptford, where after doing something at the yard without being observed, with Bagwell home to his house, and there was very kindly used, and the poor people did get a dinner for me in their fashion, of which I also eat very well. After dinner I found occasion of sending him abroad and then alone avec elle. By and by he coming back again I took leave and walked home.

all of it adding up to a mass of gossip which is now assigned reading in courses on English literature.

As the centuries go by, there is more and more of this kind of private gossip by letter-writers like Madame de Sévigné and Fanny Burney, diarists like John Evelyn, collectors of scabrous anecdotes like the Seigneur de BrantÙme, all prize pupils of Dame Gossip.

The enlarged world thus opened up to literature is evoked with the eloquence and enthusiasm, and incoherence, of the true gossip, by the 17th-century antiquary John Aubrey in a letter to his friend Anthony à Wood:

I have put in writing these minutes and lives, tumultuously as they occurred to my thoughts; or as, occasionally, I had information of them... 'Tis a task that I never thought to have undertaken, till you imposed it upon me, saying that I was fit for it by reason of my general acquaintance, having now not only lived over half a century of years in the court, but have also been much tumbled up and down in it; which has made me well-known: besides the modern advantage of coffee-houses in this great city: before which men knew not how to be acquainted, but with their own relations, or societies. ..I here lay down to you (out of the conjunct friendship between us) the truth, the naked and plain truth: which is here exposed so bare, that the very pudenda are not covered, and afford many passages that would raise a blush on a young virgin's cheek...What uncertainty do we find in printed histories: they are either treading too near on the heel of truth, that they dare not speak plain: or else for want of intelligence (things being antiquated) become too obscure and dark. I do not here repeat anything already published (to the best of my remembrance) and I fancy myself all along discoursing with you...So that you make me to renew my acquaintance with my old and deceased friends, and to rejuvenesce (as it were) which is the pleasure of old men. 'Tis pity that such minutes had not been taken 100 years since or more: for want whereof many worthy men's names and inventions are swallowed up in oblivion...I remember one saying of General Lambert's, 'That the best men are but men at the best,' of this you will meet with divers examples in this rude and hasty collection.

Aubrey practiced what he preached. Here he is, in his Brief Lives.

describing the last hours of Francis Bacon, Lord St. Albans:

Mr Hobbes told me that the cause of his lordship's death was trying of an experiment: viz., as he was taking the air in a coach with Dr Witherborn, (a Scotchman, physician to the king) towards Highgate, snow lay on the ground, and it came into my lord's thoughts, why flesh might not be preserved in snow, as in salt. They were resolved they would try the experiment presently. They alighted out of the coach, and went into a poor woman's house at the bottom of Highgate Hill, and bought a hen, and made the woman exenterate [gut] it, and then stuffed the body with snow, and my lord did help to do it himself. The snow so chilled him that he immediately fell so extremely ill, that he could not return to his lodgings (I suppose at Gray's Inn), but went to the Earl of Arundel's house at Highgate, where they put him into a good bed warmed with a pan, but it was a damp bed that had not been lain-in in about a year before, which gave him such a cold that in two or three days, as I remember he [Mr Hobbes] told me, he died of suffocation.

Bacon was of course a very famous man, the founder of modern scientific method, and it would be possible to read into this incident an ironic comment on scientific method. One of the great preachers of the Middle Ages might have described a similar episode in greater and grimmer detail as an example of the vanity of human wishes and a call for repentance. For Aubrey, there is no question of philosophy or religion involved. All he wants to do is to tell his friend, or any other friends who come along, about a man, a man at the best.

He would write with the same random all-inclusive zest about Bacon and Shakespeare and Dr. William Butler who

never took the degree of Doctor, though he was the greatest physician of his time...

A gentleman lying a-dying, sent his servant with a horse for the doctor. The horse being exceeding dry, ducks down his head strongly into the water, and plucks down the doctor over his head, who was plunged in the water over head and ears. The doctor was madded, and would return home. The man swore he shoud not: drew his sword, and gave him ever and anon (when he would return) a little prick, and so drove him before him....

The doctor, lying at the Savoy in London, where was a balcony looked into the Thames, a patient came to him that was grievously tormented with the ague. The doctor orders a boat to be in readiness under his window, and discoursed with the patient (a gentleman) in the balcony, when on a signal given, two or three lusty fellows came behind the gentleman and threw him a matter of 20 feet into the Thames. This surprise absolutely cured him...

Another time one came to him for the cure of a cancer (or ulcer) in the bowels. Said the doctor, 'Can ye shit?' 'Yes,' said the patient. So the doctor ordered a bason for him to shit, when he had so done, the doctor commanded him to eat it up. This did the cure.

So many of the recurring themes of Dame Gossip's repertory are scattered

through Aubrey's miscellaneous notes. There is the desire to set the record straight:

About nine or ten years ago, Mr Hooke wrote to Mr Isaac Newton of Trinity College, Cambridge, to make a demonstration of this theory (of gravity), not telling him, at first, the proportion of the gravity to the distance, nor what was the curved line that was thereby made. Mr Newton, in his answer to this letter, did express that he had not known of it; and, in his first attempt about it, he calculated the carve by supposing the attraction to be the same at all distances: upon which, Mr Hooke sent, in his next letter, the whole of his hypothesis, that is, that the gravitation was reciprocal to the square of the distance...which is the whole celestial theory, concerning which Mr Newton has a demonstration, not at all owning he received the first intimation of it from Mr Hooke

And there is the desire to throw up the good old days against the degenerate

present:

T.T. an old gentleman that remembers Queen Elizabeth's reign, has seen much in his time both at home and abroad: and with much choler inveighs against things now: 'Alas! O'God's will! Nowadays everyone, forsooth! must have carriages, forsooth! In those days gentlemen kept horses for a man at arms besides their hackney and hunting horses. This made the gentry robust and hardy and fit for service: were able to be their own guides in case of a rout or so, when occasion should so require. Our gentry forsooth in these days are so effeminated that they know not how to ride on horseback. -- Then when the gentry met, it was not at poor blind sordid ale-house, to drink up a barrel of drink and lie drunk there two or three days together: fall together by their ears. They met then in the fields, well-appointed, with their hounds or their hawks: kept up hospitality...Then the elders and better sort of the parish sat and beheld the pastimes of the young men, as wrestling, shooting at butts bowling and dancing. All this is now lost: and pride, whoring, wantonness, and drunkenness.'

This may not seem, strictly speaking, like gossip, which is concerned

exclusively with the up-to-date, but remember that the golden days of the past are

always being recreated at the present moment in the memories of old-timers, so

that Mr. T.T.'s laments, to those hearing them for the first time, must have seemed just as timely as Aubrey's account of Thomas Goffe the poet and preacher:

His wife pretended to fall in love with him, by hearing of him preach: upon which said one Thomas Thimble (one of the esquire beadles in Oxford and his confidant) to him: "Do not marry her: if thou dost, she will break thy heart." He was not obsequious to his friend's sober advice, but for her sake altered his condition, and cast anchor here. One time some of his Oxford friends made a visit to him: she looked upon them with an ill eye, as if they had come to eat her out of her house and home (as they say): she provided a dish of milk and some eggs for supper, and nothing more. They perceived her niggardliness, and that her husband was inwardly troubled at it, (she wearing the breeches) so they were resolved to be merry at supper, and talk in Latin, that she could not hold, but fell a-weeping, and rose from the table. The next day, Mr Goffe ordered a better dinner for them, and sent for some wine. 'Twas no long time before this Xantippe [the shrewish wife of Socrates who was said by Athenian gossips to have taught him the art of contradiction] made Mr Thimble's prediction good: and when he died the last words he spoke were "Oracle, oracle, Tom Thimble," and so he gave up the ghost.

Saint Simon was careful not to publish anything in his lifetime, he probably would have ended his days in a dungeon if he had, but he wrote as if he was writing for posterity, not to win any literary prizes but to give it a true picture of his time. His picture is all the more lifelike for being quite narrow, it is restricted to people of his own class and casts only a few sidelights on the wars and religious controversies and the creation of a modern bureaucratic state which, for the conventional historian, make up most of the substance of those years. Saint Simon had little of value to say about affairs of state because Louis XIV built Versailles specifically to keep the brawling irresponsible hereditary aristocracy, of which Saint Simon was a very haughty member though his dukedom went back only one generation, from having anything to do with running the country. He achieved this goal by packing them, the whole upper class of France, into the miles of rooms that formed his chateau of Versailles, where they could play and dance and flirt and fornicate and drink and gamble to their hearts' content when they were not being sent off to be killed in the king's various wars. If ever there was a greenhouse built for the flourishing of gossip, this was it:

It was an ingrown inward-looking community, like any small town in Eudora Welty's Mississippi, where everybody not only knew everybody else but knew exactly what everybody else was doing. There were no corridors in Versailles, only rooms: to reach the bedroom of his new mistress the Marquise de Montespan the King had to pass through the bedroom of his old mistress Mlle. de la ValliËre. Back and forth through these rooms the lords and ladies in their perruques and high heels milled continuously, backbiting, back-scratching, intriguing, squabbling over points of etiquette and count ritual ‑‑ who would pass the royal nightshirt over the naked shoulders of majesty when majesty rose in the morning? -- as they made their daily rounds of all-too-human behavior, fawning on each other, snubbing each other, climbing in and out of each other's beds, angling for a nod or a smile or a hat raised a fraction more than usual which would be a sign of royal favor. In the middle of it all was the little Duke, bobbing around on the highest pair of heels at court, taking it all in and writing it all down, everything he saw or heard, every day for forty years.

But Saint Simon had also the sharp eye and taste for dramatic color that mark the expert gossip, and he was one of the great masters of French prose. It was a time when French literature had reached almost the outer limits of formality, when every syllable and every phrase had to be weighed and measured for felicitous effect according to an elaborate and rigid set of rules. Saint Simon was a very conscientious writer who worked hard at his sentences and often rewrote them several times, but he was unaware of any rules. He wanted to give the effect of life passing by in all its quickness, color, vitality. He boasted of paying no attention to grammar and syntax, he wanted the pell‑mell rush of what he saw going on around him. He invented his own racy style, inventing words when he needed to (he is said to have coined the words patriote and publicité}. And it all comes out so lively and direct ‑‑ so gossipy ‑‑ that the court of Louis XIV is better known, in the details of its daily operations and in overall tone, than any similar body of people in history. Editors have shown that he often got his facts wrong, and his interpretations even more so, but from the moment we dip into his memoirs we have no doubt that if we were to be transported to the Sun King's Versailles we would feel perfectly at home there.

Everything goes down in the ramshackle order of real life: war, politics, religion, intrigue, money, sex, disease, death, ambition, lawsuits, slander, digestive upsets. He swings from subject to subject as the wind of Versailles gossip blows him. Now a great battle is being fought in Flanders, and he hears all about the disgraceful bickering of the French generals trying to put the blame on each other as their army disintegrates. In the next breath he is telling the merry story of M. de Roquelaure, bribed by the offer of a dukedom to marry one of the king's girlfriends. Almost immediately a daughter is born and the new duke greets her with the words, "Bonjour mademoiselle, I hadn't expected you quite so soon".

He keeps a sharp lookout of people like the Princess d'Harcourt who has become a great favorite of the king's second wife, Mme de Maintenon, "for unpleasant reasons" (Mme de Maintenon had been at one time the mistress of her father). This princess he describes as "a gross vulgar bustling creature with a skin the color of putty, thick blubber lips and hair like tow, perpetually falling down like all the rest of her soiled and filthy attire." She also cheated at cards. One night the young Duc de Bourgogne, the king's grandson, and his bubbly little wife crept into her bedroom and pelted her with snowballs. "The dreadful old creature woke up with a bound, all crumpled, furious and gasping for breath, with snow in her ears, her hair unfastened, screaming her head off, and wriggling like an eel to find some means of escape. The scene kept them amused for more than half an hour, until the nymph was awash in her bed, with water everywhere and a flood on the floor. Next day, she sulked.".

The Duchess of Bourgogne, bored to distraction by her dull pious husband, falls in love with the chevalier de Nangis. He is delighted to be involved with a girl who is scheduled to be one day Queen of France, but he is already in love with one of her ladies in waiting, Mlle. de la VirilliËre, who threatens to create a scene, and makes everyone nervous. Enter the Comte de Mauleuvrier who falls madly in love with the Duchess. He pretends to be consumptive and to have lost his voice, which allows him to keep out of the army and to be able to speak to his idol in passionate whispers out of everyone's hearing. She is pleased enough to have another handsome admirer until the day he whispers to her that if she doesn't send Nangis packing he will go to the king and tell him all. The king is notorious for disapproving all royal adulteries except his own, and is capable of blasting the reputations and ruining the lives of all concerned. There is general panic throughout the Bourgogne household until Mauleuvrier's father, the wise old Comte de Tessé, who has just been appointed ambassador to Spain, convinces the king's doctor to tell Mauleuvrier the French climate is killing him and order him to go off to some warmer place like Madrid. So Mauleuvrier departs, eventually he commits suicide, and everyone in the Duchess's little circle, which includes Saint Simon and his wife, can breathe easily again.

Great events appear as distant noises in the background. Disaster follows disaster in the war. The peasants starve, the enemy is crossing the frontier. But the king insists that everyone be gay and smiling; the balls must go on, the card games must begin again a few hours after the death of the king's brother.

With his broad‑minded aristocratic insouciance, Saint Simon could take in his stride episodes that the plebeian practitioners of the art of gossip in our own day, the Walter Winchells and Kitty Kellys would suppress in the name of good taste. In one passage he describes the mission of a bishop sent by the prince of Parma to negotiate with the Marshal Duke de Vendome, the king's cousin and commander of the French armies in Italy, who prides himself of observing the rude simple manners of the ancient Romans. The bishop was so shocked at "being received by the Marshal on his chaise percée [the 17th century equivalent of our toilet bowl], and more distressed still when his host got up, turned his back and wiped himself," that he tucked up his skirts and ran back to Parma. The Prince then dispatched a young priest named Alberoni to Vendome's headquarters, where he was received in the same manner as the bishop. "When Alberoni saw the exposed portions of Vendome's anatomy turned towards him, he cried O culo di Angelo! [oh angelic ass