SOURCE: Auerbach, Erich. “Madame du Chastel.” In Mimesis: The Representation of Reality in Western Literature, translated by Willard R. Trask, pp. 232-61. Princeton, N. J.: Princeton University Press, 1953.

In the following essay, Auerbach studies Le réconfort de Madame du Fresne, comparing the work to the anonymous Les XV joies de mariage and finding the former composition to be more elevated and ceremonious than the latter work.

Antoine de la Sale, a Provençal knight of the late feudal type, soldier, court official, tutor of princes, authority on heraldry and tournaments, was born about 1390 and died after 1461. For the greater part of his life he was in the service of the Anjous, who fought until about 1440 for their Kingdom of Naples but who also held extensive possessions in France. He left them in 1448 to become the tutor of the sons of Louis de Luxembourg, Count of Saint-Pol, who...