Antoine de la Sale
Frontispiece from 1830 edition of Le
Petit Jehan de Saintré
(1456) by Antoine de la Salle
born c. 1386, near Arles, Provence
[France]
died c. 1460
French writer chiefly remembered for
his Petit Jehan de Saintré, a romance
marked by a great gift for the
observation of court manners and a keen
sense of comic situation and dialogue.
From 1400 to 1448 La Sale served the
dukes of Anjou, Louis II, Louis III, and
René, as squire, soldier, administrator
and, ultimately, governor of René’s son
and heir, Jean (John of Calabria). The
Angevin claims to the kingdom of Sicily
brought him repeatedly into Italy, and
his didactic works contain several
accounts of his unusual and picturesque
experiences there. He was in Italy for
Louis II’s 1409–11 campaign against
Ladislas of Durazzo. In 1415 he took
part in a Portuguese expedition against
the Moors of Ceuta. La Sale visited the
Sibyl’s mountain near Norcia, seat of
the legend later transported to Germany
and attached to the name of Tannhäuser;
he relates the legend in great detail in
his Paradis de la reine Sibylle.
He became governor of the sons of
Louis of Luxembourg, count of St. Pol in
1448. There he wrote La Salle (1451), a
collection of moral anecdotes; Le Petit
Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little John of
Saintré, 1931); Du Réconfort à Madame de
Fresne (1457; “For the Consolation of
Madame de Fresne,” on the death of her
young son); and a Lettre sur les
tournois (1459; “A Letter on the
Tournaments”).
Jehan de Saintré is a
pseudobiographical romance of a knight
at the court of Anjou who, in real life,
achieved great fame in the mid-14th
century. Modern criticism ascribes an
important place to Saintré in the
development of French prose fiction and
also extols the grace, wit, sensibility,
and realism of the writer.
