A Lost Copy of the Old French Vie (or Chanson) de Saint Alexis (Alexandrine Quatrain Version)

Abstract The Municipal Library of Tournai was struck in an air raid during the Second World War. Among the valuable manuscripts that were lost was Bibliothèque de la ville de Tournai MS 129, a fragmentary manuscript containing the alexandrine quatrain version of the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis. This poem, also known as the Chanson de Saint Alexis, represents one of the oldest surviving poetic traditions in French and enjoyed considerable popularity during the centuries after it was produced. Despite considerable scholarship on the Vie de Saint Alexis, the Tournai MS has gone largely unnoticed and is not mentioned in editions of the decasyllabic version of the Vie, nor is it mentioned in the only edition of the quatrain version. Thankfully, a nineteenth-century transcription of the lost Tournai copy survived the war. This article compares this transcription to surviving versions of the Vie de Saint Alexis to explore how the lost Tournai text intersects with, and illuminates, the broader tradition of the poem.

The Municipal Library of Tournai once held a manuscript containing a version of the Old French Vie de Saint Alexis (Biblioth� eque de la ville de Tournai MS 129).The small manuscript, which contained no other work, was defective at the beginning and end-likely worn away through use.Sadly, this manuscript was destroyed during the Second World War, when the library was hit by Luftwaffe bombardment, on 17 May 1940.Although a great deal of information remains about the copy of the Vie in the lost Tournai manuscript, it has been noticed only rarely by those working on the Vie and it has not been mentioned in critical editions of the poem (as discussed further below, note 11).This is not due to a lack of interest in the Vie.Indeed, the Vie de Saint Alexis (also known as the Chanson de Saint Alexis) is often considered an important text for the development of French literature, with one critic referring to it as the "premier grand po� eme de la litt� erature franc ¸aise" (Zufferey 1) ("first significant poem of French literature"). 1The first surviving vernacular version of the poem has been dated to the eleventh (or, occasionally, early twelfth) century, and the Vie is therefore among the earliest surviving poems in French. 2 Since the Vie has been the subject of scholarly interest, it is worth examining the copy in the lost Tournai manuscript and comparing it to the broader Vie tradition, and these are the goals of the present article.
The author of the Vie remains a mystery.Gaston Paris, one of the first editors of the eleventhcentury French version of the poem, suggested that the poem could be the work of a particular canon of Rouen, Tedbalt de Vernon, who translated several saints' lives from Latin (Paris et  Pannier 44-45).But Paris stressed that this was only a suggestion: "ce n'est l� a qu'une hypoth� ese, et si elle n'a rien contre elle, elle a le d� efaut de n'avoir pour elle aucun fait positif" (45) ("this is merely a hypothesis, and even if there is nothing to disprove it, it has the drawback of having no absolute facts in support of it"). 3 More recently, Mary Dominica Legge suggested that the poem was written by a monk who was working in the Benedictine Abbey of Bec-Hellouin, in Normandy (243; see also Zuffrey 2).This suggestion is, however, grounded in little evidence and the poem is typically considered anonymous.
The vernacular Vie must have been immensely popular during the centuries after it was written.In her critical edition (1983), Alison Goddard Elliott notes that the work survives in multiple manuscripts and several different versions (13-14); this is rare for an eleventh-century vernacular text.The different versions of the work include independent renditions in both Latin and Old French, and it is worth surveying some of these renditions since one of the goals of this article to understand the position of the Tournai version within the broader Vie tradition.One of the independent French renditions was translated from a Latin version of the narrative (known as version B) and is in octosyllabic couplets.Aside from this version, there is also a thirteenth-century French version translated from Latin into Picard that survives in two manuscripts.This version is in monorhymed alexandrine laisses (in other words, the entire laisse uses the same rhyme). 4There are also two independent French prose translations from the Latin.Although these independent translations have no bearing on the examination of the Tournai version presented here, they are nevertheless worth mentioning because they illustrate the popularity of the narrative life of St Alexis.
The best-known version of the Vie, and the one that has most frequently been edited, is the eleventh-century version, which is written in decasyllabic assonanced laisses.This version survives in seven manuscripts (Elliott 14; it is classified as versions 1 and 2 on the poem's Arlima page).The stemma of this work is notoriously difficult to reconstruct, and it is not clear which copy of the work was closest to the now-lost original-a situation that has led to some editorial debate.For their well-known 1872 edition of the Vie, L� eopold Pannier and Gaston Paris chose for their base text what is known as manuscript L (a manuscript from the first quarter of the twelfth century found in Hildeshiem and also known as the St Albans Psalter) on the grounds that it is the oldest manuscript copy.The idea that this copy is the oldest is still accepted in more recent scholarship (see e.g.Elliott 15).F. Zufferey, however, has argued that although manuscript L is the oldest, the text it contains is not the best representative of the original form of the Vie.Zufferey argues that a better choice of base text would be that of manuscript A (Bibl.Nat. de France, nouvelles acquisitions franc ¸aises 4503) or manuscript V (Vatican, Bibl.Vat., Vat.lat.5334), both of which Zufferey believes stray the least from the now-lost ur-text (2). 5 Making matters more complicated, the L copy of the poem contains fifteen stanzas not found in A, and according to Tony Hunt the same stanzas are found with some variation in five of the manuscripts that contain the poem (the manuscripts that have been assigned the sigla LVPM and S)(223).As one of the Vie's editors, Alison Goodard Elliott, notes, this collation challenge, and many others, have led editors to conclude that "[i]t is not possible to construct a stemma codicum" for the eleventh-century version of the poem (15).More recently, Maurizio Perugi has tried to construct a new stemma for the poem, but the precise relationship between copies remains an unsolved issue. 6he eleventh-century version of the poem was adapted into decasyllabic rhyming verse at some point in the thirteenth century.This modified version, which is often indicated using the siglum M, survives in 2 manuscripts: Paris, Biblioth� eque nationale de France, franc ¸ais, 1553 (ff.393va-400vb; siglum Ma or M 1 ) and Carlisle, Cathedral Library (no MS reference; ff.112r-133v; siglum Mb or M 2 )  This decasyllabic version is relevant for the discussion at hand because it contains a particular linguistic feature that appears in texts concentrated around the Tournai and Lille area (Pannier and Paris 269).For this reason, L� eopold Pannier and Gaston Paris proposed that this rhymed version was written in the Tournai or Lille area (275).It is notable that the Alexis story was in circulation in the area where the Tournai manuscript was last found, but given how far manuscripts traveled during the medieval period and beyond this may not be significant.
This thirteenth-century (or "M") version of the eleventh-century poem underwent an additional transformation into a new version, and it is to this tradition that the Tournai MS belongs.According to Gaston Paris, this newer version, which is in monorhymed quatrains, represents the last known transformation of the eleventh-century version (La vie 229).Paris and Pannier date this quatrain version on linguistic grounds to the middle of the fourteenth century, and Paris adds that the rhyme scheme is also suggestive of a fourteenth-century date (229).Paris writes that of all the versions of the Vie, the quatrain version is "� a coup sûr la plus mauvaise" (230) ("without a question the worst"), but this version nevertheless holds considerable interest to literary scholars and historians alike.Written in the quatrain style that rose to prominence in the fourteenth century, this version highlights an important stage in the evolution and reception of the Vie and illustrates how the poem was adapted to changing literary tastes and forms.
According to its first and only editor, L� eopold Pannier, the quatrain version was the second most popular version of the story during the medieval period (with the eleventh-century French version having been the most popular).Pannier assigned this quatrain version the siglum Q.This siglum was used to refer to all of the manuscript copies of the quatrain version known to Pannier when he created his edition in 1872-seven copies in total. 8Each of these copies and the relationships between them are described by Pannier (331-340), and they are worth listing again here for their relevance to the Tournai manuscript.Pannier notes that the authorial copy of the quatrain version has been lost, and the copy that he considers the closest to the original (based on the age of the language) is A, Biblioth� eque nationale, fonds fr., no.1555, which Pannier dates to the early fifteenth century (331).Other copies include B Biblioth� eque nationale, fonds fr., no.1661 (end of the fifteenth century), C Biblioth� eque nationale, fonds fr., no.1881 (sixteenth century), D Biblioth� eque nationale, fonds fr., no.15217 (second half of the fifteenth century), E Biblioth� eque de Besanc ¸on MS 588 (middle of the fifteenth century), F Biblioth� eque d'Arras MS n. 766 (from l'abbaye de Saint-Waast, dated to 1471/1472; Pannier notes that this MS was copied by a woman), and P, which appears as no.129 on a 1862 sale list of the collection of M. Technener.This last manuscript is described by Pannier as having been in his possession in 1872 and it is now Paris, Biblioth� eque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions franc ¸aises, no.4085.This last manuscript was copied by one Philippe Biard of the college of Autun in 1470/1471.Pannier collates all the copies of this quatrain version to arrive at the following stemma (344), which is the only one that has been produced for this version of the poem thus far: In this stemma, Pannier uses lower case letters to indicate missing copies from which a family is descended.A single apostrophe indicates a secondary family, whereas a double apostrophe indicates a tertiary family.A � indicates a lost copy from which a surviving copy is descended.Capitals without other marks indicate surviving copies (344)."M" here refers to the aforementioned thirteenthcentury version in decasyllabic rhyming lines that has been localized to the Tournai area.
When Elliott wrote about the Vie in 1983, the list of seven manuscripts of the quatrain version (version "Q") produced by Pannier was still up to date ( 14).Since then, three more manuscripts have been identified, bringing the total number to ten.I have assigned them the following sigla, starting with G (because Pannier's sigla list ends at F): G Bern, Burgerbibliothek, A 260, ff.70-81v (or 82a) (fifteenth century); H Bruxelles, Biblioth� eque royale de Belgique, 10295-10304, f. 34v (first half of the fifteenth century; identified by Paul Meyer in 1901 but not identified as a Q version MS until later); and I Paris, Biblioth� eque nationale de France, nouvelles acquisitions franc ¸aises, no.14313 (fifteenth century). 9The version of the Vie in the Tournai manuscript represents an eleventh copy of the quatrain version of the Vie, which I have assigned the siglum J.

The Tournai MS (J)
As already noted, the manuscript was in the collection of the Biblioth� eque de la ville de Tournai (Tournai Municipal Library) when it was struck in a German air raid on 17 May 1940.The destruction to the building was significant, and the library lost about 70,000 printed books in the attack.Although the caretaker of the collection, M. Coinne, worked to save the collection's valuable historical manuscripts, only 25 manuscripts of this pre-war collection survived (Faider and Van Sint Jan 3).A total of 222 historical manuscripts were destroyed, and by my count 42 of these were copied before 1500 (one of which is in two volumes). 10The lost manuscripts held considerable historical value.Many had belonged to the local Cathedral Chapter during the medieval period and others had been donated by important humanist figures and book collectors with international connections and tastes (the provenance of the collection is discussed further below, p. 5).The manuscript collection was valuable, not just for the medieval history of the region, but also for many regions beyond it.Lost texts of historical and literary value are many and include a copy of the Old French Chevalier au Cygne (Biblioth� eque de la ville de Tournai MS 103) and a copy of Bede's Historia ecclesiastica (in Latin) with an English marginal addition of what is known as the "West Saxon" version of Caedmon's Hymn (Biblioth� eque de la ville de Tournai MS 134).
The copy of the Vie that was destroyed, Biblioth� eque de la ville de Tournai MS 129, has very rarely been noticed in the critical history of the Vie.It has gone apparently unnoticed by the editors of the various versions of the poem. 11It has surfaced in other scholarly work only occasionally and has not been the subject of critical analysis.The online Dictionnaire � Etymologique de l'Ancien Franc ¸ais, for example, records some linguistic forms from the anonymous transcription of the Tournai manuscript examined here, but it does not attempt to trace the copy's intertextual history and refers to it mistakenly as an "independent version" of the Vie in "vers hexasyllabiques." 12Christopher Storey mentions the anonymous edition of the poem based on the Tournai manuscript briefly in a "postscript" to his Annotated Bibliography of the Vie, but he gives only sparse details about the text and does not mention which version of the Vie the lost manuscript had contained (59).
Most of what we know of the Tournai manuscript comes from pre-war material.The manuscript may have once contained a complete copy of the Vie, but by the time it was catalogued in Tournai it was defective at the beginning and end.When it was destroyed, it contained the verses that correspond with stanza 123, line 4 to stanza 190, line 4 in Pannier's 1872 edition of the quatrain version.While a complete description of the manuscript is impossible (given that it was destroyed), a good deal of information about it can be reconstructed from pre-war catalogue descriptions.Most helpful here is that of Paul Faider, who had, rather fortunately, catalogued the manuscript in the years leading up to its destruction.I have listed what is known about the manuscript here: missing as a result of this loss; see the collation below).On the last two folia, the exterior margin (i.e. the margin positioned beside the text and on the side furthest from the gutter) has been cut.

Contents: ff. 1r-15v Vie de Saint Alexis
Marginal annotations: A name has been inscribed in the margin of f. 5v: "Jan de la Vingne" Given the fragmentary nature of the manuscript, one might hope that the pieces that were missing when the manuscript was catalogued might have been stored elsewhere (and might therefore survive), but unfortunately this does not appear to be the case.The size of the manuscript, which is strikingly small, does not resemble that of any of the known copies.
The name inscribed in the manuscript, "Jan de la Vingne" is suggestive.It is tempting to read it as a variant spelling of the name of Jean de Vignay (b.c. 1280, d. middle of the 14 th c), who translated the Vie for his version of the Legende doree (as noted on the poem's Arlima page).But differences in spelling make this link unlikely.It is also worth noting that the position of the name, on what is now folio 5v, is not one where an author or translator's name would be expected.The name may instead refer to the Jan de la Vingne who died in Amsterdam in 1593 ("Church Records, Burials" ff.112-13).Further provenance information is unfortunately irrecoverable. 14The manuscript cannot be identified on the list of Belgian manuscripts that was prepared by Antoine Sanderus, and which is typically a good source of provenance information for manuscripts from the region. 15Nor can the origins of the manuscript be reconstructed from its last known location, since the manuscripts of The Municipal Library of Tournai originated from multiple sources, including the local Cathedral Chapter, the Abbey of Saint-Martin of Tournai, and the collections of various early modern humanist figures and book collectors, such as Denys de Villers (as is the case for Tournai MS 133) and Jerome De Winghe (c.1557-1637), a canon from Tournai (as is the case for Tournai MS 78)(Faider 9-14; "Winghe").It must suffice to state that the manuscript was possibly in the Low Countries, and possibly near Amsterdam, in the early modern period.
The text of the Vie that was in the Tournai manuscript has thankfully not been lost to us, because it was transcribed at some point in the second half of the nineteenth century and published by an anonymous editor in the Memoires de la Soci� et� e historique et arch� eologique de Tournai.Working before automated full-text searches, this anonymous editor did not recognize the poem as a copy of the Vie de Saint Alexis, describing it simply as "une l� egende rim� ee dont le h� eros est Saint Alexis" ("L� egende" 67) ("a rhyming legend, the hero of which is Saint Alexis").Compared to many contemporary editors, the editor appears to have been relatively conservative.He claims that the edition maintains the particularities of the language of the original and adds only such punctuation as was deemed necessary. 16Since the original manuscript is lost there is no easy way to check the editor's claims, but judging from the oddities of spelling and punctuation in the text it would seem that neither had been standardized.We must assume, however, that the surviving transcription is not a completely diplomatic one, since it contains no marks to signal expanded abbreviations.But regardless of how faithful the editor was to his source text, the edition is valuable as the only remaining witness to the lost J text.

The Position of the Tournai MS (J) on the Stemma of the Quatrain Version
Since the text's anonymous editor claims to have resisted editorial intervention, the Tournai text can be collated with surviving copies to get a sense of the text's relationship to the broader tradition of Vie texts.This process must be only an imperfect one, since we cannot now assess the accuracy of the Tournai transcription-or how far its transcriber kept to the stated pledge of resisting editorial intervention.Moreover, since the Tournai text was incomplete at the time that it was transcribed, the collation must be only partial. 17The collation below should therefore be considered little more than a preliminary tool, designed to support investigation into the quatrain version until a much-needed new edition of this version can be established.
Nevertheless, the collation, which is given in Appendix A, is valuable for opening up new lines of analysis into the text.This is especially true given that the collation has established a large number of variant readings in the Tournai text (J).The large number of variants in the J text is perhaps not surprising, since the broader textual history of the quatrain version of the Vie is marked by considerable variation-or, to use Paul Zumthor's famous term, mouvance (65-68).In places, the J text closely resembles the quatrain version of the Vie as it appears in Pannier's edition, but the J text also contains many distinct readings.These are often minor variants that have no impact on the broader narrative, although the redactor of the text preserved in the Tournai MS did not hesitate to rewrite sections of lines, or to change rhyming words.Given its distinct readings, the Tournai MS was clearly a witness to a unique set of revisions, and the survival of its transcription is fortuitous.
Although the surviving transcription has its weaknesses, it is possible to use it to establish a sense of where the J text belongs on Pannier's stemma (reproduced above).The J text shares by far the largest number of substantive variants with the manuscripts of branch CDP. 18When this branch diverges on a substantive reading, J most typically corresponds to the text of D. 19 Neither D nor J is descended from the other. 20Thus the collation, limited as it must be due to the nature of the surviving evidence, suggests that D and J form another sub-family, and that both D and J were descended from a now-lost ancestor copy, which should be placed where D � falls on Pannier's stemma.The text of manuscript J, then, was not an original or authorial copy, but it is nevertheless an important one for shedding light on the evolution of the quatrain version of the Vie.
The resurfacing of this copy of the Vie, insofar as it reveals a large number of variant readings, enables new avenues of literary analysis of the work.It also highlights the need for a new edition of the alexandrine quatrain version of the Vie-one that adopts an up-to-date editorial approach and accounts for all the witnesses of the quatrain version now available.Finally, the resurfacing of the Tournai copy also helps to highlight the considerable and long-lasting influence of the Vie.The quatrain version, which survived in eleven copies before the Tournai MS was destroyed in 1940, is the best attested version of the poem in the modern era and, judging from these figures, must have enjoyed considerable popularity during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
It is clear that the Alexis narrative continued to resonate in the late medieval period.From its origins as an early verse narrative in French, the Vie evolved to suit the poetic tastes and sensibilities of multiple generations.While poems like the Vie were once viewed as relics of a "pre-romance," or epic, age that came to be forgotten and superseded by a "twelfth-century renaissance," a growing body of scholarship, which includes important work by Keith Busby, Sarah Kay and others, has highlighted the persistence of these supposedly "pre-romance" narratives in late medieval France. 21The Tournai manuscript, a witness to the richness and complexity of the Alexis tradition in the late medieval period, reflects the persistence of these supposedly preromance narratives in the late medieval world.

Notes
01. Catherine Vincent also writes that "La Vie de saint Alexis fait partie des premi� eres grandes oeuvres r� edig� ees en langue d'oïl" (par.8) ("The Vie de saint Alexis is among the first significant works written in the langue d'oïl"); all translations are my own, unless otherwise indicated.02.One of the poem's early editors, Gaston Paris, suggested that the poem began to circulate in written form around 1040 (Paris, Litt� erature 7; see Storey, Annotated, 25).F. Zufferey suggests, on linguistic grounds, that the vernacular version emerged around 1050 (2; 8-9).Christopher Storey, surveying the evidence, suggests that the text "was composed in the second half of the 11 th century, and almost certainly after the end of the First Crusade ( 1059)" (Annotated 25 (see the poem's Arlima page, "La Vie").05.For another who views the A text as superior, see Sckommodau.An edition based on MS A has since been completed by T.D. Hemming (1994).Other editors have selected manuscript L on the basis of what Carl J. Odenkirchen describes as its "completeness" (57).Perugi (2014) chooses MS L as a base text on the basis of a complex recension that takes into account the Latin versions (601-608; 617-618).On the critical history of the manuscript tradition of the text, see Tony Hunt (225, note 10; 226, note 24).06.For his 2000 edition, Perugi attempts to reconstruct a stemma for the Vie, but Perugi revisited the issue in his 2014 study of the poem (583-87) and the matter remains the subject of ongoing critical inquiry.Further discussion of the relationship between copies of the eleventh-century text is beyond the scope of this investigation.07.This is version 3 on the work's Arlima page ("La vie").Paris and Pannier had not identified the Carlisle MS at the time of their 1872 edition.This second manuscript is described by Gaston Paris in "Un second manuscrit de la r� edaction rim� ee (M) de la Vie de saint Alexis," and by R. Fawtier and E. C. Fawtier Jones; see also Elliott 18. 08.The Q tradition has been edited by Pannier (Vie 346-388), with a brief and dismissive introduction by Gaston Paris (Vie 332; the manuscripts are described on 7, 27 and 331).Elliott suggests that the Q tradition is closer to manuscript M 2 than M 1 (19).09.The list is given on the poem's Arlima page ("La vie").On MS H see Paul Meyer (1901).The Bern MS is described in Hermannus Hagen's catalogue (296).On preliminary analysis, MS G shares readings with P and E, but further collation is beyond the scope of this article and best left to future editors of the quatrain version.10.The count of 247 is given by Faider (3).It is based on the manuscripts described by Wilbaux (Wilbaux gives numbers up to 245, but one of these manuscripts, no. 3, is in three parts).The count does not include the Assistance publique fonds or Nouveau fonds.The count of pre-1500 manuscripts that were lost is mine, based on the dating given in catalogue descriptions by Faider and Wilbaux.Two additional manuscripts (MSS 243 and 244 in Wilbaux) are not dated and may therefore date to this pre-1500 period, but this is unlikely judging from Wilbaux's descriptions.MS 213 may have contained some medieval material but it was more likely a post-medieval copy.11.The Tournai MS is not mentioned in the early editions of the poem, including Wilhelm M€ uller's (1845).Dr Geßner's (1855), or Jakob Schipper's edition of the English versions of the poem (1877).The MS is also not mentioned among the seven copies of the monorhymed quatrain version described by Pannier (Vie 331-340).In his 1953 edition of the earlier poem, Gerhard Rohlfs states that the fourteenth-century quatrain version survives in "mehreren Handschriften" (6) ("many manuscripts") but does not list these.Recent studies are also silent on the Tournai MS, likely because they tend to be focused on the earlier tradition of the poem.In her 1991 study, Rachel Bullington suggests that there are 17 manuscripts of the Old French Vie but does not list them in detail (7-9, note 7).In his extremely detailed and comprehensive study of the Alexis tradition and the Old French Vie (2014), Maurizio Perugi offers an updated version of his 2000 edition of the eleventh-century Vie and establishes the sources of the Old French version but does not consider the Q tradition at any length and so does not mention the Tournai MS (the MSS of the eleventh-century version are described on 617).12.The Bibliographical entry for the work in the Dictionnaire � Etymologique de l'Ancien Franc ¸ais states that the Tournai MS version "correspond en gros aux vers 264-570" ("corresponds roughly to verses 264 to 570") of the eleventh-century Alexis.But the version corresponds much closer to stanzas 123 line 4 to 190 line 4 in Pannier's 1872 edition, as discussed above.13.This description is based on those of Paul Faider (146) and Amable Wilbaux (62).14.Linguistic localisation is best avoided given the state of the transcription, on which see below.While the anonymous editor claims that the edition preserves the particularities of the language, there are no marks of abbreviation or other qualities that reflect a strictly diplomatic transcription and we must assume the editor silently expanded abbreviations, which would influence the linguistic forms of the transcription.15.There are several lives of St Alexis listed by Sanderus but none can be positively identified with Tournai MS 129. 16.The editor writes that "La Soci� et� e a ordonn� e l'impression de ce fragment dans toute sa naïvet� e, avec ses bizarreries d'orthographe, et sans autre addition que la ponctuation n� ecessaire � a l'� eclaircissement du texte" (67) ("The Society called for the printing of this fragment in all its naivety/primitiveness with its particularities/oddities of spelling, and without any other addition than the punctuation that was deemed necessary for the clarification of the text").We must assume, however, that the transcription is not completely diplomatic, since there are no marks to signal expanded abbreviations; see above, note 14. 17.The collation is also limited by the state of scholarship on the quatrain version of the Vie.The only edition remains Pannier's, and while it should be praised for taking into account many versions of the text, its Lachmannian editorial approach results in occasional silences on variant readings and a synthetic text which can give the impression of greater variation between copies than is attested by the manuscript tradition.Pannier outlines his editorial approach on pp.344-45.In addition, a few verses of the quatrain version are printed by Carl J. Odenkirchen in his edition (56-58).18. Substantive variant readings that J shares with the whole CDP branch occur at the following lines of Pannier's edition: 129. 1, 130.3, 134.2, 142.1, 147.3, 147.4,152.2, 170.1, 174.3.The variants J shares with D provide further evidence that J belongs in this branch.19.Substantive variant readings that J shares with D include 129. 3, 132.2, 134.3 (also shared with B and P),  141.3, 143.4 (similar variants), 144.1, 144.2, 145.3, 146.4,150.2, 151.4,157.4
Tournai, Biblioth� eque de la ville,MS 129 (destroyed in 1940) ).More recently, Maurizio Perugi has argued that the vernacular version of the Vie could not have been written before 1112 (419).03.De Vernon's authorship is not commonly accepted today.Some do, however, ascribe the poem to De Vernon; see, for example, a recent article by Catherine Vincent (par.8).Vincent attributes this view to Christopher Storey (although Storey is far more restrained in his reporting of the evidence; see La Vie de saint Alexis 148).04.The octosyllabic version is no. 4 on the work's Arlima page (see also Paris, "La vie de saint Alexi en vers octosyllabiques" 166).The version in monorhymed alexandrine laisses is no. 5.This version is preserved in two manuscripts, 'P' -Paris Bibl.nat., fonds fr.no.2162; and 'O' -Oxford, Bodl., Canonici misc.74 (Stebbins 5).These two MSS have been edited by Charles E. Stebbins.Independent versions translated from Latin include that inserted into the Tombel de Chartreuse (no.7), and the prose versions (8 and 9) Of the 23 editions of the earlier version of the Alexis text listed by Christopher Storey in his 1987Annotated Bibliography, I have checked all except nos.23, 27 (a translation into modern French), and 30-31 (all of which were unavailable to me) and none of them mentions the Tournai MS.In his own conservative edition of manuscript L of the earlier version of the poem (1934), Christopher Storey does not describe the various manuscripts of the poem, so the Tournai MS is naturally not mentioned (nor is it mentioned in his 1968 edition, undoubtedly for the same reason).Nor is the Tournai MS mentioned in more recent editions.It is not mentioned by Stebbins in his 1974 edition (unsurprisingly, since this edition is focused on the thirteenth-century laisse version).Alison Goddard Elliott's 1983 edition does not mention it, perhaps because this edition is focused on the earlier, eleventh-century version (14).