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04/01/2007 Mavericks @ Phoenix
PHOENIX, April 1 (AP) -- If Phoenix plays the Dallas Mavericks a few weeks from now in the Western Conference finals, confidence should be no problem for the Suns.
Not with the way they handled the Mavericks on Sunday.
With Leandro Barbosa leading a parade of big scorers with 29 points, the Suns beat the Mavericks for the second time in 18 days, 126-104.
Amare Stoudemire added 24 points and Steve Nash had 23 points and 11 assists as the Suns snapped Dallas' nine-game winning streak and finished the season series 2-2. After a scoreless first quarter, Shawn Marion had 20 points on 8-for-10 shooting. He also frustrated Dallas' Dirk Nowitzki most of the afternoon.
"That's about as good as we can play, Phoenix coach Mike D'Antonisaid.
The Suns shot 65 percent (46-of-71), the highest in the NBA this season and a record for any team at US Airways Center, formerly America West Arena.
Phoenix shot 86 percent in the fourth quarter (13-for-15), 4-of-4 on 3s.
"We were getting good looks, Marion said. "Everybody was rotating, making the extra pass. When everybody makes the extra pass, you get open looks and you're going to knock down some shots.
Stoudemire, who scored 41 in the Suns' come-from-behind 129-127 double-overtime victory at Dallas on March 14, made 10 of 13 shots Sunday. In the last two games against the Mavericks, Stoudemire was 26-of-32 from the field.
"It's just tough because my jumper is falling now, so it makes it harder for the defense to figure out what I'm going to do, Stoudemire said. "I'm either going to shoot the jumper, drive around them or pass it out for a 3. It's pretty much pick your poison with myself and also for the team.
Even the hard-to-please Nash seemed satisfied for a change.
"Sometimes to a fault we've played to the level of our competition. Fortunately it's good on nights like tonight, he said. "Tonight I give us high marks for energy and consistency. When we play well, no one's going to defend us well.
Josh Howard scored 28 for Dallas, 18 in a tight first half that featured 13 ties and nine lead changes. Jerry Stackhouse added 25 and Jason Terry 20.
Nowitzki scored 21 but was just 6-of-18 shooting.
"They had a good strategy, a good game plan, Dallas coach Avery Johnson said. "They executed, and we never left the hotel.
Boris Diaw had 16 points for Phoenix, and a spectacular behind-the-back bounce pass to Stoudemire for a layup.
"This doesn't mean we're so much better than Dallas, no, D'Antoni said. "Dallas has got the best record, and they're going to be the No. 1 seed, but I think it's going to be very competitive and we'll see what happens.
The game was close until Phoenix took the lead for good in the third quarter, then turned it into a runaway in the fourth. The 126 points were the most Dallas has allowed this season in a game that didn't go into overtime. The only time the Mavericks allowed more in any game was in that double-overtime loss to Phoenix.
The Mavericks were without center Erick Dampier, who strained his right shoulder in Friday night's home victory over New York.
After making their first seven 3-pointers, the Mavericks went 2-for-11. The Suns, meanwhile, made 12 of 21 3s, going 6-of-7 in the second half.
"We need a practice, Johnson said. "We haven't practiced in a while because of our schedule, a really good hard practice. We need a good practice to clean up a few things, and it showed today.
The tight, high-speed first half ended with Phoenix on top 60-56. Dallas never led after that.
Phoenix outscored the Mavs 14-6 over the final 2+ minutes of the first half, then got the first two baskets of the third quarter to go up 64-56 on Stoudemire's layup. Dallas came back to tie it at 69 after Terry's 18-footer, but Phoenix followed with a 10-2 run, with Raja Bell and Barbosa sinking consecutive 3s to put the Suns up 79-71 with 4:02 left in the period.
With Nash out for his usual rest, Phoenix boosted the lead to 85-75 on Barbosa's driving layup with 1:19 left in the third. The Suns led 89-82 entering the fourth.
Phoenix went up 102-89 with a 9-2 spurt midway through the fourth quarter. During that run, Nowitzki limped off the court after missing a 3-pointer, then landing with his left foot on Marion's left foot. Nowitzki returned to the game moments later, but didn't stay long as Phoenix blew it open.
Nowitzki said after the game he was fine.
"I thought he undercut me a little bit, but it doesn't matter at that point, he said. "There was no foul called so we kept on playing.
Phoenix outscored the Mavericks 37-22 in the fourth quarter, 66-48 in the second half.
Notes: The previous high field goal percentage this season was .646 for Charlotte against Atlanta on Jan. 20. Phoenix shot .648. ... With their 55th victory, the Suns topped their total of last season. ... The Mavericks are expected to sign 44-year-old Kevin Willis to a 10-day contract on Monday. ... DeSagana Diop started in place of Dampier and went scoreless with three rebounds in 26+ minutes. ... Dallas is 61-8 since beginning the season 0-4 start. Phoenix is 54-14 since a 1-4 start. ... The Suns are 5-4 since that earlier victory at Dallas, but each of the wins has been by at least 18 points.


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French literature
French literature, the body of written works in the French language produced within the geographic and political boundaries of France. The French language was one of the five major Romance languages to develop from Vulgar Latin as a result of the Roman occupation of western Europe.
Since the Middle Ages, France has enjoyed an exceptional position in European intellectual life. Though its literary culture has no single figure whose influence can be compared to that of Italy's Dante or England's Shakespeare, successive periods have seen its writers and their language exercise an influence far beyond its borders. In medieval times, because of the far-reaching and complex system of feudal allegiances (not least the links of France and England), the networks of the monastic orders, the universality of Latin, and the similarities of the languages derived from Latin, there was a continual process of exchange, in form and content, among the literatures of western Europe. The evolution of the nation-states and the rise in prestige of vernacular languages gradually eroded the unifying force of these relationships. From the early modern period onward, France developed its own distinctive and many-stranded cultural tradition, which, while never losing sight of the riches of the medieval base and the Judeo-Christian biblical tradition, has come chiefly to be thought of as Mediterranean in its allegiance, rooted in the imitation of Classical models as these were mediated through the great writers and thinkers of Renaissance Italy.
The version of French tradition that began in the 17th century and has established itself in the cultural histories and the schoolbooks was given fresh force in the early 20th century by the philosopher-poet Paul Valéry and, especially, his English admirers in the context of the political and cultural struggle with Germany. In this version, French culture prizes reason, formal perfection, and purity of language and is to be admired for its thinkers as much as for its writers. By the end of the ancien régime, the logic of Descartes, the restraint of Racine, and the wit of Voltaire were seen as the hallmarks of French culture and were emulated throughout the courts and salons of the Continent. Other aspects of this legacy—the skepticism of Descartes, calling into question authoritarian axioms; the violent, self-seeking intensity of Racinian passion, fueled by repression and guilt; and the abrasive irony that Voltaire turned against established bigotry, prejudice, and injustice—were less well viewed in the circles of established order. Frequently forced underground, these and their inheritors nevertheless gave energy to the revolutionary ethos that constituted another, equally French, contribution to the radical traditions of western Europe.
The political and philosophical revolutions installed by the end of the 18th century, in the name of science and reason, were accompanied by transformations in the form and content of French writing. Over the turn of the 19th century and beyond, an emergent Romantic sensibility challenged the Neoclassical ideal, which had become a pale and timid imitation of its former self. The new orthodoxy asserted the claims of imagination and feeling against reason and of individual desire against social and moral convention. The 12-syllable alexandrine that had been used to such effect by Jean Racine remained the standard line in verse, but the form was relaxed and reinvigorated; and the thematic domain of poetry was extended successively by Victor Hugo, Alfred de Vigny, Charles Baudelaire, and Arthur Rimbaud. All poetic form was thrown into the melting pot by the Modernist revolutions at the turn of the 20th century.
As the novel overtook poetry and drama to become the dominant literary form in the 19th century, French writers explored the possibilities of the genre and, in some cases, reinvented it. The novel cycles of Honoré de Balzac and Émile Zola developed a new mode of social realism to celebrate and challenge the processes at work in a nation that was being transformed by industrial and economic revolution. In the work of other writers, such as Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert, and Marcel Proust, each following his own distinctive path, a different kind of realism emerged, focused on a preoccupation with the analysis of individual action, motivation, and desire as well as a fascination with form. Between them, the 19th-century French novelists traced the fate of the individualistic sensibilities born of aristocratic and high bourgeois culture as they engaged with the collectivizing forms of a nation moving toward mass culture and the threshold of democracy. Joris-Karl Huysmans's aristocratic hero, Des Esseintes, in À rebours (1884; Against Nature or Against the Grain), offered a traditionalist, pessimistic version of the final outcome. Halfway through the next century, Jean-Paul Sartre's trilogy Les Chemins de la liberté (1945; Roads to Freedom) responded to a world in which the balance of the argument had visibly shifted.
During the first half of the 20th century, Paris remained the hub of European intellectual and artistic life. Its position was challenged from the 1930s, and especially after World War II, by Anglo-American writers, many of whom honed their own skills within its culture and its borders; but it still continued to generate modes of thinking and writing that others followed. From the 1950s, proponents of the nouveau roman, or New Novel, mounted a radical attack on the conventions of the genre. At the same time, boulevard drama felt on its neck the breath of the avant-garde; and from the 1960s onward French writers began stimulating new approaches to almost every field of rational inquiry. The international status of the French language has declined steadily since World War II, with the rise of American market hegemony and, especially, with the rapid spread of decolonization. French is still, however, the preferred medium of creative expression for many in Switzerland, Belgium, Canada, France's former colonies in Africa and Asia, and its Caribbean dependencies. The contribution of Francophone authors outside its borders to the renewal of French literary traditions has become increasingly significant.
This article focuses on French literature produced within the Hexagon, as the country of France is often called because of the configuration of its boundaries, from the 9th century (to which the earliest surviving fragmentary texts belong) to the present day. Literary works written in French in countries outside the Hexagon, including former dependencies, are discussed under the appropriate national entries. For the French literature of Belgium, for example, see Belgian literature: French. Other related entries of significance are Anglo-Norman literature and African literature: Modern literatures in European languages.
The Middle Ages
The origins of the French language
By 50 bc, when the Roman occupation of Gaul under Julius Caesar was complete, the region's population had been speaking Gaulish, a Celtic language, for some 500 years. Gaulish, however, gave way to the conquerors' speech, Vulgar Latin, which was the spoken form of Latin as used by the soldiers and settlers throughout the Roman Empire. In different regions, local circumstances determined Vulgar Latin's evolution into the separate tongues that today constitute the family of Romance languages, to which French belongs. This linguistic development was speeded by the empire's collapse under the impact of the 5th-century-ad barbarian invasions and isolation from Rome. Gaul was overrun by Germanic tribes, in the north principally by the Franks (who gave France its name) and by the Visigoths and Merovingians in the south. But the Latin speech survived: not only was it the language of the majority of the population, but it was also backed by its associations with the old Roman culture and with the new Christian religion, which used Low Latin, its own form of the Roman tongue. While it retained relatively few Celtic words, the developing language had its vocabulary greatly enriched by Germanic borrowings, and its phonetic development was influenced by Germanic speech habits. The 9th-century Norse incursions and settlement of Normandy, by contrast, left few traces in the language.
The Romans had introduced written literature, and until the 12th century almost all documents and other texts were in Latin. The first text in the vernacular is the Serment de Strasbourg, the Romance version of the Oath of Strasbourg (842), an oath sworn by Louis the German (Louis II) and Charles the Bald (Charles II) against their brother Lothar in the partitioning of the empire of their grandfather Charlemagne. A German version also survives. Only a few other texts, all religious in content, survive from before about 1100.
Early texts show a broad division between the speech of northern Gaul, which had suffered most from the invasions, and that in the more stable, cultured south, where the Latin spoken was less subject to change. The tongue spoken to the north of an imaginary line running roughly from the Gironde River to the Alps was the langue d'oïl (the future French), and to the south it was the langue d'oc (Occitan), terms derived from the respective expressions for "yes."
Vulgar Latin's development had not been uniform throughout the area of the langue d'oïl; and, by the time a recognizable Old French had developed, various dialects had evolved, notably Francien (in the Île-de-France, the region around Paris), Picard, Champenois, and Norman. From the last one stemmed Anglo-Norman, the French used alongside English in Britain, especially among the upper classes, from even before the Norman Conquest (1066) until well into the 14th century. Each dialect had its own literature. But, for various reasons, the status of Francien increased until it achieved dominance in the Middle French period (after 1300), and from it Modern French developed. Old French was a fine literary medium, enlarging its vocabulary from other languages such as Arabic, Occitan, and Low Latin. It had a wide phonetic range and, until the decay of the two-case system it had inherited from Latin, syntactic flexibility.
The context and nature of French medieval literature
Whatever Classical literature survived the upheavals of the early Middle Ages was preserved, along with pious Latin works, in monastic libraries. By encouraging scholars and writers, Charlemagne had increased the Latin heritage available to educated vernacular authors of later centuries. He also left his image as a great warrior-emperor to stimulate the legend-making process that generated the Old French epic. There one finds exemplified the feudal ideal, evolved by the Franks, that was the means of establishing a hierarchy of dependency and, thereby, a cohesiveness that would lead to a national identity. The warrior's code of morality, founded on loyalty to the monarch and on the bond between brother knights, bolstered the entire political system. As stability increased under the Capetians, windows opened onto other cultures and elements: that of the Arabs in Spain and, with the Crusades, the East; the advanced Occitan civilization; and the legends of Celtic Britain. The Roman Catholic church grew in wealth and power, and by the 12th century its schools were flourishing, training generations of clerks in the liberal arts. Society itself became less embattled, and the nobility became more leisured and sophisticated. The machismo of the epics was tempered by the social graces of courtoisie: generosity, modesty, and consideration for others, especially the weak and distressed, and by a concept of love that did not view it as a weakness in a knight but as an inspiration consistent with chivalry.
By the 13th century an additional source of patronage for writers and performers was the bourgeoisie of the developing towns. New genres emerged, and, as literacy increased, prose found favour alongside verse. Much of the literature of the time is enlivened by a rather irreverent spirit and a sometimes cynical realism, yet it also possesses a countercurrent of deep spirituality. In the 14th and 15th centuries France was ravaged by war, plague, and famine. Along with a preoccupation in literature with death and damnation, there appeared a contrasting refinement of expression and sentiment bred of nostalgia for the courtly, chivalric ideal. At the same time a new humanistic learning anticipated the coming Renaissance.
Before 1200 almost all French "literature" had been composed as verse and had been communicated orally to its public. The jongleurs, professional minstrels, traveled and performed their extensive repertoires, which ranged from epics to the lives of saints (the lengthy romances were not designed for memorization), sometimes using mime and musical accompaniment. Seeking an immediate impact, most poets made their poems strikingly visual in character, more dramatic than reflective, and revealed psychology and motives through action and gesture. Verbal formulas and clichés were used by the better poets as an effective narrative shorthand, especially in the epic. Such oral techniques left their mark throughout the period.
The chansons de geste
More than 80 chansons de geste ("songs of deeds") are known, the earliest and finest being the Chanson de Roland (c. 1100; The Song of Roland). Most are anonymous and are composed in lines of 10 or 12 syllables, grouped into laisses (strophes) based on assonance and, later, rhyme. Their length varies from about 1,500 to more than 18,000 lines. The genre prospered from the late 11th to the early 14th century, offering exemplary stories of warfare, often pitting Franks against Saracens, that fire the emotions with their insistent rhythms. Under the influence of the genre known as romance, however (see below The romance), the chansons de geste lost some of their early vigour. Their story lines became looser, their adventures more exotic, and their tone often amatory or even humorous. Many were eventually turned into prose.
Cycles formed as new songs were composed featuring heroes, families, or themes already familiar. The Chanson de Roland belongs to the cycle known as the Geste du Roi ("Deeds of the King"), the king being Charlemagne, Roland's uncle, in whose service he perished with the rear guard at Roncevaux. Dominating the Geste de Garin de Monglane is Garin's great-grandson, Guillaume d'Orange, whose historical prototype was the count of Toulouse and Charlemagne's cousin. His dogged loyalty to an unworthy monarch (Charlemagne's son Louis) is the subject of a group of poems that include the Chanson de Guillaume ("Song of William"). The epics in the Geste de Doon de Mayence deal with rebellious vassals, among them Raoul de Cambrai, in a gripping story of injustice and strained loyalties. The fanciful 13th-century Huon de Bordeaux (Huon of the Horn), which introduces the fairy king Auberon (Shakespeare's Oberon), has been placed here and in the Geste du Roi. The First Crusade is handled, with legendary embellishment, in a minor cycle.
Controversy surrounds the origins of the genre and its development and transmission. It is not known how most of the poems came to contain elements, somewhat garbled, from Carolingian history some 300 years before their composition. Some scholars believe in a continuous process of oral transmission and elaboration. Others suppose the historical facts were retrieved much later by poets wishing to celebrate certain heroes, many of whom were associated with pilgrim routes that the jongleurs could then ply with profit. In fact, very few texts belong to the period before 1150.
The romance
The romance, which came into being in the middle of the 12th century in France and flourished throughout the Middle Ages, was a creation of formally educated poets. The earliest romances took their subjects from antiquity: Alexander the Great, Thebes, Aeneas, and Troy were all treated at length, and shorter contes were derived from Ovid. Other romances, such as Floire et Blancheflor (adapted in Middle English as Flores and Blancheflur), exploited Greco-Byzantine sources; but by about 1150 the Celtic legends of Britain were capturing the public's imagination.
The standard metre of verse romance is octosyllabic rhyming couplets. It differs from the chanson de geste in concentrating on individual rather than communal exploits and presenting them in a more detached fashion. It offers fuller descriptions, freer dialogue, and more authorial intervention. Christian miracles and fervour are replaced by Eastern or Celtic marvels and the cult of courtoisie and amour courtois ("courtly love"). There is more interest in psychology, especially in the love situations.
The universally popular legend of Tristan and Isolde had evolved by the mid-12th century, apparently from a fusion of Scottish, Irish, Cornish, and Breton elements, beginning in Scotland and moving south. The main French versions (both fragmentary) are by the Anglo-Norman poet Thomas (c. 1170) and the Norman Béroul (rather later and possibly composite). The legend was reworked in French prose and widely translated (Thomas's version can be reconstructed from Gottfried von Strassburg's German rendering and another in Old Norse). Chrétien de Troyes's treatment, mentioned in his Cligès, has been lost.
The deep-rooted British tradition of King Arthur was firmly established on the Continent by Geoffrey of Monmouth's Historia regum Britanniae (1135–38; History of the Kings of Britain), translated and romanticized by the Jerseyman Wace as the Roman de Brut (1155; Arthurian Chronicles [containing Wace's Roman de Brut and Lawamon's Brut]). The Bretons and Anglo-Normans were likely intermediaries in the transmission of further Arthurian material to French writers such as Chrétien de Troyes, the virtual founder of Arthurian romance, who wrote between about 1160 and 1185. His first known romance, Erec et Enide (Erec and Enide), is a serious study of marital and social responsibilities and contains elements of Celtic enchantment. Cligès, a partly Greco-Byzantine tale of young love and an adulterous relationship, uses the motif of feigned death best known, later, from Romeo and Juliet. Lancelot; ou, le chevalier de la charrette (Lancelot; or, The Knight of the Cart) relates the infatuated hero's rescue of the abducted queen Guinevere. Yvain; ou, le chevalier au lion (The Knight with the Lion) treats the converse of the situation depicted in Erec et Enide. Chrétien's ironies and ambiguities invited divergent interpretations, of no work more than the incomplete Perceval; ou, le conte du Graal, which may be the conflation of two unfinished poems. The grail, first introduced here, was to become, as the Holy Grail, a remarkably potent symbol. The verse romance genre was diversely exploited well into the 14th century, but by then Jean Froissart's contribution, Méliador (1383–88), was only a ponderous valediction to romance's golden age, and prose was the principal form (see below Prose literature). On the genre's periphery were short courtly tales and lais like those of Marie de France, treating Celtic themes and probably composed in England. The unique Aucassin et Nicolette (Aucassin and Nicolette), a charmingly comic idyll told in alternating sections of verse (to be sung) and prose (to be recited), pokes sly fun at the conventions of epic and romance alike.
Lyric poetry to the 13th century
The 12th century saw the revolution in sexual attitudes that has come to be known as amour courtois, or courtly love (the original term in Occitan is fin'amor). Its first exponents were the Occitan troubadours, poet-musicians of the 12th and 13th centuries, writing in medieval Occitan, of whom some 460 are known by name. Among them are clerics and both male and female nobles. The troubadours no longer considered women to be the disposable assets of men. On the contrary, the enjoyment of a woman's love was a man's aspiration, achievable, if at all, only after the suitor had served a period of amorous vassalage, modeled on the subject's service to his lord and where spiritualization became an end in itself, based on the notion of an erotic, unsatisfied love. This is the main theme of the troubadours' songs, whose origins have been sought in Arabic poetry, the writings of Ovid, Latin liturgical hymns, and other, less likely sources. The canso (French chanson), made of five or six stanzas with a summary envoi, was the favourite vehicle for their love poetry; but they used various other forms, from dawn songs to satiric, political, or debating poems, all usually highly crafted. Guilhelm IX, duke of Aquitaine (see William IX), the first known poet in the Occitan language, mixed obscenity with his courtly sentiments. Among the finest troubadours are the graceful Bernard de Ventadour; Jaufre Rudel, who expressed an almost mystical longing for a distant love; the soldier and poet Bertran de Born; and the master of the hermetic tradition, Arnaut Daniel.
The langue d'oïl had a tradition of dance and spinning songs before the troubadours exerted by the mid-12th century an influence encouraged by, among others, Eleanor of Aquitaine, Guilhelm IX's granddaughter and queen of France and later England (as the wife of Henry II). The troubadours' verse inspired a number of northern trouvères, including Chrétien de Troyes (two of whose songs are extant), Guiot de Provins, Conon de Béthune, and some nobles such as Thibaut (Theobald I), count of Champagne and king of Navarre, and Richard Coeur de Lion (Richard I of England, the Lion Heart).
More interesting is the work of certain bourgeois poets, notably, in the 13th century, a group from Arras and especially Rutebeuf, a Parisian who perhaps came originally from Champagne and is often compared with François Villon. Rutebeuf wrote verse in personal, even autobiographical mode (though the personal details are probably fictional) on a variety of subjects: his own pitiful circumstances, the quarrel between the University of Paris and the religious orders, the need to support the Crusades, his reverence for the Virgin, and his disgust at clerical corruption.
Satire, the fabliaux, and the Roman de Renart
Medieval literature in both Latin and the vernacular is full of sharp, often bitter criticism of the world's evils: the injustice of rulers, churchmen's avarice and hypocrisy, corruption among lawyers, doctors' quackery, and the wiles and deceits of women. It appears in pious and didactic literature and, as authorial comment, in other genres but more usually in general terms than as particular, corrective satire. Human vice and folly also serve purely comic ends, as in the fabliaux. These fairly short verse tales composed between the late 12th and the 14th centuries—most of which are anonymous, though some are by leading poets—generate laughter from situations extending from the obscene to the mock-religious, built sometimes around simple wordplay and frequently elaborate deceptions and counterdeceptions. They are played out in all classes of society but predominantly among the bourgeoisie. Many fabliaux carry mock morals, inviting comparison with the didactic fables. Realistic in tone, they paint instructive pictures of everyday life in medieval France. They ultimately yielded in importance to the farces, bequeathing a fund of anecdotes to later writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Giovanni Boccaccio.
Inspired partly by the popular animal fable, partly by the Latin satire of monastic life Ysengrimus (1152; Eng. trans. Ysengrimus), the collection of ribald comic tales known as the Roman de Renart (Renard the Fox) began to circulate in the late 12th century, chronicling the rivalry of Renart the Fox and the wolf Isengrin, and the lively and largely scandalous goings-on in the animal kingdom ruled by Noble the Lion. By the 14th century about 30 branches existed, forming a veritable beast epic. Full of close social observation, they exude the earthy humour of the fabliaux; but, particularly in some of the later branches, this is sharpened into true satire directed against abuses in church and state, with the friars and rapacious nobility as prime targets.
Allegory, popular from early times, was employed in Latin literature by such authorities as Augustine, Prudentius, Martianus Capella, and, in the late 12th century, Alain de Lille. It was used widely in religious and moralizing works, as in the long Pèlerinage de la vie humaine ("The Pilgrimage of Human Life") by Guillaume de Deguileville, Dante's contemporary and a precursor of John Bunyan. But the most influential allegorical work in French was the Roman de la rose (The Romance of the Rose), where courtly love is first celebrated, then undermined. The first 4,058 lines were written about 1225–30 by Guillaume de Lorris, a sensitive, elegant poet who, through a play of allegorical figures, analyzed the psychology of a young couple's venture into love. The affair is presented as a dream, in which the plucking of a crimson rose by the dreamer/lover would represent his conquest of the lady. Guillaume, however, left the poem unfinished, with the dreamer frustrated and his chief ally imprisoned. Forty or more years later, a poet of very different temperament, Jean de Meun (or de Meung), added more than 17,700 lines to complete it, submerging Guillaume's delicate allegory with debates and disquisitions by the characters, laden with medieval and ancient learning. Courtly idealism is shunned for a practical, often critical or cynical view of the world. Love, only one of many topics treated in the completed version, is synonymous with procreation; and a misogynistic tone pervades the writing. Embodying these two characteristically medieval but diametrically opposed attitudes to love, The Romance of the Rose was immensely popular until well into the Renaissance and gave rise to one of the earliest and most important instances of the Querelle des Femmes ("Debate on Women"; a literary disputation over the alleged inferiority or superiority of women.) Christine de Pisan's attack on the misogyny and obscenity of The Romance of the Rose, in the Épistre au Dieu d'Amours (1399; "Epistle to the God of Love"), foreshadows her later extended allegory in defense of women, the vigorous, scholarly, and immensely readable Livre de la cité des dames (composed 1404–05; The Book of the City of Ladies). Le Livre des trois vertus (1405; "The Book of Three Virtues"; Eng. trans. A Medieval Woman's Mirror of Honor: The Treasure of the City of Ladies) sets out in detail the important social roles of women of all classes.
Lyric poetry in the 14th century
Allegory and similar conceits abound in much late medieval poetry, as with Guillaume de Machaut, the outstanding musician of his day, who composed for noble patronage a number of narrative dits amoureux (short pieces on the subject of love) and a quantity of lyric verse. A talented technician, Machaut did much to popularize and develop the relatively new fixed forms: ballade, rondeau, and virelai (a short poem with a refrain). Eustache Deschamps, Machaut's great admirer and perhaps also his nephew, struck in his own verse a more personal note than many of his contemporaries. A prolific writer, he dealt with public and private affairs, sometimes satirically; but he composed little love poetry, and his work was not set to music. Jean Froissart, the chronicler, also wrote pleasantly in a variety of lyric forms, as did Christine de Pisan, whose poetry had a greater individuality. Most court verse of this period has an unreal air, as if, amid the political and social agonies of the Hundred Years' War, the poets were voicing a yearning for humane and gracious living founded on the ideals of courtoisie. Thus Alain Chartier, a political polemicist in both French and Latin, was most admired for his poem La Belle Dame sans mercy (1424; "The Beautiful Woman Without Mercy"), which tells of the death of a lover rejected by his lady.
Villon and his contemporaries
One distinguished victim of the Hundred Years' War was Charles, duc d'Orléans, who was captured at Agincourt at the age of 21 and was held prisoner in England for 25 years. There is an elegiac tone to much of his graceful courtly verse. On his return to France, his court at Blois became a literary centre, where he encouraged the work of artists and poets such as François Villon.
Born in Paris about 1431 as François de Montcorbier, Villon adopted the name of his uncle, a priest, who saw to his upbringing. At the University of Paris, where he became Master of Arts in 1452, he acquired some learning but also became involved in rioting, robbery, and manslaughter. His forced departure from Paris was the occasion for his Le Lais, or Le Petit Testament (1456; The Legacy: The Testament and Other Poems). This mock legacy in eight-line octosyllabic stanzas is conversational and often facetious in tone, full of allusions to people and events sometimes made cryptic by Villon's taste for antiphrasis. His main work, the Testament (or Le Grand Testament), was written five or six years later after a spell in the bishop of Orléans's dungeons. It uses the octets of the Lais interspersed with ballades and rondeaux and is similarly packed with personal gossip, often tongue-in-cheek but leaving a bitter aftertaste. Following more brushes with justice, Villon disappeared for good, narrowly escaping hanging. Commonly considered to have been the first modern French poet, he brings a personal note to the familiar lyric themes of age, death, and loss and mixes elegy with irony, satire, and burlesque humour. His verse shows great technical skill, a keen command of rhythmic effects, and an economy of expression that not only enhances his lively wit but produces moments of intensely focused vision and, in individual poems, moving statements of human experience.
None of his contemporaries or immediate successors was able to match the vigour of his verse. Often obsessed by metrical ingenuity, extravagant rhymes, and other conceits, they favoured Italian as well as Classical models, thus heralding the Renaissance. It is unfair, however, to judge them by their words alone, since music was, for most, a vital ingredient of their art.
Prose literature
Prose flourished as a literary medium from roughly 1200. A few years earlier Robert de Boron had used verse for his Joseph d'Arimathie (associating the Holy Grail with the Crucifixion) and his Merlin; but both were soon turned into prose. Other Arthurian romances adopted it, notably the great Vulgate cycle written between 1215 and 1235, with its five branches by various hands. These included the immensely popular Lancelot, the Queste del Saint Graal (whose Cistercian author used Galahad's Grail quest to evoke the mystic pursuit of Christian truth and ecstasy), and La Mort le Roi Artu (The Death of King Arthur), powerfully describing the collapse of the Arthurian world. The Tristan legend was reworked and extended in prose. To spin out their romances while maintaining their public's interest, authors wove in many characters and adventures, producing complex interlacing patterns, which Sir Thomas Malory simplified when he drew on them for his Le Morte Darthur (c. 1470).
As well as traditional material, new fictions appeared in prose, taking a very different view of love, and often in the form of short comic tales. Early in the 15th century, the ironically titled Les Quinze Joies de mariage (The Batchelars Banquet, or The Fifteen Comforts of Matrimony) continued the tradition of misogynist satire. In his Histoire du petit Jehan de Saintré (1456; Little John of Saintre), Antoine de la Sale drew an ill-starred relationship in which hero and heroine both sought to exploit the social game of courtly love for their own ends; the work's realism and psychological interest have made it for some the first French novel. The bawdy tales of the Cent Nouvelles Nouvelles (c. 1465; The One Hundred New Tales), loosely modeled on the work of Giovanni Boccaccio, are more in the spirit of the fabliaux, though written for the Burgundian court.
Pious and instructional works abound. More interesting are the chronicles, which avoid the romantic extravagances of their verse predecessors. Geoffroy of Villehardouin's Conquête de Constantinople ("Conquest of Constantinople") is a sober, if biased, eyewitness account of the Fourth Crusade (1199–1204). Jean, sire de Joinville, was 84 when, in 1309, he completed his Histoire de Saint Louis, a flattering biographical portrait of his intimate friend Louis IX, whom he had accompanied on the Seventh Crusade. (Both Villehardouin's account and Joinville's biography are to be found in a 20th-century English translation as Joinville and Villehardouin: Chronicles of the Crusades. Jean Froissart, who traveled extensively in England and Scotland and on the Continent, projected his admiration of chivalry into his four books of chronicles. Covering the years 1325 to 1400, they contain much picturesque detail, largely from personal observation. A far more cynical view of people, politics, and feudal values is found in the Mémoires of Philippe de Commynes, composed over the period 1489 to 1498 and published posthumously in 1524–28; these are the texts with which modern French historiography may be said to begin.
Religious drama
Serious drama in Europe was reborn in the Middle Ages within the Roman Catholic church. There, from early times, musical and dramatic elements (tropes) were introduced into certain offices, particularly at Easter and Christmas. From this practice sprang liturgical drama. Performances took place inside churches, with the cast of clergy moving from place to place in the sanctuary. At first only Latin was used, though occasionally snatches of vernacular verse were included, as in the early 12th-century Sponsus ("The Bridegroom"; Eng. trans. Sponsus), which uses the Poitevin dialect. Stories from the Bible and lives of the saints were dramatized; and, as the scope of the dramas broadened, more plays were performed outside the church and used only the vernacular. The all-male casts employed multiple settings (décor simultané) and moved from one setting, or mansion, to another as the action demanded.
The first extant mystère, or mystery play, with entirely French dialogue (but elaborate stage directions in Latin) is the Jeu d'Adam (Adam: A Play). It is known from a copy in an Anglo-Norman manuscript, and it may have originated in England in the mid-12th century. With lively dialogue and the varied metres characteristic of the later mystères (all of which were based on biblical stories), it presents the Creation and Fall, the story of Cain and Abel, and an incomplete procession of prophets. Neither it nor the Seinte Resurreccion (c. 1200; "Resurrection of the Saviour"), certainly Anglo-Norman, shows the events preceding the Crucifixion, the matter of the Passion plays; these first appeared in the early 14th century in the Passion du Palatinus ("Passion of Palatinus"). Of relatively modest proportions, this contains diversified dialogue with excellent dramatic potential and probably drew on earlier plays now lost.
The oldest extant miracle, or miracle play (a real or fictitious account of the life, miracles, and martyrdom of a saint), is the remarkable 13th-century Jeu de Saint Nicolas ("Play of Saint Nicholas"), by Jehan Bodel of Arras, in which exotic Crusading and boisterous tavern scenes alternate. Rutebeuf's Miracle de Théophile is an early version of the Faust theme, in which the Virgin Mary secures Théophile's salvation. From the 14th century comes the Miracles de Notre-Dame par personnages ("Miracles of Our Lady with Dramatic Characters"), a collection of 40 miracles, partly based on a nondramatic compilation by Gautier de Coincy. These miracles probably were performed by the Paris goldsmiths' guild.
By the 15th century, societies had been formed in various towns for the performance of the increasingly elaborate mystery plays. In Paris the Confraternity of the Passion survived until 1676, though its production of sacred plays was banned in 1548. Notable authors of mystères are Eustache Marcadé; Arnoul Gréban, organist and choirmaster at Notre-Dame, and his brother Simon; and Jehan Michel. Arnoul Gréban's monumental Mystère de la Passion (c. 1450, reworked by Michel in 1486; The True Mistery of the Passion) took four days to perform. Other plays took up to eight days. Biblical material was supplemented with legend, theology, and elements of lyricism and slapstick, and spectacular stage effects were employed.
Secular drama
A crucial factor in the emergence of the comic theatre was the oral presentation of much medieval literature. A natural consequence was complete dramatization and collaborative performances by jongleurs and later by guilds or confréries (confraternities) formed for the purpose.
The earliest comic plays extant date from the second half of the 13th century. Le Garçon et l'aveugle ("The Boy and the Blind Man"), a simple tale of trickster tricked, could have been played by a jongleur and his boy and ranks for some scholars as the first farce. At the end of the century, the Arras poet Adam de la Halle composed two unique pieces: Le Jeu de la feuillée ("The Play of the Bower"), a kind of topical revue for his friends, and Le Jeu de Robin et de Marion (The Play of Robin and Marion), a dramatized pastourelle (a knight's encounter with a shepherdess and her friends) spiced with song and dance. The first serious nonreligious play was L'Estoire de Griseldis (1395), the story of a constant wife.
The profane theatre eventually had its own societies of actors, such as the Basoches (associations of lawyers and clerks) and the Enfants sans Souci (probably a special group of Basochiens) in Paris. The societies frequently presented plays in triple bills: first a sotie, a slight, sometimes satiric, sketch; next a moralité (morality play), a didactic and often allegorical piece; and finally a farce. Some 150 farces have survived from the 15th and 16th centuries. Most are of fewer than 500 lines and involve a handful of characters acting out plots similar to those of the fabliaux. They use the octosyllabic rhyming couplet and may include songs, commonly in rondeau form. By far the best is the unusually long La Farce de maistre Pierre Pathelin (c. 1465; Master Peter Patelan, a Fifteenth-Century French Farce), a tale of trickery involving a sly lawyer, a dull-witted draper, and a crafty shepherd.
For information related to French literature of this period, see also Anglo-Norman literature.


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The U.S. economy is expanding, the agricultural sector is at or near record levels, the Stock Market is breaking records, the global economy is doing better, state economies in the region are doing better, and all that is expected to continue in 2014. So, why do most Americans still think we're in a recession? Two words: unemployment and uncertainty?
Unemployment has been above 7 percent for over 4 years, above pre-recession levels for over 5 years, and isn't likely to return to those levels for another few years. Wages are soft, and employers continue to threaten benefit cuts.
The U.S. economy continues its slow walk back to pre-recession levels, with unemployment being among the slowest of indicators to return. Household median income has declined over 5 percent since the meltdown. While higher-wage occupations have generally recovered, mid-wage occupations have not. Instead, the growth has been in lower-wage occupations. This is forcing many Americans to lower expectations about lifestyle and living standards.
If you are enjoying reading this article, please check out Southwest Farm Press Daily and receive the latest news right to your inbox.
With the Federal Reserve continuing monetary easing and the Federal government continuing to reduce spending, inflation continues to be slight. The federal budget and debt ceiling crises reduced the level of growth for 2013, and ongoing sequester cuts could do so in 2014 on a smaller scale.
Monetary and fiscal policy are moving in opposite directions: the Fed continues quantitative easing, resulting in near-zero interest rates, increasing money supply with only a slight potential for inflation. The federal government continues to reduce spending, resulting in less economic activity and less inflationary pressure. The potential tightening of monetary supply by the Fed sometime in 2014-2015 will likely result in economic challenges in late 2014 or 2015.
Key indicators are generally positive nationwide, as well as in the Oklahoma-Texas region. A review of investment sector and federal and private sources suggests optimism for the 2014 economy in general. GDP will grow, unemployment will decline, business investment and consumer spending will grow while the federal budget continues to decline.
Inflation and interest rates will see slight increases. Agricultural production and income will be down slightly in the region while the natural resource sector will likely be steady to up. Regional wages will also likely be steady to up. Unemployment will continue its slow decline. The global economy continues generally steady with Europe and China improving and other developing and emerging economies mixed.
Politics and policy continue to make a witch's brew of the economic outlook. Sequestration coupled with the lack of a deal on the federal budget and debt ceiling temporarily reduced the level of economic growth. The can was kicked down the road in hopes of an eventual deal by early January 2014. While all sides say they will not repeat the federal shutdown, no progress had been made by early December.
This level of uncertainty, in addition to a projected downturn for net farm income suggests the continued importance of risk management and longer term strategic planning. With 2014 a mid-term election year, it is unlikely that the rhetoric of politics will be dialed down. Producers and agribusiness managers will need to be keen on interpreting the facts from spin, and how such information is likely to affect profitability into the future.
Sanders is a Professor and Economist, Department of Agricultural Economics, Oklahoma State University.
Also of interest:
Cattle Outlook – 2013's year of records


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Via PropertyProf blog, here's an article on the real estate blog LA Curbed in which they disclose a previously secret settlement agreement between an LA neighborhood group and a local developer. The agreement resolved potential CEQA litigation by the neighborhood group against a possible condo development proposed by the developer. In particular, Curbed is outraged that (a) the agreement is secret; (b) the agreement gives the neighborhood group $250,000 for "monitoring" costs without actually restricting how the funds are used; and (c) the settlement provides payment of about $90,000 for attorney's fees for the neighborhood group. Curbed (and the lawyer it relies on a major source) argue that this agreement is an example of a broader pattern of "greenmail" in which opportunistic individuals, neighborhood associations, unions, and even competing businesses use the threat of CEQA litigation to extract money from developers.
The first question is whether Curbed is right that we should be outraged about the secrecy of the agreement. There are lots of secret settlement agreements in law all the time – it's unclear to me why we should be particularly troubled about them in the CEQA-context as opposed to other contexts. (That makes the comment by the lawyer that Curbed quotes that secret settlement agreements are a "loophole" in CEQA puzzling, since it's the general rule in private litigation that settlement agreements can be secret.) Perhaps the argument is that if these agreements were public, there would be more public pressure on neighborhood associations not to threaten potentially frivolous CEQA litigation against developers.
But that just leads to the next question: Are these agreements really problematic? If developers are rational business actors, then they should only be paying off potential litigants where the settlement costs are equal or less than the potential costs that the developers would face if a lawsuit was filed. Those costs would include: the costs from any delays that a lost lawsuit would impose on the project (multiplied by the risk that the developer might actually lose) plus the attorney's fees to contest the litigation, and the costs from any delays that resolving the lawsuit would impose on the project.
The problem is that these costs are present for all CEQA litigation – not just the kinds that Curbed or anyone else dislikes or thinks are frivolous or whatever. We could look to reduce those costs – for instance, we could try to accelerate some kinds of CEQA litigation so as to reduce delays (as the legislature did last session when it created special fast-track procedures for certain kinds of projects). But it's hard to imagine that reducing those costs wouldn't involve trade-offs themselves. The fast-track procedures mean that other important kinds of litigation in California courts might get further delayed; they might result in courts rushing to make decisions and therefore reaching more erroneous decisions; and creating fast-track procedures for only some kinds of projects can undermine the long-term stability and effectiveness of the statute as a whole, as other interest groups seek exemptions for their favorite kinds of projects.
Now perhaps the folks at Curbed would respond: Yes, yes, we are all in favor of CEQA litigation, but only the right kind. The kind that involves fighting big, bad corporations doing evil things. But let's get rid of the frivolous claims. Of course, no one believes they are the big, bad corporation doing evil things (well, not many people believe that anyway). Nor do many plaintiffs believe that they have frivolous claims. Perhaps you could try to impose more sanctions for losing claims – for instance, make losing plaintiffs in CEQA litigation pay for the costs of the defendant. But because many plaintiffs with truly meritorious claims will not know (before they file suit) that their claims will actually win (courts make mistakes, after all!), that kind of reform will necessarily reduce the number of lawsuits that Curbed probably thinks should be filed in the end. You know, the ones against big, bad corporations. To reduce that problem, you could set the bar for frivolous claims higher, such that only really, really bad claims mean you have to pay the defendant's attorney's fees. But that means the deterrent effect of the sanction is much reduced – just as the sanctions for frivolous claims in general in the federal judicial system (pursuant to Federal Rule of Civil Procedure 11) are generally seen as being relatively ineffective in deterring frivolous litigation.
Now maybe you think the reduction in some meritorious claims that would otherwise be brought is a price worth paying in order to eliminate a whole bunch of "greenmail" frivolous claims. (Again, setting aside the problem that one person's greenmail is another person's meritorious claim.) But if that's the case, let's be up front about the argument. We think there's too much environmental protection under CEQA and not enough development, and the lack of development means housing prices are too high, not enough construction jobs, etc., etc. That's a reasonable position, in general – but it doesn't seem to be the one that Curbed is taking. At least, they're not explicit about the first part ("too much environmental protection")
Is there a way of squaring this circle, of selectively reducing the problem of frivolous litigation while still protecting meritorious claims? Curbed, and the lawyer it quotes, seem to believe that there are three main solutions: (a) make it harder for parties not claiming environmental interests relevant to a dispute to file a CEQA lawsuit (in technical terms, restrict standing to sue to those with environmental interests, not solely business interests); (b) require public disclosure of all the interested parties in the lawsuit, such that business interests or others can't hide behind unincorporated neighborhood associations as the lead plaintiff; and (c) require public disclosure of settlement agreements for CEQA litigation. I've suggested (a) before. Now, I'm skeptical that this solution would actually make a huge dent in the amount of CEQA litigation, but it might solve the political problem of people being concerned about people suing under CEQA for the wrong reasons (i.e., greenmail). As for (b) and (c), I don't see any major problems with them. Again, I actually don't think this will deter a whole lot of CEQA litigation, but if it makes people feel better about the process, and reduces the risk of reforms that would gut CEQA, that's great.
What's interesting to me is that Curbed's blog post, and the solutions it develops, seem to show a deep concern about why people are suing under CEQA, what their motives are. Curbed cites some data collected by the lawyer that it quotes that only a fraction of CEQA litigation is filed by "traditional" environmental groups and most of the rest is filed by fly-by-night unincorporated neighborhood associations. The implication is that this is problematic, because those groups are likely motivated by "good" green motives, while the unincorporated associations might have "bad" motives, i.e., get money.
But if the law is set up well, and if it produces good results (and of course, we can question whether that is the case with CEQA's environmental review and litigation procedures), why do we care about motive? I noted this point in an earlier post about litigation over decisions whether to list species for protection under the Endangered Species Act. Environmental groups do appear at times to be motivated to list species under the ESA in order to stop development projects – but that seems to inspire those groups to take the effort to find species that are truly in trouble and warrant protection under the Act. Likewise, if various parties think they can make money of potentially successful CEQA litigation, then you'll get more efforts by private parties to scrutinize environmental review documents for potential flaws, and litigation over those flaws, which should encourage those conducting the environmental reviews to do a better job preparing them – which should be a good thing, if we think the aims of CEQA are good ones. Motive should be irrelevant; it's results that count. (PLF doesn't seem to get this, but that's okay.) Of course, you could say that the cost we're paying to get higher quality CEQA environmental review isn't worth it, because of diminishing marginal returns and all that. But again, that's an argument about tradeoffs, not motives.
But for some reason, arguments over motives appear to have a fair amount of political traction – and that's what seems to have gotten the folks at Curbed so upset. And if some tinkering with CEQA to reduce concerns about motives makes everyone happier without really undermining how the law works, I'm fine with going along with that.


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'The Next Iron Chef': Technique trumps creativity
"The Next Iron Chef" is Chef Jose Garces.
In the end, Garces' technique -- though bland at times -- beat out Chef Jehangir Mehta's unquestionable creativity.
For this finale, the judging panel added Iron Chefs Michael Symon, Bobby Flay and Masaharu Morimoto, weighing in on who should join their stable of "cooking giants" who defend their titles in Kitchen Stadium on Food Network's "Iron Chef."
The cheftestants were given 60 minutes to make a five-course feast that represents America's melting pot. The secret ingredient was ribs and racks of all sorts, including buffalo, pork and beef.
Chef Garces played it safe, an approach that seemed to impress the fellow Iron Chefs. But it turned off the judges, who have presided over the competitions that led up to tonight's showdown, including food critic Jeffrey Steingarten.
At times, the competition seemed less about Garces versus Mehta and more about Steingarden versus the Iron Chef judges.
Steingarden appeared to be trying to shame the Iron Chefs into voting for Chef Mehta by accusing them of playing it safe as well. He said like Garces because he cooked like them. "I would not pay for that food, and if any of you would, I have a bridge going to Brooklyn that I would like to sell you," he said.
Chefs Mehta and Garces are radically different in their cooking style yet well matched. They both won three challenges apiece during the course of the competition, which this season was set in Los Angeles and Japan.
Mehta was back at the ice cream again, making an avocado version that made nearly everyone swoon. But he also made a pork burger that was, well, raw. And it was served along with raw French fries. Chef Morimoto told Chef Mehta that he had tried to do too much -- it would have been better to focus on one dish and execute it perfectly.
On the other side of the spectrum, Chef Garces did just that, executing everything nearly perfectly. (The exception being a mouthful of cartilage that one of the judges got biting into his carnitas taco). But on balance, Garces' dish were kinda safe and boring, according to some of the judges.
The judging panel was left with a difficult decision: What talent should the reward most? Perfect execution, without a lot of flash? Or creative genius that sometimes fall short? Chef Symon asked this provocative question: "If you're creative and you fail, are you creative? Or are you a failure?"
It was a bit of an exaggeration, of course -- Mehta is not a failure by any stretch. But his culinary high points -- which may have surpassed anyone else in the competition -- were followed by comparable lows. Said one judge: "He can hit a high point ... but can't execute a French fry well."
It was enough to hand victory to Garces.
So what did you think? Did the right chef win?
-- Rene Lynch


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PHILADELPHIA — If Flyers fans booed every time Jeff Carter touched the puck Monday, it must have sounded like music to his ears.
With extra zip in his step if not revenge in his heart for the acrimonious end to his tenure with the Flyers, Carter scored the Kings' first goal in his first game back at the Wells Fargo Center. Another former Flyer longer removed, Justin Williams, scored the second goal of the Kings' eventual 3-2 victory.
"There's an added incentive any time you play your former team, especially the way things ended here," Williams said of Carter, who didn't speak to the media after the game.
"I know he wanted this game bad. He played well. He used his wheels well. He did what he was capable of."
So did the Kings, who have won three straight games. They prevailed on a goal by winger Dwight King, who has no link to the Flyers other than now being reviled for ending their five-game winning streak.
A turnover by the Flyers allowed defenseman Slava Voynov to dash up the right side, with King to his left and only one defender back. Voynov passed to King, whose shot from the left circle eluded goaltender Ray Emery at 10 minutes 36 seconds of the third period.
That restored the Kings' command of a game they had dominated and led, 2-0, but had to fight back to reclaim.
"We had the better of them for the first 40 minutes. Five, six minutes into the third period, for them to tie it up, not too happy about it," Kings goaltender Jonathan Quick said. "Especially because I thought we were outplaying them."
The Kings had to kill off a 30-second five-on-three Flyers power play in the second period and felt wronged when they lost an apparent goal at 13:38 to a cross-checking penalty on Carter. That made the outcome that much sweeter.
"Sometimes, you feel it was justice," Williams said.
Carter, who was traded from the Flyers to the Columbus Blue Jackets and then to the Kings, scored on a one-timer at 1:49 of the second period. The Kings then got a fortunate carom when a shot from deep on the right side by Vincent Lecavalier hit the right post, the crossbar and the left post but stayed out, a ruling that was reviewed and upheld.
"I don't know if I can remember one like that," Quick said. "Big stroke of luck there for that to happen."
After the Kings killed off a series of penalties, Williams gave them a 2-0 lead at 17:29 of the second period when Emery fumbled the rebound of a shot by Robyn Regehr. "It's a bad goal," Emery said. "I've got to control that rebound."
But the Flyers cut their deficit in half 29 seconds into the third period on a shot by Matt Read that deflected off Kings defenseman Jake Muzzin, and they pulled even at 8:18 on Jakub Voracek's redirection of a shot by Scott Hartnell.
"They're a team that scores a lot of goals in the third," said Mike Richards, another former Flyer who has played here before and was less a target than Carter was.
"They got that one early and seemed to have all the momentum, but we've been a team that's played together for a lot of years and have been through a lot. So we're a mentally strong team. We battled back after that, in a tough building."
Carter was a big part of that. "He played well. He was skating," Richards said. "He does what he does — he was shooting, skating and playing well. That's his game."
Finally, it was left to King to end a personal 10-game goal drought and successfully launch a brief but challenging trip.
"We've done some good things on the road. It's good to see," Richards said. "In playoffs, or leading up, we have to continue to build our game. I thought we'd been doing that. We had a little bit of a lull at home but the difference in the margin from winning and losing is one mistake right now. So it's good to see us get that bounce tonight and get that win."
When: 4 PDT.
On the air: TV: FS West, Radio: 1150.
Etc.: The Kings and Capitals met Thursday at Staples Center, where the Kings pulled out a 2-1 shootout victory. The Capitals are 4-0-1 in their last five games and their penalty-killing unit is 17 for 17 in that span. The Kings' last visit to the Verizon Center was on Feb. 12, 2011, a 4-1 victory.
Twitter: @helenenothelen


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Dong Zhou wrote:Yes it is
On a pedantic note, wasn't Zhang Fei opart of the rescue party when Lady Sun took Liu Shan?
well at least he tried first but then Zhang Fei come to the rescue
the intention saving Liu Chan without questioning that quite amaze me. Foolish but brave. Act first, consequences later.