The Lord of Lapalice: hero (by mistake) of the obvious
by Gino Cervi
The Battle of Pavia, which was fought at dawn on 24 February 1525 in the large ducal park north of the city between the French army of François I of Valois and the imperial army of Charles V of Habsburg, left thousands of casualties on the field, many of them 'excellent'. Among these were the remains of Ja¬cques de Chabannes, lord of Lapalice (or Lapalisse), grand marshal of France and warrior servant to no less than three sovereigns, Charles VIII, Louis XII and, indeed, François I.
The protagonist of dozens and dozens of battles, in the course of which he sustained wounds that for others would have been fatal, so much so that he was repeatedly given up for dead in the field, in spite of all this fearsome fame in his lifetime, he went down in history, and in the collective memory, as the champion par excellence of obviousness.
Unhorsed and captured on the foggy and muddy Vernavola field beneath the walls of Pavia, Lapalisse was fought over by two captains, an Italian and a Spaniard, who could not agree on who should ransom such a valuable prisoner. Poor Chabannes was thus slain by an arquebus shot by the Spaniard. Even more than that miserable end, truly ignominious for a knight of a thousand battles, Lapalice, post mortem, was the victim of a mistake, an accidental slip of the tongue, and not of the sword. As was often the case, to mourn his death his soldiers intoned a funeral lament that went like this: Hélas! La Palice est mort / Il est mort devant Pavie. /Helas! S'il n'etait mort /il feroit encore envie. Which translated means: Alas! La Palice is dead / He died before Pavia / Alas! If he were not dead / he would still make one envious (in the sense that his valour and strength would be so awe-inspiring to admire). Unfortunately, however, the last verse, due to a swap of consonants and a word break, became: Il seroit encore en vie, meaning 'he would still be alive'. What a mess! A lament in death of a fearsome warlord slipping into a joke of the absurd. Of course if he wasn't dead he would still be alive! What the heck! Need it be said? It is obvious. A century later, the mischievous prank of an academician of France, Bernard de la Monnoye, would amuse himself by transfiguring the valiant marshal of France into a puppet for all seasons: de la Monnoye wrote and circulated The Song of Lapalice, a florilegium of banalities, such as 'if he didn't wash he was dirty' or 'if he didn't sleep he was awake'. And then, in the second half of the 19th century, a well-known novelist and critic, still famous today for having given his name to a prestigious French literary prize, Edmond de Goncourt, would put the icing on the mocking cake by coining the word that consigned Lapalice to vocabularies and to future memory: lapalissade, the saying of something so obvious as to seem ridiculous, from which the adjective lapalissiano was born in Italian.
On the occasion of the 500th anniversary of his death, Ibis Edizioni has printed a new edition of Vita, morte e trasfigurazione del Signore di Lapalisse, a small and highly enjoyable essay written by Dante Zanetti, former professor of economic history at the University of Pavia, and published in 1992 in Contrappunti de Il Mulino, a cultured and entertaining series directed by Carlo M. Cipolla.
The singular fate of the Marshal of France has also inspired a series of meetings entitled Obviously. The incredible story of the famous lord of Lapalice (the ways of error, and of celebrity, are infinite), held from mid-October to mid-December at the Salone Teresiano of the University Library of Pavia and other venues in the city. There are twelve events - book presentations, narrated lectures, workshops and performances - that investigate, on the one hand, the theme of obviousness, and its numerous humorous derivatives, in contemporary culture and communication; on the other hand, the numerous cases of people who have become famous 'in spite of themselves', or of original ideas, discoveries, inventions obtained by chance or, better still, 'by accident'. The programme of Obviously can be found online at compagniadellacorte.it
