Beatrix

Beatrix is the former beloved of the Sire of Keridreux and the figure who gives his comic misfortunes their emotional and supernatural shape. She first appears as a woman with enough authority to interrupt a public execution, but her intervention also reopens the knight’s buried attachment to her. Through her conversation, refusal, and final trick beside the river, Beatrix becomes at once rescuer, lost love, moral opponent, and apparent agent of the uncanny.

Identity and First Appearance

Beatrix enters at the moment when the Sire of Keridreux is about to kill Hugues Wulfric. After Hugues has been dragged from the river, the knight climbs onto the bank, clears a space with his sword, and approaches his intended victim. Beatrix breaks through the spectators and places herself between them, requesting the vassal’s life as a boon in the name of chivalry. Her intervention is immediately powerful: the knight, who had been inflamed by rage, drops his sword and stands speechless at the sight of her.

Her authority is personal as well as ceremonial. The Sire of Keridreux declares that he would rather have been commanded to fetch the head of the king of the Mohammedans or perform another service worthy of her beauty and his loyalty. Beatrix answers his idealized language with scornful precision, repeating the word loyalty rather than accepting the courtly declaration at face value. She then orders Hugues away, calling him a naughty fish-seller and blessing his escape, while Hugues kisses the hem of her mantle and disappears into the crowd.

Former Love and the Marriage Wound

Once Beatrix has taken the knight into her house, the comic spectacle of his drenched clothes gives way to the history of their failed love. He complains that his servant has humiliated him in her presence after he had dressed himself in a manner befitting his spurs and travelled specifically to speak with her. His appeal presents Beatrix as the sovereign of his beauty, but she answers with practical concern about the cold, the danger of his wet clothing, and the possibility of cupping. Her wit punctures the knight’s heroic self-presentation without denying that she understands his distress.

The mention of the Dame of Keridreux reveals the cause of that distress. Beatrix asks after the knight’s wife, and the question provokes anger and confession. He says that Beatrix once treated him with a seeming slight, which he understood as a deliberate insult; in a fit of fury and despite, he went home and married another woman. He insists that he loved Beatrix as a man and a soldier, while he failed to recognize the conventions of modern noble and knightly love. Having exchanged a pledge and drunk with her from the cup of faith and unity, he assumed that their bond pointed toward holy wedlock rather than toward the uncertainty, doubt, and suffering celebrated by minstrels.

Beatrix accepts part of the blame but does not simply submit to his version of the past. Weeping, she calls him fierce and sudden-tempered and admits that she may have concealed the softness of her heart behind a hard expression. She had expected greater patience and forbearance from him than his constancy could provide. Her account gives her an interior position within the failed romance: she was not merely the inaccessible beloved imagined by the knight, but a woman whose guarded manner helped produce the misunderstanding. At the same time, the scene shows how completely the knight still interprets their history through the language of masculine honor, service, insult, and possession.

Refusal of the Escape

The old attachment reaches its most dangerous point when the Sire of Keridreux declares that he is weary of life, intends to abandon his inheritance, and will go to Italy. He asks Beatrix to flee with him, promising to beg or buy a dispensation from the pope and make her his wife in Rome. The proposal converts his nostalgia into an attempted rupture with his social and religious obligations: he is prepared to leave his inheritance, cross national borders, and seek official permission to make the former beloved his lawful wife.

Beatrix reacts with astonishment and horror rather than romantic acceptance. She rejects the idea that distance could free them from the laws of Heaven, arguing that Italy, Spain, or England would offer no refuge from spiritual judgment. Her warning specifically returns the knight to the Dame of Keridreux, imagining the wife seeking permission from Saint Peter to forgive him through the bars of Paradise. Beatrix therefore refuses to treat geography, papal dispensation, or renewed passion as solutions to the moral consequences of his marriage.

Her refusal is not passive. She actively frightens him by asking whether he dares return alone to his house at so late an hour with mortal sin in his thoughts. When a wolf howls in the neighboring forest, she presents the sound as a possible warning from the Virgin and suggests that it resembles the knight’s own voice. The remark exploits a fear already latent in him: only the previous night he had dreamed that he was transformed into a loup-garou, and Hugues had supposedly seen the Leader of Wolves emerge from the pool into which the knight had plunged. Beatrix’s words turn private anxiety into immediate evidence, at least in the knight’s imagination.

The River Trick and Apparent Supernatural Power

As evening deepens, Beatrix’s role changes from conversational antagonist to deceptive performer. After the knight has left, he hears her call him back to help wring a garment that is too heavy for her slender fingers. He returns half alarmed and half ashamed, takes hold of the dripping garment, and tries to twist it. Each time he turns one way, the washerwoman turns the same way; she repeats the maneuver until he realizes that the person opposite him is not an ordinary woman. The labor continues through his straining, praying, and perspiring, until the garment falls into the water and floats away like a bubble.

Beatrix then breaks into wild laughter and disappears among the trees. The episode never offers the knight a stable explanation. It is presented as a false washerwoman’s trick, but its effect is supernatural in his experience. He leaps across the river and hurries along the road while shadows and strange voices fill his disturbed mind. When a wolf howls from the thicket, he answers with a cry from his own lips. The dream of the loup-garou, Beatrix’s warning, and the resemblance between the wolf’s voice and his own merge into one overwhelming suspicion.

The river encounter thus weaponizes Beatrix’s knowledge of the knight’s fears. She does not need to transform him or state that she possesses magical powers; the ambiguity of her disappearance and the earlier omen are enough to make him doubt his identity. A following sound alternately seems a threatening shout, a call for help, and a dying moan, sometimes distant and sometimes close behind him. Unable to draw his sword or form a prayer, he finally flees. Beatrix’s prank converts courtly seduction and marital guilt into a night of terror, completing the comic reversal of the proud knight who had earlier attempted to kill Hugues with a sword.

Later Reunion and Narrative Function

The consequences of the encounter reach beyond the immediate scene. The Dame of Keridreux eventually leaves for a distant country with her Latin-learning and a monk, while the Sire of Keridreux mourns for a reasonable time before returning to court Beatrix. This second wooing succeeds. Beatrix consequently becomes not only the lost love whose earlier misunderstanding helped cause the knight’s first marriage, but also the woman who ultimately replaces that marriage after its collapse.

Her significance lies in the contrast between the knight’s language and her conduct. He approaches her through loyalty, beauty, suffering, inheritance, marriage, and heroic escape; she answers through command, mockery, practical care, moral warning, and theatrical deception. Yet she is not merely a corrective to his vanity. Her grief over the failed courtship and her admission of possible fault show that she shares responsibility for the original misunderstanding. The story grants her direct speech and strategic control, allowing her to shape both the social scene at the river and the knight’s private interpretation of the night.

Beatrix also occupies the boundary between ordinary agency and the supernatural. The narrative identifies her as a false washerwoman rather than conclusively identifying her with a loup-garou, but the knight cannot preserve that distinction. Her intervention saves Hugues, her conversation revives an abandoned love, and her river trick makes the knight’s feared metamorphosis feel imminent. When the Sire of Keridreux later retells his translation into a loup-garou, Hugues regularly resumes the story at the passages he witnessed. Beatrix’s actions therefore survive as the most memorable bridge between the book’s romantic comedy, its marital satire, and its recurring mythology of transformation.