SOURCE: Kibler, William W. “The Narrator as Key to Alain Chartier's La Belle Dame sans mercy.” The French Review 52, no. 5 (April 1979): 714-23.

In the following essay, Kibler contends that, rather than being “a piece of escapist literature written only to divert the court,” as it is often characterized, La Belle Dame sans mercy responds to the political and social upheaval caused by the Hundred Years' War by urging “a return to the chivalric virtues of honesty, truthfulness, loyalty and honor.”

In the summer of 1422, Alain Chartier, secrétaire du roi de France, composed an impassioned plea to the three estates to end corruption and restore the rule of honesty and honor, to cease quarreling among themselves and to rediscover their common purpose in opposition to the English. This masterpiece of oratorical prose, known as the Quadrilogue invectif, was written when France was near the nadir of her fortunes...