Jean de Meung

An Encyclopaedia of Occultism (1920)

Jean de Meung owes his celebrity to his poetical genius rather than his alchemical powers; to his Roman de la Rose , rather than to his rhyming treatise upon the hermetic philosophy. He was born about 1280, and flourished through the reigns of Louis X., Philip the Long, Charles IV., and Philip de Valois. He appears to have possessed a light and railing wit, and a keen appreciation of a jest; and it may well be doubted whether he was altogether sincere in his praises of alchemy. Having composed a quatrain on woman, which stigmatized her in the strongest terms, the ladies of Charies VI.'s court resolved to revenge their affronted honour, and surrounding him in the royal antechanber, desired the courtiers present to strip him preparatory to their inflicting a sound flagellation. Jean solicited to be heard before he was condemned and punished; and having obtained an interval of grace, set forth, with fluent eloquence, that he was certainly the author of the calumnious verses, but that they were not intended to vilipend all womankind. He referred only to the vicious and debased, and not to such models of purity as he saw around him. Nevertheless, if any lady present felt that the verses really applied to her, he was her very humble servant, and would submit to a well-deserved chastisement. Like most of the medieval poets, Jean de Meung was a bitter enemy of the priesthood, and he contrived with great ingenuity a posthumous satire upon their inordinate greed. He bequeathed in his will, as a gift to the Cordeliers, a chest of immense weight. As his fame as an alchemist was wide-spread, the brotherhood accepted the legacy in the belief that the chest contained the golden results of his quest of the Philosopher's Stone. But when they opened it, their dismayed eyes rested only on a pile of slates, covered with the most unintelligible hieroglyphics and cabalistic characters. The perpetrator of this practical joke was hardly, we think, a very sincere believer in the wonders of alchemy. (See Devon, Witchcraft in.)