A History of Modern French Literature

by Christopher Prendergast

  Ronsard

  Poet Laureate, Public Intellectual, Cultural Creator

  TIMOTHY J. REISS

  By 1555, five years after his first book, Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) was the principal literary figure of his day, called, roughly in the order of his publications: “the French Pindar,” “Horace,” “Petrarch,” “Homer,” “Virgil,” “Prince of Poets.” He was the prime poet, quantitatively, and maybe qualitatively, writing some of the loveliest lyric poetry of his era and much of the most enduring philosophical and political poetry. He would be a leading public intellectual bridging trouble and tradition, consulted by court and kings, and a (the?) vital player in rethinking the role and power of the French language and its letters, as well as prosody—these last three, vital stakes in the political and ideological response to civil war and in constituting the nation-state. Some think Ronsard’s intimate, Joachim du Bellay (1522–60), was the better lyric poet, but in sheer quantity and impact Ronsard, in his own day and long after, far outweighs him. Even if, eighty years later, Ronsard’s star had waned, by the 1920s the judgment that he was “the begetter of modern French poetry” was again a critical chestnut.

  The poet never doubted. He described himself in the preface to that first book, his Quatre premiers livres des odes, as “the first French lyric author, who has led the rest to the path of such honorable labor” (“lyric” meant music, essential to great poetry), and often exulted in creating a golden era in French poetry, routing “the vile monster Ignorance”—said ode 1.3, to Henri II’s sister Marguerite—his “lute first / to show the way / to ring out so cleanly” (De sonner si proprement), by recovering the Greek and Latin lyricists. Ten years later (though the earlier preface had acknowledged that Clément Marot was a skilled vernacular poet), he named himself, in Complainte contre fortune in his Second livre des meslanges, “With great labor quite the first … / Who led the Muses from Greece to France, / And first measured their steps to my cadence, / And instead of Latin and Greek / First made them speak French, / Boldly defying the ignorant rabble” (thereby defaming Marot and others). In his 1563 “Reply to the Attacks and Calumnies of Sundry Genevan Preachers and Ministers,” the last great civil war thrust of his Discours des miseres de ce temps, speaking for himself and his Catholic Church, he scorns his attackers as able to write at all only by his having given them the language to do so: “You cannot deny it: for with my plenty / You all are filled, I am your only study, / You are all issued from my greatness, / You are my subjects, and I am your law. You are my streams, I am your source.”

  By then, Ronsard really was Poëte du Roy, king’s poet (as he had long sought); close to the queen mother, Catherine de Médicis; cherished by young Charles IX; and royal “counselor and almoner” from January 1559, before the deaths of Henri II and François II. He was a favored court confidant and spokesman, dicey as such favors were, especially during the ever more vicious civil strife after 1560. So these equal boasts bore unequal weight. In 1549, before the Odes, Ronsard was a figure known only to his schoolmates and teachers. His cultural creation was poetic and aesthetic—not yet of philosophic, political, or religious heft. The boast presages the growing layers and arenas of influence, justifying the future cardinal Jacques-Davy du Perron’s (1556–1618) claim in his 1586 funeral eulogy, that Ronsard “had always been exposed and formed in the public glare and in acts and words of which France has been so very long the theater.” But if the boast’s import in the last ode of his novice collection, “To his Muse,” was just poetic, even cultural in a narrow sense, it augured more; notably after the Odes’ success. The poem recasts the mature Horace’s famed Exegi monumentum aere perennius:

  Plus dur que fer, j’ay finy cest ouvrage,

  Que l’an dispos à demener les pas,

  Que l’eau rongeade, ou des freres la rage,

  Qui rompent tout, ne ru’ront point à bas,

  Le mesme jour que le dernier trespas

  M’assoupira d’un somme dur, à l’heure

  Sous le tombeau tout Ronsard n’ira pas,

  Restant de luy la part qui est meilleure.

  Tousjours tousjours, sans que jamais je meure,

  Je voleray tout vif par l’Univers,

  Eternisant les champs où je demeure

  De mes Lauriers honorez et couvers:

  Pour avoir joint les deux Harpeurs divers

  Au doux babil de ma lyre d’yvoire,

  Qui se sont faits Vandomois par mes vers.

  Sus donque, Muse, emporte au ciel la gloire

  Que j’ay gaignée, annonçant la victoire

  Dont à bon droit je me voy jouyssant:

  Et de ton fils consacre la mémoire,

  Ornant son front d’un Laurier verdissant.

  (Harder than iron have I ended this work, / That the year quick to maim one’s steps, / The wasting rain, or brothers’ [the winds’] fury, / That smash all, will not o’erturn. / The very day that final death / Lulls me into a hard sleep, at that hour / all Ronsard will not go under the tomb, / The best part of him remaining./ Forever forever, without my ever dying, / I shall fly full alive through the Universe, / Eternalizing the meadows where I dwell, / Honored and covered with my laurels: / For having joined to the sweet prattle of my ivory lyre, the two different harpers [Pindar and Horace] / Who have become Vendômois by my verses. / Up then, Muse, carry to the heavens the glory / I have won, declaring the victory / In which by good right I see myself rejoicing: / And of your son consecrate the memory, / Decorating his brow with laurel greening.)

  The decasyllabic ode flaunts his project. It is praise poetry of his muse and himself but mostly of king, queen, princes, statesmen, poets, lovers. It takes from Latin to draw French out of “infancy” (says his preface). It unites the two great Greek and Roman lyricists, ending a work whose strident Hellenism hyped new sources and the erudition to use them. It rejects “medieval” poetic genres for ancient ones, signally, in the First Book, Pindar’s triads of strophe, antistrophe, and epode, the first two metrically alike, the third different, but all triads alike, letting two tunes set the ode. Very singable, in alternating feminine (final mute-e) and masculine rhymes, it is metrically adept, its decasyllables’ latent tedium, their interior breaks, caesuras, all placed as required after four syllables (in French verse, the interior mute-e is voiced save before a vowel; the final mute-e is silent), offset by a rhyme scheme of plain alternating rimes croisées (abab) in paired couplets, whose second rhyme gives the first of the next pair: yielding a set of quasi-rimes embrassées (abba), ababbcbccd …, ending in serial near or actual rimes léonines (two or more final homophonous syllables) on vers, victoire, mémoire, and joy/fertility (jouissant/verdissant). It fuses abstract and figural topoi of (poetic) glory, peace, death, immortality, memory, with a loved home reality (a usual motif in Ronsard, here the Vendômois fields where his body lies). Finally, ending a first collection by calling it a life’s monument relishes its being anything but, and augurs Ronsard’s endless reworking, typical of his day’s poetics, its appeal and beauty.

  These formal, topical, and semantic elements—new in French (some were), age-old, the poet says, in the Ancients whose imitation he exalts and his public praises—recall that no post-Romantic “originality” is at issue. Far from it: the ideal was to express in French ideas, beliefs, desires, songs that others had uttered before, elsewhere, otherwise. Here lay “invention,” and the old canons of rhetoric and poetics provided the devices, topoi (places), and figures realizing that “originality.” These “fair inventions, descriptions, comparisons” were, said Ronsard’s 1565 Abbregé de l’art poëtique françois (Breviary of French poetic art), poetry’s nerves and pulsing life. His posthumous Franciade preface held “figures, schemes, tropes, metaphors, phrases and periphrases” needed most for the “prosy” twelve-syllable alexandrine line—whose novelty this chapter’s last third explores. “Invention” and “originality” raise two further unfamiliar elements. A general one is that intellectual activities were les
s fragmented than now (hence the normalcy of “Renaissance man”). Beside Ronsard’s ideal of the poet as vates, inspired seer with quasi-divine access to knowledge and wisdom, that poetry, logic, rhetoric, philosophy, theology, and political action were autonomous was inconceivable. Poetry, passion, politics, and place were imbricate, and none could be but refound or rebuilt. Ronsard and his fellows sought for poetry the depth of act and wisdom, breadth of intellectual address, expressive flexibility, and communicative intelligence they felt Greeks had found in Homer, Romans in Virgil.

  No idea fell ex nihilo. Poetry was joyous recognition in the endless kaleidoscope of the known. Petrarch’s love poetry, ringing changes on Latins and troubadours, had untied one sort of novelty-in-tradition in Italy, Spain, England, and France, where Marot shared in little, but in whose cultural hub of Lyons, Maurice Scève (1501–64), Louise Labé (1520–66), Pernette du Guillet (1520–45) and others wrote radiant Petrarchan lyric (Scève another of the few unallied poets Ronsard saluted). Du Bellay, with his 1549 Olive, soon joined. So did Ronsard, but only after his Odes loosed a graver, public, legacy of ancient festivals of city and nation culture invested in great Games and their victors. Pindar’s victorious athletes became Ronsard’s princes, prelates, patrons, and poets; ancient festival, competition, and panegyric became France’s present wars, court grandeurs, prayers for peace and golden-age renewal, beauty of country, future peerless culture, with large room for Hesiodic, Virgilian, and Ovidian myth, amity, banter, and bucolic love—also evoking renewal. So his boast may not be coy. Post-1560 editions alter “ton fils” to “Ronsard,” surely because, as the poem tells his immortal soul spanning the universe, these lines easily hinted blasphemous identification with Christ (of which Petrarch too had been accused). Such hubris followed giving poetry such wide mediatory and guiding roles, besides Ronsard’s dedicating half of his first printed poems to people of the highest rank and council—after addressing others privately.

  These themes and people found him. He first saw Paris in 1533, aged nine, when his father put him in the elite, conservative Collège de Navarre. He benefited little there, except for becoming acquainted with Charles, later cardinal de Guise, and in six months returned to being tutored at the family manor near Vendôme, a hundred miles southwest of Paris. His family were old gentry, keepers for their Vendôme lords of the Gastine forest, whose magic imbued the poet—“saincte Gastine” of his first Amours (sonnet 132), where beloved Cassandre sang and dreamed (131); his home and constant muse (Odes, 2.23); its cutting forlorn augury of men’s brutality and discord with nature (Elégie, 24). Nature was not just the site of, or cover for, human acts, pastoral, brutal, or amatory, but of its own delights, beauties, and God’s presence resounding to spirit and senses. In 1569, he thus addressed his poem “Le chat” (The cat), on nature and its animals, to his friend Rémy Belleau (1528–77): “Dieu est par tout, par tout se mesle Dieu, / Commencement, la fin, & le millieu / De ce qui vit, & dont l’ame est enclose / Par tout, & tient en vigueur toute chose / Come nostre Ame infuse dans noz corps.” (God is everywhere, everywhere God mingles, Beginning, end and middle Of whatever lives, and whose soul is enclosed Everywhere, and keeps everything alive Like our soul infused in our bodies.) The artful enjambments of these opening decasyllables make a sentence whose plenitude equals that of its sense and willful ambiguity in ties of life to life and soul to soul in God, nature, and humans. Ronsard fears cats, yet they embody God’s guardian presence. Comparison is irresistible to Christopher Smart’s “For I will consider my cat Jeoffry. / For he is the servant of the living God.” His 1750s poem reads and answers Ronsard. It is not alone.

  Ronsard’s father, Louis (1479–1544), who began fighting at age fifteen in France’s Italian wars, won the highest knightly Order of St. Michael from his field-commander, Louis d’Orléans, and favor from the king when Orléans ascended to the throne as Louis XII. In 1518, Ronsard père became maître d’hôtel (steward) to François I’s dauphin. In 1526, when his own youngest son, Pierre, was two, this meant his attending the two princes, the dauphin François and Henri, to Spain, as hostages for their father’s liberty after his capture at the Battle of Pavia (February 24, 1525). There Louis stayed, mostly alone in prison, until all three of them returned to France in 1530. Meantime, Pierre and three older siblings (three others died before his birth) were raised by their mother, Jeanne Chaudrier (ca. 1490–1545), who came from a well-connected, wealthy Poitou family, a social step above her husband when she and Louis wed in 1515.

  Maybe this Poitevin link, along with a later adored and much-sung clerical living in Touraine, helped inspire the Poitevin René Descartes’s well-known love for his “jardins de Touraine”—and for Ronsard: gardens the poet celebrated, for instance, in the lovely pastoral Voiage de Tours, added to Amours 2 in the 1560 Oeuvres, relating a trip made by Ronsard and his younger friend Jean-Antoine de Baïf (1532–89) to a wedding at Ronsard’s soon-to-be living on the islet of Saint-Cosme-lès-Tours: “C’estoit en la saison que l’amoureuse Flore / Faisoit pour son amy les florettes esclorre / Par les prés bigarés d’autant d’aimail de fleurs, / Que le grand arc du ciel s’emaille de couleurs …” (It was in the season when amorous Flora / Made the buds open for her beloved / Over meadows dappled with as much flowers’ enamel / As the great heavenly bow is enameled in colors …), and so on, for another 330 alexandrines, the grand line that Ronsard and his friends made standard in French (parallel in ease and feel to English blank verse), flexibly shifting from grandiosity to lighthearted joy in spring and fertility.

  Some think Pierre was partly tutored by a paternal uncle, canon of Le Mans cathedral and vicar-general to cardinal-bishop Louis de Bourbon, for this youngest nephew inherited his uncle’s library in 1535. A tutor’s death could be why his father had him made page in 1536 to the dauphin François, whose Provence campaign he joined on August 4. On the 10th, he witnessed François’s death, and the autopsy that was required by suspicion of poisoning. His father now became maître d’hôtel, and his second brother almoner, to the new dauphin, Henri, and Pierre became page to Charles, next in line. October saw him shifted to serve their sister, the ailing Madeleine, affianced to Scotland’s James V. Married at Notre-Dame in Paris on New Year’s Day 1537, they sailed north in May, arriving on the 19th after a stormy trip. The queen’s health worsened. Ronsard attended her until she died on July 7, then had to wait as James negotiated marriage with Marie de Lorraine, sister of Ronsard’s college associate, Charles de Guise. Marie came to Scotland in June 1538. Like many, Ronsard would idolize her daughter Mary, born in 1542, Queen of Scots at a week old. Not made page to Marie, as his father hoped, he left with Madeleine’s last courtiers in August, riding through London and England’s southeast to rejoin Charles d’Orléans at Amiens at October’s end. In two months, he was on an embassy through Brussels (as courier to his prince’s intended, daughter of Emperor Charles V) back to Scotland. A still stormier trip landed them at Queensferry as their ship sank under them.

  Back in France in March 1539, he was placed in the Écurie royale, the court military school. From May to August 1540, he was in Lazare de Baïf’s (1496–1547) embassy to a Diet at Haguenau with imperial princes, seeking allies against the emperor. Ronsard returned very ill, partly deaf, and for two years recuperated at home. His distress was likely as much emotional as physical. Deafness closed any opportunity for a diplomatic or military life. He turned to poetry. In March 1543, he went with his father to Le Mans for the funeral rites of their relative, diplomat and general Guillaume du Bellay. His brother bishop René tonsured Ronsard, making him eligible for church revenues and livings. Ronsard also met the bishop’s secretary, Jacques Peletier du Mans (1517–83), learned in mathematics, medicine, grammar, law, and Greek, and a poet who had translated the first French version of Horace’s Art poétique in 1541 (its printing is a mystery; no copy is known before a 1545 new edition). The two became firm friends, with Peletier acting as quasi–poetry tutor to Ronsard. Later in 1543, Peletier beca
me rector of the Paris Collège de Bayeux. Ronsard returned to his palace school and duties to his prince, spending all his spare time across the river at Baïf’s grand house, working with his son Antoine, a Greek and Latin prodigy, and his teachers—above all, Jean Dorat (1508–88), who became the beloved teacher of Ronsard and the whole band of friends, all soon urging a revolution in French letters.

  In June 1544 and January 1545, respectively, Ronsard’s father and mother died, and he spent ever more time with his literary friends. In September, Charles d’Orléans died of plague, and Ronsard passed into the dauphin Henri’s service. In spring 1546, Peletier met Joachim du Bellay in Le Mans or Poitiers, as Ronsard did a year later, legendarily by chance in a country inn. Du Bellay joined their group. The year 1547 also saw the deaths of Lazare de Baïf and, to more urgent sense of change, of François I and Henry VIII. Ronsard and Baïf entered the university, studying at the Collège de Coqueret with Dorat (who was not, contrary to myth, its principal until 1556). From the mid- 1540s, Ronsard had been building his odes, the first appearing in print as a jokey ode-blason salute to erotic chic in Peletier’s 1547 Œuvres poëtiques, listing beauties favored in a lover, to which Peletier replied in ensuing verses. Henri’s accession apparently freed Ronsard of duties, as he rethought poetry and its creative cultural and political work. And 1548 brought Mary, Queen of Scots, to Henri’s court, engaged to the four-year-old dauphin François—as if Ronsard’s material and spiritual pasts were fusing in a day, a place, a group. In 1549, he published a skilled Petrarchan pining lover’s song and a reworked Petrarchan sonnet, these amorous poems balanced by three “state” poems, each a separate brochure (the last, “Hymn to France,” included the two Petrarchan poems).

  One is a 1548 epithalamium to his family’s lord, Antoine de Bourbon, duc de Vendôme, on marrying Jeanne, Marguerite de Navarre’s daughter, François I’s niece. In sonnet 172 of the 1552 first Amours, tying together love, politics, and spirit of place, Ronsard would celebrate his adored Gastine and their short-lived son Henri’s birth, praising his valor and future defeats of Spain. Both poems easily slid to their eponymous next son, who became heir to the French throne a year before Ronsard’s death and Henri IV five years later, in 1589. Jeanne was fiercely Huguenot, while Antoine was a Catholic leader, slain at the siege of Rouen in 1562. Ronsard would long hew a middle path, like his future patron, Queen Catherine, whose June 1549 Paris Entry he feted, with Henri II the city’s “new God,” for a spring of wealth, fertility, victory, and courage. His ode must have been ordered by the festival’s grandmaster, Anne de Montmorency, constable of France, brother-in-law to Gaspard and Odet de Coligny, future Huguenot leaders, and Ronsard’s beloved patrons all—as the Guises, less loved, were amid Catholics. A 1547 “hymn” sings a France of agricultural, raw, and pastoral wealth; power, harmony, friendship, and peace; of storied heritage and divine legitimacy, its people Hector’s progeny (ll.119–20: the epic Franciade hinted here, as in the Odes); its cities, ports, lovely lands, rivers, industries, arts, mathematics, great princes and “me, thy poet” (l. 217). These poems foretell the diversity and bounty, erudition, linguistic riches, intellectual force, and high ambition of the 1550 Odes, boding their variety of rhythm and matter, skill and ease—sprezzatura—of touch and tone, dizzying verbal wealth and felicity, music, polemic and philosophy, their paean to kingship and its order, to the French land and nation (hence the Franciade), to nature and/as divinity. They echo the high dreams of du Bellay’s 1549 Deffence et illustration de la langue françoise, his “Petrarchan” Olive, and those Ronsard encomia. Ronsard’s January 1550 Odes are their first great original achievement.