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TITLE: DOMNEI
AUTHOR: JAMES BRANCH CABELL
EBOOK: E05603 (O'Briens Book Cellar)
LANGUAGE: ENGLISH

Domnei

A Comedy of Woman-Worship

By

JAMES BRANCH CABELL

1920

"_En cor gentil domnei per mort no passa_."

TO

SARAH READ McADAMS

IN GRATITUDE AND AFFECTION

"The complication of opinions and ideas, of affections and habits,
which prompted the chevalier to devote himself to the service of a
lady, and by which he strove to prove to her his love, and to merit
hers in return, was expressed, in the language of the Troubadours, by a
single word, by the word _domnei_, a derivation of _domna_, which may
be regarded as an alteration of the Latin _domina_, lady, mistress."

--C. C. FAURIEL,
_History of Provencal Poetry_.

CONTENTS

CHAPTER

A PREFACE

CRITICAL COMMENT

THE ARGUMENT

PART ONE--PERION

     I  HOW PERION WAS UNMASKED

    II  HOW THE VICOMTE WAS VERY GAY

   III  HOW MELICENT WOOED

    IV  HOW THE BISHOP AIDED PERION

     V  HOW MELICENT WEDDED

PART TWO--MELICENT

    VI  HOW MELICENT SOUGHT OVERSEA

   VII  HOW PERION WAS FREED

  VIII  HOW DEMETRIOS WAS AMUSED

    IX  HOW TIME SPED IN HEATHENRY

     X  HOW DEMETRIOS WOOED

PART THREE--DEMETRIOS

    XI  HOW TIME SPED WITH PERION

   XII  HOW DEMETRIOS WAS TAKEN

  XIII  HOW THEY PRAISED MELICENT

   XIV  HOW PERION BRAVED THEODORET.

    XV  HOW PERION FOUGHT

   XVI  HOW DEMETRIOS MEDITATED.

  XVII  HOW A MINSTREL CAME

 XVIII  HOW THEY CRIED QUITS

   XIX  HOW FLAMBERGE WAS LOST

    XX  HOW PERION GOT AID

PART FOUR--AHASUERUS

   XXI  HOW DEMETRIOS HELD HIS CHATTEL

  XXII  HOW MISERY HELD NACUMERA.

 XXIII  HOW DEMETRIOS CRIED FAREWELL

  XXIV  HOW ORESTES RULED

   XXV  HOW WOMEN TALKED TOGETHER

  XXVI  HOW MEN ORDERED MATTERS

 XXVII  HOW AHASUERUS WAS CANDID

XXVIII  HOW PERION SAW MELICENT

  XXIX  HOW A BARGAIN WAS CRIED

   XXX  HOW MELICENT CONQUERED

THE AFTERWORD

BIBLIOGRAPHY

A Preface

By
Joseph Hergesheimer

It would be absorbing to discover the present feminine attitude toward
the profoundest compliment ever paid women by the heart and mind of men
in league--the worshipping devotion conceived by Plato and elevated to
a living faith in mediaeval France. Through that renaissance of a
sublimated passion _domnei_ was regarded as a throne of alabaster by
the chosen figures of its service: Melicent, at Bellegarde, waiting for
her marriage with King Theodoret, held close an image of Perion made of
substance that time was powerless to destroy; and which, in a life of
singular violence, where blood hung scarlet before men's eyes like a
tapestry, burned in a silver flame untroubled by the fate of her body.
It was, to her, a magic that kept her inviolable, perpetually, in spite
of marauding fingers, a rose in the blanched perfection of its early
flowering.

The clearest possible case for that religion was that it transmuted the
individual subject of its adoration into the deathless splendor of a
Madonna unique and yet divisible in a mirage of earthly loveliness. It
was heaven come to Aquitaine, to the Courts of Love, in shapes of vivid
fragrant beauty, with delectable hair lying gold on white samite worked
in borders of blue petals. It chose not abstractions for its faith, but
the most desirable of all actual--yes, worldly--incentives: the sister,
it might be, of Count Emmerick of Poictesme. And, approaching beatitude
not so much through a symbol of agony as by the fragile grace of a
woman, raising Melicent to the stars, it fused, more completely than in
any other aspiration, the spirit and the flesh.

However, in its contact, its lovers' delight, it was no more than a
slow clasping and unclasping of the hands; the spirit and flesh,
merged, became spiritual; the height of stars was not a figment....
Here, since the conception of _domnei_ has so utterly vanished, the
break between the ages impassable, the sympathy born of understanding
is interrupted. Hardly a woman, to-day, would value a sigh the passion
which turned a man steadfastly away that he might be with her forever
beyond the parched forest of death. Now such emotion is held strictly
to the gains, the accountability, of life's immediate span; women have
left their cloudy magnificence for a footing on earth; but--at least in
warm graceful youth--their dreams are still of a Perion de la Foret.
These, clear-eyed, they disavow; yet their secret desire, the most
Elysian of all hopes, to burn at once with the body and the soul, mocks
what they find.

That vision, dominating Mr. Cabell's pages, the record of his revealed
idealism, brings specially to _Domnei_ a beauty finely escaping the
dusty confusion of any present. It is a book laid in a purity, a
serenity, of space above the vapors, the bigotry and engendered spite,
of dogma and creed. True to yesterday, it will be faithful of
to-morrow; for, in the evolution of humanity, not necessarily the turn
of a wheel upward, certain qualities have remained at the center,
undisturbed. And, of these, none is more fixed than an abstract love.

Different in men than in women, it is, for the former, an instinct, a
need, to serve rather than be served: their desire is for a shining
image superior, at best, to both lust and maternity. This
consciousness, grown so dim that it is scarcely perceptible, yet still
alive, is not extinguished with youth, but lingers hopeless of
satisfaction through the incongruous years of middle age. There is
never a man, gifted to any degree with imagination, but eternally
searches for an ultimate loveliness not disappearing in the circle of
his embrace--the instinctively Platonic gesture toward the only
immortality conceivable in terms of ecstasy.

A truth, now, in very low esteem! With the solidification of society,
of property, the bond of family has been tremendously exalted, the mere
fact of parenthood declared the last sanctity. Together with this,
naturally, the persistent errantry of men, so vulgarly misunderstood,
has become only a reprehensible paradox. The entire shelf of James
Branch Cabell's books, dedicated to an unquenchable masculine idealism,
has, as well, a paradoxical place in an age of material sentimentality.
Compared with the novels of the moment, _Domnei_ is an isolated, a
heroic fragment of a vastly deeper and higher structure. And, of its
many aspects, it is not impossible that the highest, rising over even
its heavenly vision, is the rare, the simple, fortitude of its
statement.

Whatever dissent the philosophy of Perion and Melicent may breed, no
one can fail to admire the steady courage with which it is upheld.
Aside from its special preoccupation, such independence in the face of
ponderable threat, such accepted isolation, has a rare stability in a
world treacherous with mental quicksands and evasions. This is a valor
not drawn from insensibility, but from the sharpest possible
recognition of all the evil and Cyclopean forces in existence, and a

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