The Banquet hosted in Lille by Philippe le Bon on February 17th, 1454, continues to elicit fascination in those who study it. The feast was a lavish affair: guests entering the hall had to pass a chained lion before taking their seats at tables decorated with automata, described as entremets, including fountains, moving tableaux, and a pie crust containing twenty-eight musicians. During and after their meal, guests were entertained with similarly exotic scenes (also called entremets): a fire-breathing dragon flew over their heads, and a small boy mounted on a deer moved amongst them, singing a duet in which the deer took the melody line. Finally, the allegorical figure of Sainte Eglise entered, mounted on the back of an elephant. She read a moving poem about her plight in the East following the Turkish capture of Constantinople during the previous year. Inspired by this spectacle, Philippe le Bon and his guests made vows to the Virgin and to a live pheasant, presented for this purpose, oaths intended to recapture Constantinople for the Christian faith.

The Banquet's iconography and the seriousness of its moral purpose account for some of the feast's fascination for the researcher. However, I would argue that there is a perceivable tension between the splendor of the public occasion and the intimacy of the voices in the written accounts, in which eyewitness narrators shared their misgivings as to the cost and purpose of the entertainment.