MBTI Type: ESTP

Jean starts off the story by seeing a bunch of peasants being beheaded across the river, drawing his sword, saying “orders be damned” (it doesn’t matter if the king told them to hold the bridge) – and recklessly charging across the river into action. He refuses to apologize for this action, even though it lost them ground in a battle (he tells the men he won’t make any excuses for them, since they did the right thing). Jean is always quite headstrong in how he rushes into things; he often speaks before he thinks, alienating people in the process whom it would be wiser to befriend. He reads things on a surface level and reacts to them, becoming angry and jealous when his friend inherits a great, beautiful swath of land, which he then covets. He is quick to react to changing situations, whether that is his prowess on the battlefield (and he eagerly leaps into action), his furious attempts to get a stallion away from a mare he does not want bred, or in his final duel, where he manages to withstand a brutal knife wound to the upper thigh. Jean sees things in terms of gaining an advantage; he has no interest in the war, but joins it because “I need money”; he insists on being paid, rather than staying home with his wife. Jean marries a woman because her father can give him an enormous dowry to go with her, which will help ease some of his financial problems, but he winds up being a distant husband, oblivious to her feelings and sometimes rude about her inability to bear children. Jean has rather childish emotions; for no real reason at all, when provoked, he lashes out at people, in one situation being furious that Le Gris made a joke about him, and insisting that his rival call him ‘sir’; he is obsessed with forms of address, and his self-worth comes from his family’s good name and social standing, rather than his own sense of values. He also uses scandal tactically against Le Gris; knowing he will not win in the local court, due to Pierre’s bias, Jean tells everyone he knows about the assault, and urges them to spread it far and wide, to gain widespread hatred toward his enemy, which will force the king to settle their dispute. Jean has no real long term thinking and no interest in the mundane details of being a knight; planning for the future bores him.

Enneagram: 8w7 sp/so

Jean sees himself in a more favorable light than others do; he wants to think of himself as a champion of the people, and demands respect, not realizing that by asserting his constant anger and resentment, others such as Le Gris view him as a temperamental child. He often loses his temper and insults people in more powerful positions than he is, because he is not afraid of them and assumes they cannot hurt him, with the result that he is banished from court. When he finds out about his wife’s rape, he grabs her by the throat, chokes her, and demands to know how she brought this upon herself and if she had any part in it. Then, he wants to grind her rapist into the dust, from a selfish perspective (he wonders aloud if there is any part of his life that Le Gris will not touch – essentially, making the assault about him and his feelings and his anger, rather than her needs). He is a brutal man when roused, mercilessly killing his former best friend when Le Gris refuses to admit to his guilt, lashing out Le Gris in public when he refuses to call Jean ‘sir’ as given his knighthood, and mistreating his wife through sheer self-absorption and neglect. He also has a nature that takes no interest in being at home; he roams around the world, looking for things to do… and he has a 7 wing tendency to rewrite narratives to cast himself in a more honorable light. In his perspective, Jean is a man obsessed with goodness and virtue, who puts his wife ahead of his own needs and is tender with her, when in reality, he is the opposite—a cold and inconsiderate man focused on fulfilling his own physical desires. But he couldn’t live with himself, if he saw the truth of himself, so he denies it. He also just assumes he will defeat his adversary, when it comes to physical combat, without ever thinking he might be wrong—if he dies, his wife gets burned at the stake!