SOURCE: Keating, L Clark. “To Defend and make Illustrious …,” “The Return to Paris: Les Regrets,” and “Les Antiquitez de Rome.” In Joachim Du Bellay pp. 9-18; 70-97, New York: Twayne 1971.

[In the first of the following three essays, Keating explores the events surrounding Du Bellay's composition of Le Deffence Et Illustration De La Langue Françoyse, as well as its impact upon the writing of French poetry. In the second and third, he offers background and influences regarding two collections of poetry by Du Bellay, based upon his impressions of Rome.]

TO DEFEND AND MAKE ILLUSTRIOUS …

It is a pity that we have no record of the day-by-day conversations of Dorat with his students. Yet we have in their lives and works evidence that he fired them with enthusiasm for the ancient poets, Greek and Roman. We know too that they read much Italian poetry and, with varying degrees of pleasure or dismay, such French verse as they could find to peruse. We know that there was a growing conviction among them that they were destined to lead the way to a reform in poetry. They were bent upon success for themselves and upon distinction for the literature of their country. And with the daily inspiration provided them by Dorat's analysis of texts, and from his intelligent commentary on forms and techniques, they began to feel that in a short time they would be ready to show their countrymen the way by publishing compositions of their own. But whether at this point they considered it necessary to make a declaration of principles we do not know. That they did so was seemingly the result of an event beyond their control.

I SEBILLET'S PAMPHLET

All of Dorat's students were acquainted with the Traduction de l'art poetique d'Horace which had been published in 1545 by Jacques Peletier. The latter was not a student under Dorat. In fact, he had already become a schoolmaster himself. But he was acquainted with nearly everyone in humanistic circles, and the men at Coqueret were in full accord not only with the principles laid down by Horace but by those additions furnished by Peletier in his introduction. They must have noticed especially his advocacy of the use of French as a literary language. Yet despite the intellectual ferment in which they lived, and their natural eagerness to make their position known, they might very well not have rushed into print with a statement of their own had it not been for the publication in 1548 by Thomas Sebillet of a pamphlet entitled Art poetique françoys. It is quite possible that before this work appeared in print most of the members of the Coqueret group had never heard of this talented but obscure Parisian lawyer with literary leanings. What, they asked themselves, were his principles? We can imagine and all but re-create without straining credulity the scene that occurred at Coqueret when someone purchased in a bookstall and brought home a copy of the new pamphlet. Undoubtedly before the group had a chance to read Sebillet's remarks in detail their reaction on reading the title alone must have been one of dismay. Had this Sebillet stolen all their thunder? they asked themselves. Had he spoken out ahead of them to tell the world what they had come to believe it was their prerogative to tell? Was he as aware as they were that the national literature was headed in the wrong direction?

As they read the Art poetique aloud to each other, they must have begun to feel relieved. From a feeling of fear lest Sebillet had plowed new ground, they turned to a feeling of scorn. Sebillet, once read, did not look like a very formidable rival. Essentially, he had but summarized the status quo. What he had done was to give advice to young poets, fairly good advice as we see it now. He praised the long-deceased poet Jean Lemaire de Belges (d. 1525) and the recently deceased Clément Marot (d. 1544), calling them the remakers of French poetry. He admired natural poets. He even liked the medieval genres and saw nothing wrong with them which could not be corrected by a strong dose of talent. In other words, after analyzing the poetic tendencies of the day he accepted them and contented himself with urging young poets to apply themselves diligently to composition in order to succeed within the existing tradition. And although he made passing mention of classic poetry, such as that of Horace and Pindar, he was obviously more at home with the unpretentious work of the reigning favorite, Mellin de Saint-Gelais. Although a humanist, he was obviously no revolutionary, and he seemed quite unaware of the ferment in the schools. He was simply an educated but unsophisticated observer who ventured to publish his opinions as an amateur of letters and a would-be poet. When this became plain to Ronsard, Du Bellay, and the rest, their irritation was mingled with joy. Plainly, Sebillet had not cut the ground out from under them to the extent that they had feared. If anything, he had done the opposite. He had given them an idol to smash, and if he had ventured into print before they were quite ready to do so themselves, all the more reason to answer him quickly and forcefully lest the public accept his conservative opinions as gospel.

II A PAMPHLET IN REPLY

Joachim du Bellay seems to have been designated as the spokesman to answer Sebillet and put him in his place. It might have been expected that Ronsard would have demanded and been accorded this role, or at least that he might have had it attributed to him by right of scholastic seniority. After all, he had been an advanced student when Du Bellay was a mere beginner. But time was of the essence. On that all agreed. And Ronsard had the habit of slow and careful workmanship, not to say procrastination. If the task had been assigned to him, he would have wished to write and rewrite at his leisure, and all agreed that the issuance of a reply should not be postponed. Du Bellay had no such scruples about rapid composition, and his willingness to fashion a quick rejoinder may have been the deciding factor. Doubtless we shall never know all the ins and outs of the discussions which took place, but very soon Du Bellay found himself turning out copy quickly and enthusiastically. It has been conjectured that, as he wrote, Ronsard and the others looked over his shoulder and made suggestions, and even that he sometimes wrote a paragraph or two at their dictation. Of this we have no evidence, but certainly the succeeding chapters must have been read aloud as soon as they were written to be applauded or criticized by all those present. Most scholars now regard the Deffence as Du Bellay's own work, but it would have been unbelievable for him to have been unwilling to listen to and to accept the suggestions of his comrades. The full title of the pamphlet which he wrote to state the principles of humanistic literature, and at the same time chastise Thomas Sebillet, was La Deffence et Illustration de la langue Françoyse.

The date of publication was April, 1549, which indicates clearly that Du Bellay rushed into print just a few months after the appearance of Sebillet's work. The basic ideas in the Deffence are not new. Jacques Peletier had already defended the use of French, not only in his translation of Horace's Art poetique, but in a poem of 1547 entitled “A un Poete Latin.” Even Du Bellay's title was far from original. In his pamphlet Sebillet had spoken of the necessity for “l'illustration et augmentation de la langue françoyse.” Du Bellay's statement, which has been regarded ever since its appearance as the official manifesto of the new school of poetry, shows evident signs of haste. Not only is the composition loose to the point of careless writing, but the work is ill-organized, repetitive, and exceedingly truculent. Had Sebillet and the poets he innocently defended been some sort of mortal enemies of the band at Coqueret, Du Bellay could not have handled them any more rudely or with less generosity. Sebillet himself was ridiculed for his opinions, his friends, his tastes, and his ignorance. Judging by his tone, Du Bellay's main purpose in reading the Art poetique seems to have been to find out what it had to say in order to declare himself against it, or to advocate a conrtary point of view. It is not to be wondered at that Sebillet was aghast at the violence of his opposition, equally not to be wondered at that in his next publication, an introduction to his translation of Iphigénie, he replied to the Deffence in kind.

Still, to this day, the Deffence is, notwithstanding its obvious faults, an interesting, even an exciting document. Its line of argument is still more or less acceptable. After a flowery dedication to his father's cousin, Cardinal Jean du Bellay, from whom Joachim hoped one day to obtain some sort of preferment, he plunges into his argument. He begins boldly, basing his ideas, no doubt, both on his reading and on the teachings of Dorat, with the statement that all languages have their origin in the imagination of men and are therefore equal. He continues to the effect that French, even in its present uncultivated state, is not a barbarous tongue, since it is capable of improvement. If it is less rich than Latin and Greek this is because Frenchmen of previous generations have expended too little effort on the enrichment of their language. The ancients, by way of contrast, labored long and hard on their mother tongues, exercising themselves in prose and poetry in order to render their written language a suitable instrument for the great works of literature that were to be composed in them. French, nontheless, is greater than most persons suppose. If Italian surpasses it at the moment of writing, the advantage is temporary and due to the fact that so many Italian humanists have taken the trouble to compose in their vernacular. French, if similarly used, will show itself quite capable of rendering the meaning of the sciences when it translates them from the ancient languages.

Yet the reader should not take this to mean that translation alone will suffice to improve the French language. Translation, after all, can be applied but clumsily to poetry. In fact, it fails altogether to carry with it the genius and flavor of any original poetic composition. At this point Du Bellay might have added, though he refrained from doing so, “Besides, Marot and his group have done translation to death.” What, then, is to be the procedure for improving the language? The best method is to be found in the substantive imitation of foreign works. The imitation of French works will not serve. One must remember that the Romans imitated the Greeks. Therefore the French will do well to imitate the writers of both languages. French should not be regarded as an inferior tongue simply because it does not have a complicated system of noun declensions and other grammatical subtleties. French, though a tardy plant, is bound to flower. Even as it stands, the language is capable of expressing all the intricacies of philosophy. If Frenchmen would but apply to other studies all the time they devote to the learning of the classical languages, France would be more likely to produce great poets and philosophers. After all, Frenchmen cannot hope to excel or even to equal the ancients in their own languages. For this reason it is far better to be preeminent in French than to write Latin and Greek with difficulty. Confidence in the possibilities of French on the part of native writers will do a great deal to improve the standing of France and her language at home and abroad. Here ends the first part of Du Bellay's argument.

III THE DEFFENCE CONTINUED

The second part of the Deffence is, from the standpoint of composition, no less repetitive and disorganized than the first. It is also equally spirited. Du Bellay continues to discuss on a more practical plane what he had generalized about in the first part. There are passing references to the Roman de la rose, to the late Marot, and to the Lyonese poet Antoine Héroet, and it seems as if our author is about to write a brief summary of the history of French poetry. Instead of doing so, he thrashes about somewhat vaguely concerning the faults to be found in contemporary poets and includes in his chapter a further admonition to study the ancients.

His next major subject is an analysis of the natural versus the learned poet, and of course he yields the palm to the latter. He is not all vague about this. His chapter is entitled “Que le naturel n'est suffisant à celuy qui en Poèsie veult faire œuvre digne de l'immortalité” (“That natural gifts are not sufficient for him who wishes to create poetic work worthy of immortality”). Even if poets are born, not made, he says, the aspiring poet had better spend long hours in study. Then, if he will but choose a model within the limits of his skill, he will by creative imitation finally write something worthwhile.

Our theorizer next discusses the poetic genres, which he believes need a thorough overhauling. He has, for instance, a positive dislike for poetic contests and for the conventional poetic genres submitted there. Get rid, he says, of all the easy victories to be won at the Puy of Rouen or the Floral Games of Toulouse. If this means scrapping the rondeau, the ballade, the chant royal, the virelai and the chanson, so much the worse. In their place the poet should attempt the epigram, in the style of Martial, the elegy in the manner of Ovid, Tibullus and Propertius, and the ode, which is still unknown in France. He also advises the cultivation of satire, after the manner of the ancients, of course. And with an exuberant semipun, he says: “Sonne moy ces beaux sonnetz, non moins docte que plaisante invention Italienne” (“Sound for me fine sonnets, a no less learned than pleasant Italian invention”), for at this point the Italians are praised in the same breath with the ancients. Evidently, Du Bellay was already reading Petrarch and Sannazzaro, as well as Horace and Virgil, for as we shall see when we come to consider his own poetry, he was already practicing the creative imitation which he advocates for the French poet in general. Almost nonchalantly, considering its undeveloped state, Du Bellay drops a passing admonition to the poet to contribute to the French theater. But what really rivets his attention in the cultural desert of his country is the lack of a French epic poem. This for a classicist was a crying need, and so he devotes a whole chapter to the possibilities for a French epic. Homer and Virgil are obviously the models to be imitated. Lancelot or Tristan, he thinks, would readily furnish good subject matter. As to how to write such a poem he says little. Curiously, or so Frenchmen regard it, he failed to mention what was to become the dramatic meter par excellence, that is, the twelve-syllable Alexandrine.

From this discussion of genres Du Bellay proceeds to more general matters. He urges his learned poet to invent words, basing them on classical models, and to resurrect French words that have fallen into disuse. He would like him to experiment with language, using infinitives as nouns. He must not hesitate to compose anagrams and acrostics, advice which, while it may sound odd to us, had solid classical models to build on. When the poet speaks he should be careful of his pronunciation. He must not imitate the writers of the collections of verse facetiously called “Printemps,” “Ruisseaux,” and the like. He should—an undoubted reference to Charles Fontaine—let his “fontaine” (fountain) run dry. He must write in French and learn withal how to excite a reader's emotions. He should emulate Guillaume Budé and Lazare de Baif who, though brilliant classicists, both of them yet enjoyed French literature and French intellectual pleasures. He must courageously celebrate French heroes and French cities. He should not hesitate to pillage the ancient masterpieces for examples of metaphors and other figures of speech. There was more, of course, but this was the gist.

As it happened, most of this advice was good, but the manner in which it was offered was in many ways unfortunate. By his militancy, his rudeness, and his calling by name of the poets toward whose practices he was hostile, Du Bellay went out of his way, and quite unnecessarily, to win the temporary hostility of many of his contemporaries. Perhaps these faults can be excused on the usual grounds of youth and inexperience, but less excusable was the hasty composition and disorganized thinking displayed in a manifesto that purported to teach others how to become men of letters. Still less excusable was the way he stretched some of his ideas in order to make them refute directly the advice given and the opinions expressed by Sebillet in his mild and even useful Art poetique françoys.

IV A COUNTERATTACK: LE QUINTIL HORATIAN

All the flaws in the Deffence that have been mentioned, and more too, were noted by the author of an anonymous pamphlet entitled Le Quintil horatian, which employed considerable wit and no less sarcasm to refute Du Bellay's point of view. Professor Chamard had the excellent notion to reprint the pertinent passages of this counterattack as footnotes to his scholarly edition of the Deffence. From these excerpts, as plainly as from the work as a whole, we perceive that at least one of Du Bellay's contemporaries was as aware of his shortcomings as any modern reader who studies him for the first time. Since the counterattack was published anonymously, there was much speculation as to who its author could be. For a long time it was assumed, despite his protests to the contrary, that Charles Fontaine was the author. He had a motive, as we have seen, in the snub that Du Bellay had thrown in passing at his poetry. Yet we know now that he was innocent of the charge. In our day it has been conclusively demonstrated that Barthélemy Aneau, the principal of the Collège de la Trinité in Lyons, was author of the Quintil. The Deffence was to suffer other blows.

In 1904 Professor Pierre Villey made what was thought to be the shocking discovery that whole portions of the Deffence had been translated with but minor changes from the Dialogo delle lingue of the Italian Sperone Speroni.¹ His pamphlet had appeared in Italy but a scant seven years before the Deffence, in 1542, and it has been noted that it was altogether possible for Du Bellay to have known the Italian writer personally. Reaction in our day to the discovery of Du Bellay's plagiarism has been strong, particularly in view of his firm stand against translation in his own pamphlet. Severe critics stated in effect that whatever he said in the Deffence that was new was not good, and that whatever was good was not new. This has been countered by the suggestion that, original or not, Du Bellay's pamphlet has exercised a strong, beneficent, and useful influence on French letters during a critical period in their history. Admiration for the Deffence should, according to this view, replace carping criticism.

It seems to me, however, that both the positive and negative attitudes of modern times may be quite beside the point. We have perhaps made too much of Professor Villey's discovery. No one seems to have paid much attention to the fact that Sperone Speroni's Dialogo was translated into French and published in 1551 by Claude Goujet and that in his introduction to the French edition he says that an excellent French author has already made good use of the dialogue. To whom besides Du Bellay could this remark have applied? In other words, the possibility exists that Du Bellay's translation and adaptation of Speroni may have been an open secret in his own century, and one that evoked little or no comment or disapproval. A public that had read and reacted to Du Bellay's manifesto in vehement fashion could hardly have ignored the implications of downright plagiarism if plagiarism there was. Barthélemy Aneau had not spared Du Bellay's ego in his strictures on his minor faults, and so it is hardly to be imagined that he would have passed over in silence the discovery that many of the objectionable views expressed were not even original. Several centuries later, Emile Zola, with no intention of deceiving anyone, adapted Claude Bernard's pamphlet on experimental medicine to his own uses, and it seems logical to postulate that Du Bellay may have been engaging in the same sort of adaptation. We know that Du Bellay was acquainted with the writings of Bembo and Castiglione as well as with the dialogues of Gelli.² The Roman writer Quintilian was in the public domain. If Du Bellay did not copy any of these writers slavishly he was at least inspired by them. The copying of whole pages of Speroni is another matter, but the remark of Goujet, plus the failure of his more vociferous opponents to protest, would suggest to me that his conduct in the matter of copying was well known.

Applying similar logic to the whole subject of creative imitation, the German scholar Hedwig Aebly writes that in her opinion Du Bellay's adapted versions and apparently literal translations of both Italian and Latin poetry frequently mask a talent for original phrasing and a gift for exquisite expression which are far removed from the sometimes pedestrian models that he followed. It is her contention that in dealing with Speroni's Dialogo Du Bellay made for himself a pamphlet whose importance transcends that of its model. She believes that the concept of creative imitation itself, while it existed in the Italian writers, is developed by Du Bellay in a fashion far superior to any expression of it that he found in his originals.³ With this judgment, I concur.

In this same connection it has been wondered why, if Du Bellay admired the Greeks as well as the Romans and Italians, he made relatively little use of Greek in his own work, whether original or derivative. Indeed it was long assumed that the poet's late start in studying Greek precluded his use of it even as a tool. Professor Isidore Silver has dealt this myth a severe blow. His careful studies of Du Bellay's work provide convincing evidence that he was a competent Greek scholar.⁴ It must be remembered, however, that even during the Hellenic revival of Du Bellay's day, Greek studies never achieved the prominence of Latin.

Ever since its publication the Deffence has been subject to critical evaluation. Probably no document so hastily written and so hastily conceived has been given so rigorous an examination. Barthélemy Aneau was but the first of a long line of critical readers. As we know, his evaluation was principally negative. He found fault with Du Bellay's sins of overstatement, name calling, irony, and hasty composition. He also ridiculed his penchant for self-congratulation and his attitude of omniscience. All these faults are present, but of them all hasty composition is probably the most obvious. Our author has the annoying habit of starting a discussion and then, somewhat in the manner of Homer's lengthy metaphors, he permits totally extraneous material to take up several pages before he returns to his argument to conclude it. Even then, he will probably take up and amplify the same topic later on in the book. Unfortunately, his logic is as faulty as his composition. As Aneau rightly observes, it is a decidedly weak argument to claim that French has parity with Italian simply on the basis of its possibilities. To do so is to admit a present inferiority. Any reader can multiply for himself examples of Du Bellay's haste and superficiality and yet it is all but universally agreed that to do so is to miss the point. Listing faults will not deprive Du Bellay of the place which his exuberant treatise won for him among his contemporaries. Over and against the commentary of Aneau, we must place the tremendous enthusiasm with which many others greeted his pamphlet when it appeared. Much of its freshness remains to this day, and casual readers as well as serious scholars find in its pages an excitement that all the strictures of the Quintil horatian cannot quite dim. The charge of plagiarism, even if proved, now scarcely offends us. It was Du Bellay, not his models, who made history by his humanistic approach to literature.

In summary, the Deffence was a timely document. Its praise of the French language and its confidence that France would someday produce a great literature appealed to the patriot. Italy had long been the inspiration for a rebirth of learning and literature, but even the humanists were beginning to ask themselves when Frenchmen would undertake to do something on their own. Du Bellay's call to arms was the answer, an appeal to hard work and young talent. Latin compositions, which were being produced on all sides, were a poor substitute for French, and there was even fear in some quarters that French literature might abdicate in favor of Latin. This danger was overcome at least in part as a consequence of Du Bellay's patriotic plea.

The opposition to all his hopes and plans for a national literature was in the hands of unimaginative men. Sebillet in his Art poetique revealed himself as a supporter of the status quo. His counterblast in the introduction to Iphigeniedeveloped no new arguments. Soon afterward he sought an accommodation with Du Bellay, and the two men became friends. As one critic has written ironically, Du Bellay readily forgave [himself] for the harm he had done.”⁵ Du Bellay, to make the record plain, praised Iphigenie on two occasions.⁶ Charles Fontaine, as we know, tried to make sure that he was not blamed for the Quintil,⁷ but nothing from Du Bellay's pen indicates that a friendly relationship ever developed between them. Maurice Scève, whom the Deffence had handled a little roughly for the obscurity of his verses, is to turn up shortly as the poet's host and guide during his stay in Lyon. Strangest of all, Aneau was also appeased, and in 1556, in his translation of Ovid's Metamorphoses, he refers to the pamphleteer whom he had pilloried as among “les bons poètes du présent.”⁸ The truth is that with the exception of Scève, who was a poet of stature in his own right, it was their association with Du Bellay that made his detractors famous.

To have been the acknowledged spokesman of the band at Coqueret was a signal honor. To have stated in memorable fashion what he and his associates intended to do was an achievement, but if Du Bellay had stopped there he would hardly have made a lasting reputation. It was the fact that in the same year that he issued the Deffence he also published a book of poetry, embodying some of the principles which he had advocated, that made humanists and men of letters take him seriously. From the modern point of view, it is Du Bellay's theory of creative imagination which is his most vulnerable point, but as Pierre de Nolhac has wryly observed, “Everyone thought it was easy to follow these models because it was easy to follow them.”⁹

.....

THE RETURN TO PARIS: LES REGRETS

We are not informed as to the circumstances surrounding Du Bellay's departure from Rome. It has been assumed by several commentators that he and his cousin the cardinal had a bitter quarrel and that the poet was dismissed. This theory does not square with the facts. No sooner did Joachim arrive in Paris than he undertook to oversee for his employer several important aspects of his episcopal concerns in Paris. For this he must have had explicit instructions with all that the fact implies. It is hardly likely that a dismissed employee would have been entrusted to handle weighty personal and professional matters. Therefore, the idea of his dismissal must be abandoned. The cardinal himself left for France a little more than a year later, but under the trying circumstances of diplomacy in Italy at the time, it is unlikely that he could have foreseen his own recall. He must, therefore, have wished to rely on the poet, thinking that after four years of absence from his archbishopric it would be useful to have a trusted agent in Paris to report to him directly on the progress of his affairs.

Nothing that has been said regarding Joachim's very real desire to return home, nor the suggestion that he and the cardinal had more than one unhappy confrontation over the business affairs of the palace, need imply that there was a decisive quarrel between them. Indeed, as we shall see, more than one sonnet that the poet devotes to his experiences in Rome speaks of the cardinal in terms that resemble much more those of an admiring observer than those of a dismissed or even an angry subordinate.

It was in October, 1557, that Joachim du Bellay reached Paris. He had been gone a little more than four years. Inevitably there were changes to face. Some of his friends had left the city. Marguerite de France, on whom he counted for advancement, was about to leave France permanently to take up residence in Savoy with her husband. We do not know exactly how Du Bellay was greeted by his friends, for strangely enough poetic tributes to his return were all but lacking. Dorat came forth with an enthusiastic poetic greeting, but Ronsard and younger friends were silent. Most probably there were jollifications in his honor, but no record of them was couched in verse to help us re-create the occasion.

For the first time in his life the poet was in fairly easy circumstances. Thanks to his continued employment by the cardinal, he was henceforth relieved of financial worries. Several minor benefices had also been conferred on him, including his nomination to be a canon of the Cathedral of Notre Dame. This churchly bounty was most welcome, for if Du Bellay continued to bombard the wealthy and powerful with ill-disguised appeals for material support, he was, at least, not dependent on a favorable reply for his daily bread.

In the business affairs of the archbishopric of Paris he began an immediate and almost feverish activity. This activity and interest were not at all welcome. A distant cousin, Eustache du Bellay, was the titular bishop, although in actuality he was little more than a stand-in for the cardinal. For a considerable time he had been managing his see without interference. He considered himself, furthermore, an honorable and capable servant of the cardinal, and he did not take kindly to interference. Joachim saw things differently. As one who had most recently talked to their common employer, he thought he understood better than Eustache how affairs should be managed. Besides, his experience in Rome may have given him a good opinion of himself. He had become an activist, and he began at once to offer unasked advice in the management of affairs. His interference, for so Eustache regarded it, was bitterly resented. In the latter's view, there was no reason not to continue as he had been doing. Suddenly he found himself with a supervisor, and he did not like it. He thought his kinsman overbearing, incompetent, and, particularly because of his deafness, impossible to deal with. He said so in angry letters to the cardinal. He complained that Joachim was interfering in decisions as to appointments within the diocese. He accused him of meddling in the allocation of funds. He told the cardinal that he was of so prickly a disposition that he was impossible to get along with. He was not only irascible, but the handicap of deafness made all communication between the two men impossible. Joachim defended himself stubbornly in letters and tried to throw the blame for their quarrel on Eustache. He held that he was but doing his assigned duty, that his alleged interference was but necessary participation, and that in point of fact it was Eustache who was the difficult and stubborn one. These mutual recriminations might have gone on for some time. From the cardinal's point of view, they may even have served their purpose, for he must have thought himself unlikely to be cheated if two quarrelsome men were observing each other closely. But suddenly a complication arose. In January, 1558, a collection of poetry by Joachim du Bellay was published in Paris. It was all about Rome, and its title was Les Regrets. It was followed in March by Les Antiquitez de Rome. With the publication of these two books, Joachim received a peremptory message from the cardinal.

I THE TRUTH ABOUT ROME

When Du Bellay was finally led to express in verse something of his disenchantment with Rome, and with his place in Roman society, he found for the first time among his talents a vein of poetic irony and a gift for satire that may have been as unsuspected by himself as by his friends. In his frequently ironical Deffence he had called for the development of literary satire in French, but it is most unlikely that he saw himself cast in the role of satirist. It is also equally unlikely that when he wrote the first poems of the new collections he had any thought of modifying his practice of the poet's role as he had previously described it. In the Deffence he had spoken of the poet as a seer and a divinely inspired madman who was to lead humanity. As his work on both collections progressed, this role was abandoned for that of the cynical, sometimes angry, but usually smiling observer of a decadent society. Perhaps in the beginning he had intended to write mainly of himself and his place in that society, but as time went on he looked increasingly at social institutions themselves and included in his purview the sacrosanct body of the church temporal. Naturally, this was not the first time that the church in Rome had been satirized by a practicing Catholic, but it must have been the first time in many years when the confidential representative of a foreign cardinal had handled it so roughly.

One would think that it could not have come as a surprise to Joachim that his book would displease Cardinal du Bellay. He acts surprised that it did so, and his own view of the book is such as to suggest that he never quite realized what he had accomplished. He says, for instance, in his Discours preliminaire, that what he set out to do was to arouse laughter and that his work was to be taken not as serious but as comic relief. This remark, as one of Du Bellay's English editors has observed, is calculated to disorient readers of our century.¹⁰ Undoubtedly, our idea of humor differs from that of the poet's era. Rabelais is still funny in places even after a lapse of four hundred years. But how much, even of his humor, leaves us cold? Du Bellay's case is even more striking. We see nothing to laugh at in the entire volume of the Regrets. At most, we may smile with wry satisfaction at the irony or sarcasm of some of the poems, but we are unlikely to do even that. There is a quiet humor in much of what Du Bellay says, but such humor as it contains is of a highly intellectual sort. If Les Regrets is not, therefore, as its author describes it, a humorous book, just what sort of book is it?

The collection of sonnets which we know as Les Regrets was dedicated to the French ambassador to Rome, M. d'Avanson. Its title was borrowed from Ovid's Tristia, for undoubtedly Du Bellay saw a parallel between the fact of his being exiled in Rome while the Roman poet suffered from being exiled from Rome. The poetic form that Du Bellay chose was the sonnet, of which by this time he was an acknowledged master. There are one hundred and ninety-one sonnets in this volume. The meter he chose is the dodecasyllabic or Alexandrine. Du Bellay had not mentioned this meter in the Deffence, but he said of it subsequently, in a letter to Jean de Morel, that he chose it in preference to all others in translating Michel de l'Hospital's Latin Discours au Roy “because no other satisfies me in so grave a matter.”¹¹ All literate Frenchmen, who greatly admire the Alexandrine as a quasi-national meter, have applauded his decision ever since.

In an interesting article Professor René Jasinski has attempted a step-by-step analysis of Du Bellay's thought processes in composing his sonnet sequence.¹² According to this study, the first four sonnets are introductory, and the next five set forth the poet's purpose. The body of the sequence then proceeds to consider a number of disparate topics. Five of the sonnets toward the end, usually referred to as the “sonnets suisses,” describe his passage through Switzerland on his way home. It seems, parenthetically, that he did not follow the usual route to Paris. Because of sporadic fighting north of Rome he took a ship for a short way and then worked his way up the peninsula. Switzerland once again made an unfortunate impression upon him, and his sonnets are satirical commentaries describing the crude manners of the Swiss and making fun of them.¹³ Incidentally, the humor here comes closest to the comic vein that we are promised in the preface.

It was for a long time assumed that Les Regrets was the simple outgrowth of Du Bellay's custom of confiding to his pen in hit-or-miss fashion some of his nostalgia for France and some of the frustrations of his daily life in Rome. He implies that such will be the case when he says in sonnet IV:

Je me contenteray de simplement escrire
Ce que la passion seulement me fait dire,
Sans rechercher ailleurs plus graves argumens. …(14)

I shall content myself with simply writing down what my emotions alone make me say, without looking elsewhere for more solemn arguments.

To a very limited extent, this statement may have coincided with reality, though it accords but ill with the poet's habits. Unlike Mellin de Saint-Gelais and some of his contemporaries, after writing a few poems Du Bellay generally began to think in terms of the total work that he intended to write. He then planned it, sketched out a rough outline, and proceeded to compose poems to fit his plan. It seems probable that he worked thus to complete the Regrets. A few of the sonnets in the sequence may have been written early in his sojourn in Rome, but by internal evidence the majority of them seem to have been composed toward the end of his stay. Some of the sonnets have nothing to do with his sojourn as such and are simply a return to Platonic and Petrarchian verse in honor of a woman of the sort that he had often written before. As usual, from time to time he included sentiments in praise of Marguerite de France and other members of the royal family. There is even a little tourism concerning Rome and the towns that he passed through on the way home.

What the poet has omitted by and large are the mythological references which up to this time had always been an integral part of his imagery. In no more than thirty sonnets out of the one hundred and ninety-one is there any reference at all to the classic myths or to mythological personages, and on the rare occasions when they do appear they are handled so as to imply a certain disdain for them on the part of the poet. All these factors taken together give us a new Du Bellay, and a more original one, even in the modern acceptance of the word. Many of these verses also have a lilt that is missing from his earlier work, and they are far less subservient to the influence of previous poets. Even the most indefatigable of source detectives have found few outright translations of whole sonnets in Les Regrets.¹⁵ Still, the modern reader must use all his faculties and perhaps have recourse to an authoritative commentary if he would enjoy the full flavor of Du Bellay's work. Our poet, even when he is not actively imitating an Italian or classical source, generally has at the back of his mind some half-remembered fragment of a poem that he has read, or some unconscious reminiscence of a literary metaphor, which does not readily present itself to the modern mind. In fact, so wide has the gulf become between his frame of reference and ours that sometimes in our reading we lose that thrill of pleasure that only the spontaneous recognition of shared experience can give. This said, we come occasionally upon a poem whose simple message strikes us with the force of a projectile. Thus, in the midst of a group of poems of no outstanding merit we come upon the most famous sonnet in the collection, a sonnet that represents the full flowering of Du Bellay's inspiration. True, this of all poems is an adaptation, but from his own compositions in the Latin collection of Poematia in the section entitled “Patriæ desiderium.” Every literate speaker of the French language knows it well:

Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage,
Ou comme cestuy là qui conquit la toison,
Et puis est retourné, plein d'usage et raison,
Vivre entre ses parents le reste de son aage!
Quand revoiray-je, helas, de mon petit village
Fumer la cheminée, et en quelle saison
Revoiray-je le clos de ma pauvre maison,
Qui m'est une province, et beaucoup d'avantage?
Plus me plaist le sejour qu'ont basty mes ayeux,
Que des palais Romains le front audacieux:
Plus que le marbre dur me plaist l'ardoise fine,
Plus mon Loyre Gaulois que le Tybre Latin,
Plus mon petit Lyré que le mont Palatin,
Et plus que l'air marin la doulceur Angevine.(16)

Happy the man who like Ulysses has made a fine journey, or like the hero who conquered the Golden Fleece, has come home at last, full of experience and wisdom, to live out the remainder of his life in the bosom of his family. When, alas, shall I see the chimney smoke of my village, or in what season look upon the walled enclosure of my poor house, which is to me a province and much more? I am more fond of the place my ancestors built than of the proud façades of Roman palaces, and better than marble I like our good slate, better than the Roman Tiber my French Loire, better my little stream Lyré than the Mount Palatine and better than the sea air the sweetness of Anjou.

This is lyricism of a lofty sort, of the sort, indeed, which won immortality for this collection of poems. In this instance, and in others like it, the sonnet has become the vehicle for a personal sentiment exquisitely expressed, and the result is a masterpiece. We may speculate as to whether Du Bellay fully realized what he had done, or whether like many another artist before and since, he merely returned to his work table in an hour's time to compose an excellent but not remarkable poem, whose mediocre quality he quite failed to distinguish from that of the great poem that had preceded it. Ulysses, by the way, was one of Du Bellay's favorite heroes. In him he saw a not unflattering parallel between his own situation as an unwilling expatriate and the Greek hero's prolonged efforts to return to his homeland. In this connection, it is interesting to note that M. Chamard, while he admires the poem as a whole, as all Frenchmen do, begrudges Du Bellay the mention of Ulysses. We can be a little more charitable, I believe. Even for the reader without much classical background, the reference to Ulysses remains both clear and pleasing. In any event, our best stance is a total acceptance of the poem. Few other sonnets among the collection of nearly two hundred achieved so much. No poet could have been expected to make them do so. Yet the standard maintained in the Regrets is high. This time Du Bellay had something to say, and the personal note, which he had once warned poets to avoid at all costs, stood him in good stead. Contrary to his own teaching, and probably contrary as well to his innermost convictions, he set out in Les Regrets to tell us about himself. In the very first sonnet he declares to his readers that this book is not one in which he will speak of philosophy, nature, or any other lofty subject. It will be instead a repository for the poet's innermost thoughts. He says:

Je me plains a mes vers, si j'ay quelque regret:
Je me ris avec eulx, je leur dy mon secret,
Comme estans de mon coeur les plus seurs secretaires.(17)

I complain to my verses when I am sad. With them I laugh; to them I tell my secrets, for they are the most trustworthy secretaries of my heart.

In the second sonnet he says to his friend Paschal that his apparently aimless versifying on a variety of subjects will undoubtedly appear easy to some persons, although in fact it is not. This collection, he continues, will not be the product of prolonged study or preparation. He has no intention of working it over and polishing it as he had urged the conscientious poet to do. In the third sonnet he continues his statement of purpose, saying that he has no expectation of winning a name for himself by writing this sort of verse. In other words, he is putting his precepts aside, but he wants to make certain that his public knows that he does so intentionally and that he tends to think of this collection as an exceptional one, quite outside the usual framework of humanistic composition. It was to be a pastime, more difficult than it appeared, but not to be judged by the criteria employed in looking at a scholarly and therefore truly noble work.

Underlying the whole was a sincere love of country, astonishing in its intensity, admirable in its spontaneity. And inseparable from it was the regret that he would not be able to pay homage in person to Madame Marguerite when she left for Piedmont. Truly, king and country appear to have been all but indistinguishable for our poet, and this says much to excuse the frequently exaggerated and trivial words that he addresses to the royal family.

II A MIRROR OF DAILY LIFE

Upon concluding his introductory sonnets, Du Bellay plunges into a recital of his thoughts and occupations. He describes his work in the cardinal's household, and we learn that he was essentially a manager or majordomo. We follow his growing disgust with Italy and all things Italian as his references to local persons and customs grow more and more harsh. Even the climate of the foreign city, that perennial scapegoat of the homesick and unhappy, comes in for its share of contempt. He wonders not once but several times why he was ever persuaded to leave home. He complains that even his intellectual pursuits have to be neglected. Rome, instead of warming his spirit, has simply chilled his bones. Here is one of his complaints:

Ne t'esbahis (Ronsard) la moitie de mon ame,
Si de ton Du Bellay France ne lit plus rien,
Et si aveques l'air du ciel Italien
Il n'a hume l'ardeur que l'Italie enflamme.
Le sainct rayon qui part des beaux yeux de ta dame
Et la saincte faveur de ton Prince et du mien,
Cela (Ronsard) cela, cela merite bien
De t'echauffer le coeur d'une si vive flamme.
Mais moy, qui suis absent des raiz de mon Soleil,
Comment puis-je sentir echauffement pareil
A celuy qui est pres de sa flamme divine?
Les costaux soleillez de pampre sont couvers,
Mais des Hyperborez les eternels hyvers
Ne portent que le froid, la neige et la bruine.(18)

Be not dismayed (Ronsard), companion of my soul, if France reads nothing more by thy Du Bellay, or if with the air of the Italian sky he does not breathe in the ardor that kindles Italy. The blessed ray of light which shines from thy lovely lady's eyes, and the blessed favor of thy Prince and mine, that, Ronsard, that well deserves to warm thy heart with its bright flame. But I, who am away from the rays of my sun, how can I be as warm as one still close to his divine flame? The sunny slopes are covered with vine leaves, but the eternal winters of the North bring only cold, snow and drizzling rain.

In ensuing poems he turns to a cynical yet humorous consideration of his involvement with household financial problems and of his day-to-day struggles with the cardinal's creditors and servants. Many of these descriptions of his misery he addresses to friends and associates in Paris as a subtle reminder to them of an exile's existence. We do not know whether the sonnets addressed to particular persons were sent to them at once or whether they had to wait upon the publication of the collection. But it seems most unlikely, if the dedications were to have meaning and usefulness, that Du Bellay would have failed to put them into his friends' hands. It seems, therefore, reasonable to assume that he arranged for the delivery of many of his sonnets, which thus fulfilled the function of letters. This was a sensible and efficient way of keeping his memory green among a busy and possibly fickle circle of intimates.

Interwoven with these mundane complaints is Du Bellay's everlasting theme: if I could only leave Rome! But in the midst of his complaints he exclaims in a practical vein: but if I were to do so I would forfeit my back pay! The picture of the poet that thereby emerges is of a very human individual whose problems sometimes come close to driving him to distraction. In the meantime, if we are to believe his own account of his performance, he is that rare, efficient, and most frustrated of men, the unappreciated confidential servant. He is harassed by menial concerns. He was to waste his good French talent on a bunch of ungrateful foreigners. By his very occupation he is cheated out of his rightful place in society. All that he dares to hope for is that when his servitude is over he will be able to return to a peaceful and quiet old age in his beloved Anjou country. Naturally, there is an element of conventional sentiment here. Anjou and the Loire Valley had become a sort of trademark for Du Bellay. They symbolized home and happiness, a place often talked about yet seldom visited. Thus, it is hardly surprising that when the poet finally returned to France he omitted entirely the much-advertised visit to Anjou. Except for brief and infrequent business trips there, he was quite content to remain in Paris. Still, the talk of home was quasisincere, and it made effective copy.

Occasionally in the midst of a discussion of his own problems, Du Bellay turns his thoughts to others. On one occasion he writes a sonnet for the death of a friend. On another he writes of his sympathy for his cousin the cardinal, whom he depicts as a faithful servant of the French crown, badgered by problems impossible of solution. He pictures him as a man who has been for more than forty years in the service of his king, who has always been inadequately rewarded and for the most part unappreciated. Parenthetically, let it be said that this view of the cardinal is close to reality. Cardinal du Bellay was in and out of favor with Francis I and Henry II, employed and discharged at their whim, yet the record shows that he was a man of unfailing and unswerving loyalty to his country. Nor is it possible to question Joachim's motives in writing this sonnet in his cousin's behalf. Nothing in the record, despite occasional differences between them, points to a lessened affection on the part of the poet for his distinguished relative and patron. He appears to have realized that his own unhappy position resulted more from circumstances than from any ill will on the part of his employer.

There is much commentary in the Regrets on the political events of the day. For instance, the change in popes is commented on, and the idiosyncrasies of each pope are mentioned. The machinations and misdeeds of the Spanish adversary are also dwelt upon. In short, Les Regrets furnishes the reader with a rare sort of news coverage, which is rendered all the more attractive for being so often sardonic and iconoclastic. The precise meaning of many of Du Bellay's references are in our day quite obscure, and so their identification with persons and events by a minute examination of the text of each sonnet has become, like the identification of the poet's sources, a kind of pastime for scholars.

Still, in large measure Du Bellay's thoughts seem to have been intended above all for his own satisfaction and as a kind of escape from reality. For instance, after considering the world and his place in it for the space of fifteen sonnets, there suddenly appears in sonnet LII this passionate outburst:

Si les larmes servoient de remede au malheur,
Et le pleurer pouvoit la tristesse arrester,
On devroit (Seigneur mien) les larmes acheter,
Et ne se trouveroit rien si cher que le pleur.
Mais les pleurs en effect sont de nulle valeur;
Car soit qu'on ne se veuille en pleurant tormenter,
Ou soit que nuict et jour on veuille lamenter,
On ne peult divertir le cours de la douleur. …(19)

If tears could remedy misfortune and weeping put an end to sorrow, we should (My Lord) [Cardinal du Bellay] buy tears, and nothing would be dearer than to cry. But tears in fact are useless, for whether one refuses to torment himself with weeping, or whether one wishes to lament by night and day, one cannot turn aside the course of grief.

This expression of sadness appears to be a turning point, for the sonnets that follow thrust melancholy firmly aside to advise a philosophical acceptance of one's fate. They even go so far as to uphold the epicurean view that the best course of action is to eat, drink, and be merry. After this, in sonnet LVI Du Bellay says that he is determined to make a virtue out of necessity, and with that he turns to satire.

III THE DIARIST TURNED SATIRIST

If we may judge by the sudden turn in the direction of the sonnets, Du Bellay seems to have perceived all at once the absurd, perhaps even comical, side of the situations and persons in whose midst he found himself. He begins to make fun of the pretentious, the cowardly, and the pedantic, of the captious critics and aged lovers, to name but a few of the stereotypes which Rome served up for his amusement and as models for his caricatures.

There is also a rising crescendo of contempt for Italy and for Italian ways of doing things. Toward all peninsular phenomena, his irony turns harsh and bitter. For the time being, he seems to have cast aside the tone of gentle melancholy which reached its height in “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse …” and has replaced it with a world-weariness and a kind of dry cynicism which, he assures us, is intended to make us laugh. By means of his irony he indulges in much forthright social criticism, culminating in the famous sonnet in which he describes the round of his daily encounters:

Marcher d'un grave pas et d'un grave sourci,
Et d'un grave soubriz à chascun faire feste,
Balancer tous ses mots, respondre de la teste,
Avec un Messer non, ou bien un Messer si:
Entremesler souvent un petit Et così,
Et d'un son servitor contrefaire l'honneste,
Et, comme si lon eust sa part en la conqueste,
Discourir sur Florence, et sur Naples aussi:
Seigneuriser chascun d'un baisement de main,
Et suivant la facon du ourtisan Romain,
Cacher sa pauvreté d'une brave apparence:
Voila de ceste Court la grande vertu,
Dont souvent mal monté, mal sain, et mal vestu,
Sans barbe et sans argent on s'en retourne en France.(20)

To walk solemnly and with a frowning look, and greet everyone with a sober smile, to weigh all words and answer with a nod, with a “no, signor,” or a “si signor”: to put in often a little “just so,” and mimic the honest man with a “your servant, sir,” and, as if one had had something to do with the conquest, to talk of Florence and of Naples too; to show deference to every man by kissing his hand, and, following the custom of the Roman courtier, to hide one's poverty under a brave appearance; there you have the great virtue of this court, from which, frequently, ill mounted, in ill health, ill clad, beardless and penniless one returns to France.

This is Du Bellay at his sardonic best. Then, deliberately forgetting for the nonce that he was the employee of the cardinal, with whose problems he had on occasion sympathized, he begins to mingle with his satire on things Roman and Italian an equally outspoken criticism of the church. He attacks its personnel, both high and low, and its notorious corruption. Considering his position, one wonders whether mere naïveté led Du Bellay to this dangerous indulgence in frankness or whether some sort of fatuous self-conceit led him to imagine that, because of his quasi-amateur status in diplomatic circles, he could say these things with impunity. But whatever the rationale, he continued to write in this sardonic vein for some time, becoming so personal in one sonnet as to attack the pope's eating habits and to make fun of his fondness for onions. But serious as this was, it seems but a trifle compared to some of his other comments. In one sonnet he actually attacked the pope for making a cardinal of one of his male paramours. That the pope had done so could not be denied, for in Rome nothing that went on in the Vatican escaped public notice, but to accord to the hints and whispers of backstairs gossip the immortality of a sonnet was going rather far. It is possible to argue, of course, although to do so is not flattering to Du Bellay, that he perhaps knew that he was coming to the end of his stay in Rome and that he therefore cynically calculated that when the storm broke he would be safely in Paris and out of reach. If so, he underestimated his cousin the cardinal. As he was to find out, the long arm of retribution was able to reach him even in France.

Buried, as it were, in the body of Les Regrets are several groups of sonnets of a peculiar sort. For example, sonnets XCVII and XCVIII give the reader a vivid description of an attempted exorcism performed on a woman supposedly possessed of a demon. Du Bellay had observed this weird performance at the Orphans Asylum in Rome in 1555, and although he reveals no skepticism regarding the belief in demons implied by the action taken, he is sardonic about the lecherous gestures employed by the monk who pretended to effect a cure.

The forms of passion and their social implications are a recurring theme throughout Les Regrets. Du Bellay castigates the Romans for their open companionship with courtesans. He speaks of the danger of venereal disease and rejoices that he himself has escaped from the temptations of vice. On another occasion, he cynically describes an unknown woman's charms. His attitudes, in other words, are ambivalent. As a somewhat reserved Frenchman, he found the Italian parade of vice fairly irritating. As a normal man, however, he sometimes thought its more obvious aspects exciting. There is, therefore, no consistent attitude toward women or love to be found in the sonnets. He seems rather to have treated the subject as the spirit moved him, with no attempt at an over-all consistency.

Toward the end of the sequence, among the fifty-odd sonnets that were composed after the poet returned to Paris, is one in which he reflects once again on his own poverty and wretchedness. He tortures himself by contrasting his low fortunes with the exaggerated hopes and aspirations with which he had approached his Roman assignment. Then he closes the Roman commentary with a sonnet of remarkable calm. What we might have expected at this point was an outpouring of joy at the prospect of a return to France. Instead, Du Bellay writes simply and matter-of-factly of his departure, reflecting in part his more famous poem. He says:

Et je pensois aussi ce que pensoit Ulysse,
Qu'il n'estoit rien plus doulx que voir encor' un jour
Fumer sa cheminee, et apres long sejour,
Se retrouver au sein de sa terre nourrice.
Je me rejouissois d'estre eschappé au vice,
Aux Circes d'Italie, aux Sirenes d'amour,
Et d'avoir rapporté en France à mon retour
L'honneur que l'on acquiert d'un fidele service.(21)

I congratulated myself on having escaped from vice, from the Circes of Italy and the Sirens of love, and for having brought back to France upon my return the honor that one acquires for faithful service. And I thought too what Ulysses thought, that nothing could be sweeter than to see again one day, the smoke of my chimney, and after a long stay to find myself again in the bosom of the land that nurtured me.

In these latter sonnets he comments like an interested tourist on the Italian cities that he passes through, giving special attention to the duchy of Urbino, which he found attractive. Switzerland was, as we have seen, the occasion for satirical comments, and the Protestant religion practiced there came in for pointed ridicule. It was quite appropriate for a cardinal's secretary to deal harshly with the reformed faith, but Du Bellay felt moved to display more than conventional opposition to it. As a Catholic, he had assumed the right to criticize the church's shortcomings and to attack the misconduct of her priesthood, but he had never attacked her doctrine. In attacking Protestantism he singled out what he regarded as the reformers' chief weakness, that of hypocrisy. For him, the stern moral code demanded by Protestant leaders should have been lived by everyone and not simply expounded from the pulpit. Therefore, he attacks the immorality of the city of Geneva where, he says, the austerity of a citizen's language is not matched by austerity of his conduct. Altogether, his remarks are in strong contrast with the more tolerant attitude of Montaigne when he visited the city a couple of decades later.

Inevitably, Du Bellay's unfriendly comments about the reformed religion drew forth a sharp reply. For reasons difficult to fathom, his opponent hid behind the pseudonym Quidam, which modern scholarship has not succeeded in penetrating. Du Bellay prepared a reply in the form of five sonnets, but he seems to have felt no urgency about getting them published, and so they did not appear until nearly a decade after his death, in 1568. Far from taking back what he had said originally, he returned to the attack. He did not trouble to be logical or fair, for such was not the mood of the times. Feelings, not facts, were uppermost. Du Bellay, though he might criticize the Catholic Church as one of her own, was simply out of tune with reform and reformers. The corruption of Rome he might despise, papal power and intrigue he might hate, but the reform of the church by persons who had left its fold had no appeal for him.

The visit to Lyons on the way home was a repetition of the pleasant social visit that he had enjoyed when he had passed through on his way to Italy. He was at home again, and he knew that from Lyons the way to Paris was not far.

IV THE CARDINAL'S DISPLEASURE

It may be said without fear of contradiction that Du Bellay felt that his return to Paris was in every sense a triumphal one. In retrospect, he was inclined to magnify his Italian role. And before him lay the pleasant task of showing his Parisian friends that he had never ceased to be a poet. His first care, therefore, was to see to the publication of the overstuffed portfolios that he had tucked away in his baggage. He counted on making an impression on the other members of the Pléiade, and as he reassumed his place among them socially he wanted at the same time to reassert his claim to the post of second in command after Ronsard. He began with Les Regrets whose privilège is dated January 17, 1558. A reaction from His Eminence the cardinal was not long in arriving. It seems that even before the publication of the entire sonnet sequence in Paris, the cardinal had heard rumors of its existence. He had read, or caused to be read to him, a few choice excerpts. Italians who resented the poet's attitude toward their country probably saw to that. Former French colleagues who had disliked the proud man who was also the master's kinsman are certain to have helped the cause of the poet's unpopularity. The cardinal was displeased, and he said so. At least, this is the way the story is usually told, so for the moment let us repeat it that way. We know that Cardinal du Bellay wrote a purportedly angry letter to Joachim. That letter is no longer in existence, but from Joachim's reply we can easily infer its contents. The cardinal certainly sounded angry. He asked what Joachim meant by publishing such a scurrilous work. Had he neither tact nor common sense? Was he not aware of the damage that might be done to France's cardinal and through him to France itself? He demanded an explanation forthwith. Now the foregoing is a mere reconstruction of what the cardinal may have said. But as we examine the actual reply by Joachim it will become apparent that the reconstruction cannot be far from the truth.

Joachim du Bellay's answer appears most ingenuous. But was it really? Could a man of his intelligence, who had spent his time in Rome learning the ins and outs of diplomacy, including its least savory aspects, have remained as innocent as the writer of the following letter appears to be? It seems most unlikely. Here is what Joachim wrote:

… while I was in your service in Rome I sometimes spent my time writing French and Latin poetry, not so much for the pleasure that I took in it as for the relaxation of my mind, occupied as I was by such affairs as you well know, and sometimes aroused according to events. This one may easily judge by reading my compositions. I had no intention then of publishing them, but contented myself with showing them to those who were my closest friends in your household; but a writer named Breton, who was with me at the time, made secret copies which, (as I discovered later) he sold to French gentlemen who were then in Rome. M. de Saint Ferme was the first to let me know about this. Now when I had returned to France, I was dismayed to discover a quantity of copies printed both in Lyons and in Paris. Wherefore I sued several printers, as I can prove by the decrees and judgments rendered against them. Seeing, therefore, that there was no remedy, and that it was impossible to suppress so many copies printed everywhere, and add to that the fact that the late king (whom God absolve) had read most of them and had told me himself to have them correctly printed, I handed them over to a printer without further ado, not thinking that there might be in the midst of them anything to offend anyone. …²²

This letter was followed by a second, which is also extant, and which repeats essentially the same arguments as the first. The gist of both letters is plain: the poet is innocent of intentional wrongdoing; he had no wish to offend; he was only saying what everyone knew; he had had no expectation of publishing his verse but had merely shown them to friends in the household; to his astonishment his trust had been betrayed; publication was his only protection against literary piracy; besides, King Henry II (now conveniently deceased) had urged him to publish his poetry.

Such is Du Bellay's letter, if we take it at its face value. The arguments against doing so appear to me to be very great. The lack of sophistication that such remarks would imply, as already noted, defy credulity. Further, could the poet actually have expected Breton to keep his secret? Had he himself not referred to the utter untrustworthiness of his associates? Such, in fact, was one of his principal themes.

The cardinal's real thoughts on the matter also lend themselves to speculation. He must have come to know Joachim fairly well in more than four years of association with him. He knew above all that he was a poet, and he must have had sense enough to realize that poets demand a certain amount of free speech. And as a skeptical humanist himself, the attitudes of his cousin must have been fairly predictable. He was not especially fond of the Italians, nor of the political institutions of the papacy with which he had to deal. In fact, the more one thinks of it, the more difficult it is to imagine that the cardinal was anything but vastly amused at seeing his adversaries, clerical and otherwise, put in the pillory. Of course, it is true that Joachim's published views regarding the function of poetry had nothing to say about its satirical and political uses in sonnet form, and least of all had the Deffence envisioned the use of poetry as catharsis. From this point of view, the completed sequence called Les Regrets must have astonished Joachim almost as much as it astonished the cardinal. Why, then, the angry letter from the latter to the author of Les Regrets? And equally important, why the apparently naïve, not to say hypocritical, reply?

Though he could hardly have expected that the cardinal's wrath would be lessened thereby, Joachim may very well have thought that because his verse in criticism of Rome was of an unlearned, unhumanistic sort it did not really count as part of his serious poetic output. But the weakness of this argument lies, first, in the haste with which he saw to its publication and, second, in the fact that his mockery of the popes and of the Italian capital was in no way lessened by not being “important” from their inventor's point of view. But even if this line of inquiry is abandoned, there are several reasons for believing that the cardinal could not have been as angry as he pretended. First was the fact that shortly before Joachim's departure he himself had been reduced in rank by the king. And this, coming on top of several years of hard work, could not but have made him angry. Why, then, would he have objected to seeing the Vatican roughly handled? With any sense of humor at all he must have realized that his cousin wrote not only wisely but too well of Roman society. But the clinching argument for believing that the cardinal's anger was mostly feigned, or pro forma, was the all-important fact that he made no move to relieve Joachim of the important post of collaborator with Eustache du Bellay in overseeing the affairs of the archbishopric of Paris. In fact, there are those who claim, without being altogether convincing, that at the time of his death Joachim was about to be nominated by the cardinal for the post of bishop of Bordeaux.²³

Without more evidence we cannot close the question. The assumption that both Joachim and his cousin said more than they meant may in part be true. Still, there is the fact of a Latin elegy to Jean de Morel in which the poet seems to show a need for self-justification and a sense of honest indignation that the attitudes reflected in the Regrets were misunderstood. We know, too, that his participation in the affairs of the diocese were a cause of real frustration to him. In fact, if any shadow stood between him and the affection and trust of Cardinal du Bellay, its presence was in all likelihood due to the quarreling and bickering that he had to endure as he tried to fulfill his ecclesiastical tasks. Ever since he had returned to Paris, this task had been a source of irritation. After naming Eustache du Bellay his deputy in Paris, the cardinal had left for Italy and apparently had not been overly generous with him. The perquisites of the archbishopric went to the cardinal; to his substitute went the headaches. And now after four years of faithful service Eustache found himself saddled with an overseer, and he did not like it. He was touchy as to his authority and was not averse to trying to make trouble between Joachim and the absent cardinal. This, it would seem, far more than any momentary irritation at the appearance of a book of satirical poems, tended to weaken somewhat the ties of mutual esteem between Joachim and his cousin. Yet, insofar as the evidence goes, they remained on terms of respect, if not friendship, until the poet's untimely death. And this event was followed in turn by the death of Cardinal du Bellay a little more than a month later.

.....

LES ANTIQUITEZ DE ROME

Shortly after the appearance of the Regrets, with a privilège dated six weeks later (March 3), Du Bellay's second volume of poetry written in Rome was printed by Fédéric Morel. Once again, the Roman sojourn itself provided the inspiration. The title in this instance was Les Antiquitez de Rome. The book is altogether different from its predecessor, but if the first was calculated to irritate the poet's former associates, French and Italian, the second was no less so. There is a difference, however. This time, the frustrations of the poet turned majordomo are thrust into the background. Once again the poet of Coqueret comes to the forefront, and Du Bellay takes on again the role of humanist, which in the Deffence he had called indispensable. Here speaks, despite disillusionment and cynicism, the classical scholar who, four years previously, had ridden into Rome all but overcome by a sentiment of awe. By the time the sonnets of Les Antiquitez de Rome were being composed, that awe was either gone or badly tarnished. A solid respect for the city that had known more than two thousand years of civilization still subsisted, but the poet now viewed the capital in two ways. He no longer saw it solely as a great historic whole whose modern aspects included and encompassed the ancient ones. The city's continuity of existence no longer blinded the poet to the changes that had taken place. Rome he would continue to glorify and to exalt, but the city was sharply divided. The modern city no longer blended in his mind with the ancient one. The old city appeared to him in the form of grandeur and decadence. The modern city was something apart, a dwelling place to be tolerated rather than loved. It was a place of intrigue and of exile, and Du Bellay cared little for either. Thus it is really ancient Rome that Les Antiquitez is about. We return in this book to classical allusions, to classical backgrounds, and to a host of reminiscences from the poet's reading and classical schooling. But there is a difference. In contrast to the Regrets, the poet is far more preoccupied with historical than with mythological references. Jupiter, Thetis, and Apollo make their appearance occasionally, but more prominent by far are ancient Greek heroes, men not gods, and their Roman successors and contemporaries. Les Antiquitez is a short collection of thirty-two sonnets, of which no less than eleven are closely imitated from the poet Lucan.²⁴ But whether largely original in development, or arrived at by creative imitation, it is generally conceded that Les Antiquitez de Rome no less than Les Regrets is a masterpiece.

I A CONFRONTATION WITH ROME

The over-all theme of this second sonnet sequence of Roman inspiration is, as its title implies, an exaltation of the great city of the past. With it, he contrasts the ruins that surround him at every turn, and betimes, the teeming, grubby city that stands on its site. As he looks about him, his mind is full of the lore, literary and historical, of classical Rome. He still worships at the shrine of her grandeur. He meditates on the wisdom of her great thinkers and writers. At the same time, his eyes take in at every glance sights that contrast sharply with the idealized and conventional picture that he has drawn from books. He is depressed as well as inspired by the ever-present ruins, the bits and pieces of the still visible Rome that was once republic and empire. And as he reflects, a trifle romantically, perhaps, on the nobility of the ancient and the tawdriness of the modern, he reflects both realistically and sentimentally on the fate of Rome and on her fall. The result is Les Antiquitez de Rome, a divergent theme drawn from the same inner sources that produced Les Regrets.

The first sonnet was carefully composed to set the serious, semitragic tone of the sequences that it introduced:

Divins Esprits, dont la poudreuse cendre
Gist sous le faix de tant de murs couvers,
Non vostre loz, qui vif par voz beaux vers
Ne se verra sous la terre descendre,
Si des humains la voix se peult estendre
Depuis icy jusqu'au fond des enfers,
Soient à mon cry les abysmes ouvers,
Tant que d'abas vous me puissiez entendre.
Trois fois cernant sous le voile des cieux
De voz tumbeaux le tour devotieux,
A haulte voix trois fois je vous appelle:
J'invoque icy vostre antique fureur,
En ce pendant que d'une saincte horreur
Je vays chantant vostre gloire plus belle.(25)

Divine spirits, whose powdery ashes lie beneath the burden of so many hidden walls, your praise, which lives in your beautiful verses will not be seen descending beneath the earth. If human voices can be heard from here to the depths of hell, let the abyss be open to my cry, so that you may hear me from below. Circling three times beneath the veil of heaven, making a pious circuit of your tombs, I call upon you loudly. Here do I invoke your ancient fury, while with a holy dread I sing your finest glory.

As may be perceived from these lines, the peculiarly personal mood of nostalgia that permeated Les Regrets has disappeared. There are to be but few references to the poet's personal situation, and, if we make an exception of a single sonnet which concludes in Petrarchian terms by referring to a case of unrequited love, we may say that the love element is just about missing. It is further interesting to note that in the midst of a collection that is original rather than derivative in inspiration, this single love sonnet represents a substantial borrowing from Baldassare Castiglione and, from its beginning to its end, is more his than Du Bellay's. Also lacking in this sequence are the numerous dedications of individual sonnets to friends and the incidental mention of their names in the body of the sonnets. There was a reason for this. This sonnet sequence is meant to serve a quite different purpose from Les Regrets, and in keeping with its solemnity Du Bellay has returned to the stately measures of his earlier days in Paris. He has also assumed a more philosophical attitude toward the shortcomings of modern Rome, and his desire to attack the city with irony and ridicule is kept well in hand.

The high reputation of these thirty-one sonnets is richly deserved, but even so there are among them some that fall short of excellence. As a sample of one of the most pedestrian we may cite sonnet VIII:

Par armes et vaisseaux Rome donta le monde,
Et pouvoit on juger qu'une seule cité
Avoit de sa grandeur le terme limité
Par la mesme rondeur de la terre et de l'onde.
Et tant fut la vertu de ce peuple feconde
En vertueux nepveux, que sa posterité
Surmontant ses ayeux en brave auctorité
Mesura le hault ciel à la terre profonde:
Afin qu'ayant rangé tout pouvoir sous sa main,
Rien ne peust estre borne à l'empire Romain:
Et que, si bien la temps destruit les Republiques,
Le temps ne mist si bas la Romaine hauteur,
Que le chef deterré aux fondemens antiques,
Qui prindrent nom de luy, fust découvert menteur.(26)

With arms and ships Rome conquered the world, and one might suppose that this single city was limited in grandeur only by the very globe of earth and sea. So great was the virtue of this people, fruitful in offspring, that its posterity, surpassing their ancestors in bold authority, measured the lofty sky to the depths below. So that, having brought all power to its hand, nothing could limit the Roman Empire. And that, if time destroys republics, time could not bring tall Rome so low that the head, disinterred from the ancient foundations, from which they took their name, might be called a cheat.

This sonnet repeats without any special éclat or verve what the poet has often said before, that is, that ancient Rome was a great city, that she ruled the world, and that withal she carried within her the seeds of her own destruction. But for most readers the poem seems prosaic. If it were written out as prose its poetic form would hardly be missed. But even though the poem is poor it is nonetheless characteristic, for it contains one of those enigmas so often used by Du Bellay and the Pléiade. Upon reading the last two verses of this poem, every thoughtful reader must have asked himself what is meant by the disinterred head referred to in the next-to-last line. In fact, we not only ask what is the meaning of the passage but why it was inserted in the poem. Few of the poet's associates could have been able to understand it. Surely, it was a private pedantry known only to those at Coqueret, after it was explained in a lecture by Dorat. Recently, M. Saulnier has come up with a reasonable explanation. He thinks that the head in question was one discovered during excavations for the foundations of the original Rome, that it lent its name to the etymology of the word capital, and that it was regarded by the founders of Rome as an augury of the city's future greatness. Rome, therefore, could never be less than head or chief of the world.²⁷ This was just the sort of mystery that Du Bellay enjoyed, for learning and pedantry were not always carefully distinguished from each other in Dorat's school.

From the master Du Bellay had learned to respect accurate scholarship, and therefore his learning and that of Ronsard is generally sound, but because Du Bellay often allowed himself to rely on recollection to create his effects he was sometimes inaccurate as well as pedantic. For this reason, modern scholars who have put Du Bellay's verse under a microscope have sometimes caught him in errors.

Of far more interest and greater poetic value is sonnet XV, which is by all criteria one of the best in the sequence. Its nostalgic view of Rome, which has at once withstood and succumbed to the ravages of time, is quite charming:

Palles Esprits, et vous Umbres poudreuses,
Qui jouissant de la clarté du jour
Fistes sortir cest orgueilleux sejour,
Dont nous voyons les reliques cendreuses:
Dictes, Esprits (ainsi les tenebreuses
Rives de Styx non passable au retour,
Vous enlacant d'un trois fois triple tour,
N'enferment point voz images unbreuses)
Dictes moy donc (car quelqu'une de vous
Possible encor se cache icy dessous)
Ne sentez vous augmenter vostre peine,
Quand quelquefois de ces costaux Romains
Vous contemplez l'ouvrage de voz mains
N'estre plus rien qu'une poudreuse plaine?(28)

Pale spirits, and you, o dusty shades, who when you enjoyed the light of day, created this proud sojourning place, whose fragmented remains we see, Say, o spirits (for thus the gloomy shores of Styx, which cannot twice be crossed, hold you three times in thrall, yet cannot hold back your shadowy images), Say, then (for some one of you perhaps is hidden here below), do you not feel increase of sorrow, when sometimes from these Roman slopes you contemplate your handiwork, and see that it is now a dusty plain and nothing more?

In this sonnet, as the reader can see for himself, Du Bellay appeals to the shades of the ancient Romans and calls upon them to witness the destruction of their city. His own attitude in this instance is withheld. His own homesickness is unmentioned, and yet his feeling of the tragedy of Rome's fall is abundantly clear. The reference to the river Styx is banal enough; the use of parentheses is an annoying interruption. And yet the whole is charming.

At the same time that we pause to note the subtle qualities that Du Bellay provides in his poetry, we note other and less praiseworthy traits also. In all the sonnets that deal with the city of Rome, we come up against a consistent tendency toward vagueness of description. In these sonnets we are being told by an eyewitness about sixteenth-century Rome as well as about the ancient city. We are asked to focus our attention upon its physical appearance while at the same time we reflect upon its role as the seat of the Roman Empire and upon its role as the capital of Christianity. Yet in this sonnet and others like it, the poet is content to refer to “ashen relics,” “the remains of Rome,” “Rome in ashes,” “holy ruins,” “these brave walls,” or “these dusty tombs.” Never does this man who walked the streets of Rome for more than four years describe his environment in colorful detail. He visited all quarters. The ruins of the ancient city were all about him. But when he came to describe in detail what he had seen he melted everything into general impressions of the sort that can be obtained from a book. We are far in thought and in time from the dictum of Flaubert that a single tree should be so carefully and accurately described that a visitor to a grove should be able to pick it out merely from having read a description of it. To expect so much of Du Bellay would be manifestly unfair, but, for all that, we know that our poet was capable of such precision when he wanted to be. His psychological analyses of the foibles of the Italians in Les Regrets are frequently outstanding for their quality of accurate and skillful observation. But evidently, what he was able to do when he wrote of the people around him it did not occur to him to do with the descriptions of Rome. This was true not only of the city but also of the places in which he lived. We know from contemporary accounts that the palaces which Cardinal du Bellay occupied were the last word in luxury, and we would have liked to have Joachim describe them to us, but of their appearance there is no hint in his verse.

Another noteworthy aspect of Du Bellay's style, and one which was also practiced by his friends, was the custom of beginning each verse of a given poem with an identical word, frequently a negative. “Neither this Nor that,” he says, or, more specifically: “Ny la fureur de la flamme enragee, / Ny le tranchant du fer victorieux, …”²⁹ (Neither the fury of the angry flame, nor the sharpness of the victorious steel, etc.) and so on, verse after verse. The result, if the practice is not too often repeated, is not necessarily unpleasing. The essential pattern for this sort of thing was borrowed from a fourteenth-century Italian genre called the noie in which the poet begins each line by mentioning some quality or object that he dislikes. The result is a list of undesirables and can be serious or humorous depending on the poet's handling of it. The noie approach was used in only one sonnet in Les Antiquitez, but in one form or another it found its way into much of his poetry. In Les Regrets he had used it often, notably in sonnets I, IV, LXVIII, and LXXIX.

Those of Du Bellay's readers and critics who distinctly prefer Les Antiquitez to Les Regrets stress the fact of the former's elevated, almost solemn, style, its elegance of language, and its absence of personal pleading. For these qualities they are willing to overlook an occasional woodenness of expression, the infrequent but very real intrusion of a melodramatic tone, and the knowledge, inseparable from any modern interpretation of his work, that a number of his sentiments and even of his felicities of expression are due as much to the hand of Lucan and others as to his own skill. Scholars have indeed been indefatigable, here as elsewhere, in seeking Du Bellay's sources. Professor Fucilla, for instance, has enlightened us by demonstrating that sonnet XXVII was fabricated from materials taken from both Castiglione and Bonamici,³⁰ but this said one must admit that the sonnet is still as fresh and attractive today as on the day when it was written some four hundred years ago:

Toy qui de Rome emerveillé contemples
L'antique orgueil, qui menassoit les cieux,
Ces vieux palais, ces monts audacieux,
Ces murs, ces arcz, ces thermes et ces temples,
Juge, en voyant ces ruines si amples,
Ce qu'a rongé le temps injurieux,
Puis qu'aux ouvriers les plus industrieux
Ces vieux fragmens encor servent d'exemples.
Regarde apres, comme de jour en jour
Rome fouillant son antique sejour,
Se rebatist de tant d'oeuvres divines:
Tu jugeras que le daemon Romain
S'efforce encor d'une fatale main
Ressusciter ces poudreuses ruines.(31)

Thou who lookest in wonder upon Rome's ancient pride, which threatened heaven, these old palaces, these bold mountains, these walls, these arches, baths and temples, judge, while looking upon these ample ruins, what injurious time has gnawed away, since to the most industrious of workman these old fragments still serve as examples. Look, then, and see how from day to day Rome, ransacking her ancient resting place, reshapes herself employing parts of works divine; thou wilt then think that the Roman spirit is trying once again with fateful hand to bring to life these dusty ruins.

Critics have wondered whether these sentiments and others like them were put to paper before or after the sonnets of Les Regrets. It had long been supposed that Les Antiquitez, if begun first, was put aside for the writing of the more personal Regrets. Professor Saulnier has demonstrated more or less conclusively that the two volumes were complementary and that they could hardly have been written except simultaneously.³² He also adds, in some irritation, that the effort of source seeking has gone too far and that scholars have even been capable at times of mistaking random and altogether spontaneous recollections for outright borrowing.³³

To choose between Du Bellay's two most famous collections is all but impossible, for each has its own particular charm. Perhaps no choice can be made. Les Antiquitez offers us, as it were, the keys to the city; Les Regrets, the key to the poet's heart.

II A FLIGHT OF FANCY

In the same volume in which Les Antiquitez de Rome appeared, Du Bellay included a series of fifteen sonnets which resembled nothing that he had ever done before. Deserting even the poetic realism of mythology, he plunged straight into a world of fantasy, a world of unbridled imagination and total unreality. In one of the final sonnets in this strange series there is a reference to the Book of Revelation in the Bible. The reference is timely, and one asks oneself whether Du Bellay, no serious Bible scholar, had by chance been reading the Scriptures and whether he was led thereby to try his hand at the writing of an apocalyptic vision in sonnet form. Significantly, he called his work Songe, and the title is wonderfully descriptive. Commentators have had a happy time trying to make sense of this wildly imagined vision, for although there are here and there some flashes of meaning, by and large the Songe is a hermetically sealed mystery.

Having taken leave, in this sequence, of the actual city of Rome, the poet lets his fancy wander at will. He imagines palaces and other grandiose structures built of marble and encrusted with precious stones. The result, if dazzling, tends also to be unreal. The hidden meaning, if any, appears to be that Rome, after rising to unparalleled heights, after building palaces and baths and other public structures of great beauty, was torn asunder by the barbarian invasions—or at least such is a possible interpretation of his reference to “winds from the north” which destroy the city. Further, the white and shining marble edifices seem to signify the Rome of the early days, when the city was new and the greatest of noble and patriotic Romans walked the city's streets. The tumbling of the palaces in its turn signifies Rome's fall. So much is easy to imagine, but individual poems seem, almost all of them, to hide references to specific catastrophes, some of them contemporary with Du Bellay's stay in the city. These we shall never succeed in untangling, for into their creation the poet put all his perverse love of puzzles and well-kept secrets. We can even apply to the whole Estienne Pasquier's dictum regarding Maurice Scève, author of the obscure Délie, “I gave up trying to understand him since obviously he did not want to be understood.”

Here as elsewhere at this stage in his career Du Bellay's control over the mechanics of his verse is complete. He has rendered both rhyme and rhythm subservient to his will. He has used two meters, the decasyllabic and the Alexandrine, and his use of the sonnet form is equally masterful. All the more pity, then, that most readers and critics feel that his skills are mainly wasted in the Songe. There are among us few readers interested in enigmas in poetic form. Perhaps in his own day, when puzzles and acrostics were a favorite parlor game, the reception of these sonnets may have been more favorable than it is today. For us not only the enigma but the fantasy tend to be regarded as a squandering of talent. We believe that describing real palaces and real jewels calls for skill of a higher order than that required to take leave of reality and simply allow the mind to drift into daydreams of kaleidoscopic brilliance. Therefore, except insofar as they interest the scholar and antiquarian, the sonnets of the Songe are doomed to oblivion. And, as is the case with Du Bellay's less striking efforts, this is a pity, for he always manages to put a few good lines into everything that he writes. A single sonnet, one of the better ones, will suffice to suggest the general tenor of the work with its real beauties and technical skill, along with its undoubted limitations. Here is sonnet XIV:

Ayant tant de malheurs gemy profondement,
Je vis une Cité quasi semblable à celle
Que vid le messager de la bonne nouvelle,
Mais basty sur le sable estoit son fondement.
Il sembloit que son chef touchast au firmament,
Et sa forme n'estoit moins superbe que belle:
Digne, s'il en fut onc, digne d'estre immortelle,
Si rien dessous le ciel se fondoit fermement.
J'estois emerveillé de voir si bel ouvrage,
Quand du costé de Nort vint le cruel orage,
Qui soufflant la fureur de son coeur despité
Sur tout ce qui s'oppose encontre sa venüe,
Renversa sur le champ, d'une poudreuses nüe,
Les foibles fondemens de la grande Cité.(34)

Having lamented bitterly so many misfortunes, I saw a city almost like that which the Evangelist saw, but its foundation was built on sand. Its summit seemed to touch the firmament, and its form was no less proud than beautiful, worthy if one ever was, worthy to be immortal, if anything under heaven was solidly built. I stood in wonder to see so fine a work, when from the north came the cruel storm which, exhaling the fury of its angry heart on everything that stood against its coming, overturned at once with a fine cloud the weak foundations of the great city.

Du Bellay enthusiasts find even this sort of composition worth reading for the sufficient reason that it comes from the master's pen, but surely it is “caviar to the general.”

Notes

1. Pierre Villey, Sources italiennes de la “Deffence” de Joachim du Bellay (Paris: Champion, 1908), pp. 71-75.

2. Natale Addamiano, “Quelques sources italiennes de la Deffence de Joachim du Bellay,” Revue de la littérature comparé, 3 (1923), 177-89.

3. Hedwig Aebly, Von der Imitation zur Originalität, Untersuchungen am Werke Joachim du Bellay (Zurich: Villiger, 1942), pp. 10-11.

4. Isidore Silver, “Du Bellay and the Hellenic Poetry: A Cursory Review,” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 60 (March-June, 1945), 66-80, 356-63, 670-81.

5. Hendrik de Noo, Sebillet et son Art poetique françoys rapproché de la Deffence et illustration de la langue françoise de Joachim du Bellay (Utrecht: Beijers, 1927), p. 125.

6. Du Bellay, Oeuvres poétiques, IV, 180-81; V, 272-73.

7. Letter from Charles Fontaine to Jean de Morel, cited by R. L. Hawkins, Maistre Charles Fontaine, Parisien (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1916), pp. 150-52.

8. Noo, op. cit., p. 123, n. 1.

9. Pierre de Nolhac, Ronsard et l'humanisme (Paris: Champion, 1921), p. 103.

10. M. A. Screech, Les Regrets (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 17.

11. Nolhac, Lettres de Joachim du Bellay, p. 29.

12. René Jasinski, “Sur la composition des Regrets,” Mélanges Lefranc (Paris: Droz, 1936), pp. 339-48.

13. Alexis François, Les Sonnets suisses de Joachim du Bellay (Lausanne: Librairie de l'Université, 1946), passim.

14. Du Bellay, Ouvres poétiques, II, 55, sonnet IV.

15. Joseph Vianey, Les Regrets de Joachim du Bellay (Paris: Nizet, 1967), Ch. 7.

16. Du Bellay, Ouvres poétiques. II, 76-77, sonnet XXXI.

17. Ibid., II, 52, sonnet I.

18. Ibid., II, 58-59, sonnet VIII.

19. Ibid., II, 92, sonnet LII.

20. Ibid., II 118, sonnet LXXXVI.

21. Ibid., II, 156, sonnet CXXX.

22. Nolhac, Lettres de Du Bellay, pp. 43-45.

23. Chamard, Du Bellay, pp. 457-59.

24. Frank M. Chambers, “Lucan and the ‘Antiquitez de Rome,’” Publications of the Modern Language Association, 60 (December, 1945), 937-48. See also Joseph Vianey, “Les Antiquitez de Rome, leurs sources latines et italiennes,” Bulletin italien, I (1901), 187-99.

25. Du Bellay, Ouvres poétiques, II, 4, sonnet I.

26. Ibid., II, 11, sonnet VIII.

27. V. L. Saulnier, “Commentaires sur les Antiquitez de Rome,” Bibliothèque de l'humanisme et Renaissance, 12 (1950), 114, 143.

28. Du Bellay, Ouvres poétiques, II, 16 sonnet XVI.

29. Ibid., II, 14, sonnet XIII.

30. Joseph Fucilla, “A Sonnet in Du Bellay's Antiquitez de Rome,” Modern Language Notes, 61 (1946), 260-62.

31. Du Bellay, Ouvres poétiques, II, 25, sonnet XXVII.

32. V. L. Saulnier, Du Bellay, l'homme et l'œuvre, p. 73.

33. Ibid.

34. Du Bellay, Ouvres poétiques, II, 38-39.

Selected Bibliography

Primary Sources

Ouvres poetiques. Edition critique par Henri Chamard, Vols. I-VI. Paris: Droz, 1908-31.

Secondary Sources

Chamard, Henri. Joachim du Bellay, 1522-1560. Lille: Au Siège de l'Université, 1900. The basic biography of Du Bellay, old but still good.

Nolhac, Pierre De. Lettres de Joachim du Bellay. Paris: Charavay, 1883. The letters are an indispensable tool for students of Du Bellay.

———. Ronsard et l’humanisme. Paris: Champion, 1921. Since during their time of study the careers of Ronsard and Du Bellay were closely intermingled, this book is most useful.

Saulnier, Verdun L. Les Antiquitez de Rome de Joachim du Bellay. Paris: Centre de documentation universitaire, 1950. An excellent new study.

———. Du Bellay, l'homme et l'œuvre. Paris: Boivin, 1951. A new and excellent biography.