, contenance),
Mais mieux pleurassent mes oeil (yeux),
Ne nul ne sait le travail
Que mon pauvre coeur endure.
Pour ce (je) muce (cache) ma douleur
Qu'en nul je ne vois pitie.
Plus on a cause de pleur (pleurer),
Moins on trouve d'amitie.
Pour ce plainte ne murmure
Ne fais de mon piteux deuil.
Aincois (plutot) (je) ris quand pleurer veuil (veux),
Et sans rime et sans mesure
Je chante par couverture."

It is, you see, the old _motif_, in melodramatic pathos that of the
harlequin Dorkins, who must play his part in the pantomime even though
his child lie dying, in tragedy that of Lady Macbeth, who must play the
queen by day and suffer the torments of the murderess at night. It is
not the novelty but the universality and truth of the idea or sentiment
that makes Christine's verses rank as poetry.

But love songs alone could not support a family of five; the Church, so
often the refuge of forlorn women, might have offered Christine a
refuge, but not support for those dependent on her, since she had not
sufficient influence to assure herself of any office of dignity and
emolument in the convents of the proud and wealthy. Her pen must be her
resource; and thus Christine de Pisan became not merely an authoress,
but the first authoress to support herself by her pen. For some of her
shorter poems she received not inconsiderable sums; but longer works,
works of more permanent value must be undertaken, and Christine
valiantly set to work.

Her first task was to secure a patron, for only some great lord could
afford to pay sums sufficient to enable her to live: there was no eager
public of thousands, educated by the printing press to expect, to
welcome, to demand fresh intellectual food. One of her patrons was the
great Duke of Burgundy, Philippe le Hardi, to whom she dedicated a very
long and partly autobiographical poem called _La Mutation de Fortune_.
She tells her story with rather too much display of the fact that she
knows all the famous apologues and anecdotes that might apply to her
case; still, it is an earnest and in some ways interesting account of
how she had been compelled to take up a profession not then regarded as
befitting a woman how,--as she says, she had turned herself "from woman
to man." She read this work to Philippe de Bourgogne in that same palace
where she had once been a familiar inmate, where she had playe