Richeut

Richeut is a delightfully obscene Old French fabliau which was written by an anonymous poet in the middle of the twelfth century. It's written in a poetic metre called rhythmi caudati ("rhyme with a tail"), which is to say three octosyllabic verses followed by a half-length verse that introduces a new rhyme.

Even if you don't understand Old French, it's possible to enjoy the singsong, playground nature of the rhymes, which -- ironically -- were most often used for stories about saints in this period. Read it aloud to yourself and you'll see what I mean:

Richeut cheats nobles,
Priests, knights, townsmen,
and peasants.
She has a hand in every pocket.
She even cheats other whores.
Hers is a fierce and shameless heart.

The main character is a vicious, manipulative prostitute who has sex with as many powerful men as she can, including a priest, a knight (seignor Vïel, "Sir Geezer"), and a childless bourgeois. When she finally gets pregnant, she approaches every wealthy man she's slept with, telling him that the baby is his. Each of the men pays her a vast sum of money to keep her quiet, and she becomes rich thanks to this scheme.

There is no peasant, no vagrant,
no squire, no forester,
that she doesn't ransom.

Eventually she gives birth to a son, whom she names Samson. She displays the boy to each of the gullible "fathers," getting shush-money out of all of them and catapulting herself into the high life.

If this were all there were to the poem, I would dismiss it as an amusing bit of medieval misogyny and go on my way. But when Samson grows to adulthood, the poem takes a turn for the surreal.

Richeut's son, like his mother, is a sweet-talker, a flatterer, and a lech. He masters courtly games, gambling, and song. He does not meet a single woman he can't seduce. Scandalously, he becomes a monk, then a priest (like mother, like son: Richeut was briefly a nun), so that he can loot the church treasury and deflower all the women in the cloisters.

At one point Samson asks his mother the question that's been on his mind all his life:

"Tell me, dear mother,
which of the three is my father?"
"Good son, I don't know.
For I've coupled with all three,
and a thousand others.
I'm not ashamed to say.
How can a woman who's been a mount
for this kind of population count
her children?"

Mother and son enter into a good-natured argument about what ought to be done next. Richeut says that Samson's best approach would be to extort money out of one of the wealthy men in town, but Samson replies that Richeut has already made paupers out of all of them. Instead, he would rather get money out of women.

Richeut laughs and tells him that men are much more gullible than women, and that all men will end up impoverished by wicked women in the end. Samson declares that no woman can fool him, and the two lay a bet:

"Samson, if you can do what you say,
I will know that you truly are my son."

Over the course of the next three hundred lines, Samson perfects the sexual techniques that his mother taught him -- the implication is that she taught them to him in an a... um, hands-on kind of way. Anyway, he leaves home and travels through all the countries of Europe, engaging in every depraved (but always heterosexual) act that he can think of. He breaks hearts, empties wallets, and reduces hundreds of decent women to lives of harlotry.

Twelve years later, he and his mother are reunited -- but he does not recognize her, since she is wearing a nun's habit. As you can imagine, it all ends very badly for him, since Richeut is able to exploit her anonymity to best advantage, using her pox-scarred maid Herselot as bait. She wins the bet and Samson is humiliated.

The poem is clearly infected with deep cynicism and misanthropy, typical in the fabliaux but wildly exaggerated here. That said, it seems that our anonymous author does not hate everyone equally: he has a very special venom reserved for women:

It is Samson who avenges us all
against the bitches
who act so proud with us.

So it would be naive to say that the author thinks women are more intelligent than men just because Richeut "wins" in the end. Women, in his mind, are simply more wicked; Samson's conquests are described with no small amount of locker-room glee ("he fucks them all flat on their backs; he pushes their knees up to their chests," vv. 945-948), while Richeut's exploits are recounted with paranoid horror ("whoever fucks her is very unhappy," v. 614).

Nevertheless, if you're a cynic yourself -- if you think that everyone in the priesthood and the government is thoroughly corrupt -- then reading this poem might remind you that you're not the first person to have those suspicions. And besides, it's outrageous fun to read all the dirty bits out loud.

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