SOURCE: Griffin, Robert. “From Poetic Theory to Practice,” and “Les Antiquitez de Rome.” In Coronation Of The Poet: Joachim Du Bellay's Debt To The Trivium pp. 67-111; 115-137. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1969.

[In the first essay below, Griffin illustrates Du Bellay's contributions to the structure of French poetry. In the second, he conducts a detailed exploration of Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez De Rome.]

FROM POETIC THEORY TO PRACTICE

ART AND NATURE

It has often been observed that the contribution of the Deffence et Illustration can be measured as much by the enthusiastic attitude of its author as by the substance of its poetic doctrine. We have seen that this doctrine can be reduced largely to the main points of classical Latin rhetoric and poetic in both theory and practice. Under the guise of Corybantic madness that supposedly besets the poet and through the impulse of the desire for immortality, traditional precepts of rhetoric and poetic were accorded the status of a surpassing art. From the outset Du Bellay realized that, despite the handsome trappings of the theories of poetic inspiration, his art or artifice implied hard work and mastery of technique. In the Illustration he clearly outlined the required ascesis in an often quoted passage which he borrowed from Speroni and Horace: “Qui veut voler par les mains & bouches des hommes, doit longuement demeurer en sa chambre: & qui desire vivre en la memoire de la posterité, doit comme mort en soymesmes suer & trembler maintesfois, & autant que notz poëtes courtizans boyvent, mangent & dorment à leur oyse, endurer de faim, de soif & de longues vigiles. Ce sont les esles dont les ecriz des hommes volent au ciel” (pp. 105-106). To the “poete courtisan” he gives the ironic counsel of avoiding studious exercise when composing frivolous verse (VI, 131). But the Pléiade—and the Renaissance as a whole—held, at best, an ambivalent attitude toward art and technical skill in isolation. At times art appears to enjoy privileges unrelated to any referents in the natural world, as when Du Bellay blithely passes over the question of L'Olive’s biographical validity, “Et mon Olive (soit ce nom / D'Olive veritable ou non) / Se peult vanter d'avoir premiere / Salué la doulce lumiere” (V, 63). Chamard and John Lapp have speculated on sources drawn from visual arts that may have contributed to the plastic images of his “Prosphonematique” and “Musagnoeomachie,”¹ thus elevating art to the status of a self-contained world. And certainly the Pléiade's numerous references to Rosy-Fingered Dawn are less an allusion to a natural phenomenon than to a stylized and prestigious epic prototype. At other times Du Bellay cautiously avoids “trop hault louer l'artifice ou j'ay employé une portion de mon industrie” (VI, 247).

The crux of Renaissance discussions of art lies in its relationship to nature, not so much to the naturalism of the visible world as to the recognition of the intelligible in the physical and to the natural movement and functioning of the mind. This is as true of the self-conscious proclamations in Rabelais' prologues and Montaigne's legion statements as it is of the Pléiade's random and systematic reflections. Ramus' belief that art always presupposes nature, just as exercise assumes art, exemplifies the primacy of nature both in chronology and in value. Despite Du Bellay's allegations that human “artifice & industrie” determine linguistic improvement (p. 13) and the high esteem in which he held Vergil, at times he falls in step with the notion that the Golden Age of Homeric inspiration gave way to the iron age of Vergilian polish:

Montrant que la seule nature
Sans art, sans travail & sans cure
Fait naistre le poëte avant
Qu'il ayt songé d'estre sçavant …
Aussi les vers du temps d'Orphee,
D'Homere, Hesiode & Musee,
Ne venoient d'art, mais seulement
D'un franc naturel mouvement …
Depuis geinant tel exercice
Soubs un miserable artifice,
Ce qu'avoient de bon les premiers
Fut corrompu par les derniers.
De la vindrent ces Eneïdes, …

(V, 117-120)

He repeats the same terminology and attitude in a poem to Saint-Gelais where he censures the laborious muse of “l'artifice miserable” (III, 96).

This paradoxical status of art, now venerated, now despised, arose from the related beliefs that, when characterized by an exclusive attention to technique or vapid rhetoric, art could deform nature. And when encumbered by an arcane doctrine it hides the primary substance of nature in an unintelligible obscurity. The most frequent image used to describe art's deformation of nature, farde, suggests at once the familiar Renaissance topos of the mask of appearance hiding reality and the Pléiade's criticism of appliquéd figures and colors. Thus the pernicious effects of artifice are viewed in both moral and aesthetic terms, in keeping with the poet's priestly role. The description of the Petrarchistic “style fardant” (IV, 211) coincides with the “artifice menteur” underlying mythological tales which “ne farde point mes paroles” (V, 388). Ronsard's blunt conclusion on the advantages of wandering contours over stylized craftsmanship, “D'artifice soigneux, toute peinte de fart; / Car toujours la Nature est meilleure que l'art,”² is essentially the same as that arrived at by the degenerate “courtisanne repentie”:

Adieu donc, fards, dont mon visage est peingt,
Boetes, ou sont les couleurs de mon teinct …
Et ne veulx plus, pour me faire plus belle,
Changer par art ma forme naturelle,

(V, 139)

The correlative objection advanced against art that excessive learning hinders “le style doux-coulant” found adherents in both Ronsard, “Je ne veux que ce vers d'ornement indigent / Entre dans une escole,”³ and Du Bellay who disclaimed a lyric “plein de doctrine & antique erudition” in his introduction to the Divers jeux rustiques. But the contradiction surrounding the praise and blame of art is more apparent than real. We must heed the qualifications imposed on the terms art and artifice, since unalloyed art is criticized in various degrees for the corresponding imbalance it creates between carefully considered meaning and the spontaneous overflow of feeling. Du Bellay disdains a work “plein de doctrine,” but not doctrine itself; he shuns a cultivated obscurity at the expense of the populace, since such showy pirouettes contravene the Horatian imperative to “mesler en sa doctrine / Le plaisir à l'utilité” (V, 359). The poet's rejection not of art but of constrained art, “qui produict naïvement en moy / Ce que par art contraint les autres y font naistre” (II, 195), finds its counterpart in the acerbic common sense of Aneau who objects to L'Olive's “huyle obscur” and “choses & parolles” on the rhetorical grounds of battology (pointless repetition) and indecorum (III, vi). In short, Du Bellay, like Cicero and Quintilian, conceives nature's superiority over art as proportional and not absolute, “le naturel faire plus sans la doctrine que la doctrine sans le naturel” (p. 103).⁴ Art is both man's revenge on nature and his acceptance of its primacy.

In defining this dynamic relationship he employed the traditional complex of Latinate terminology surrounding the trichotomy of natural gifts of the mind (ingenium), art (ars, disciplina, scientia, doctrina) and exercise (usus, experientia). Taken together, they imply the learned mastery of methods inherent in successful examples which a gifted mind can judiciously use as guides in creating.⁵ Since the terms are universal and go back at least as far as Plato (Phaedrus, 269d) it is no surprise that Renaissance writers make them the bases of discussions on dialectic, rhetoric and poetry without any necessary communication or reciprocal influence among those writers. In his coronation address, amid Horatian and Ciceronian adages and reminders to discipline the imagination, Petrarch elaborates the interrelations of natura, ars, doctrina, ingenium and their efficient cause.⁶ The second chapter of Peletier's Art poétique I, in which he argues the interdependence of art and nature, is entitled “De la Nature et de l'Exercice.” And the wording of Ramus' treatise on dialectic is strongly reminiscent of Du Bellay's treatise on poetry, “l'exercise monstroit le fruict de l'art, ainsi nous fault icy penser que non par l'art seullet mais beaucoup plus l'exercice d'icelluy et la practique faict l'artisant … ce n'est pas assez de scavoir que c'est de vertu, mais il fault mettre peine de l'acquérir et d'en user … Et vauldroit beaucoup mieux avoir l'usage sans art que l'art sans usage.”

Indeed, Renaissance writers from various callings feel compelled to anchor their discussions of art, nature, experience and reason in unassailable logic. Writes Leonardo da Vinci: “La sperienza, interprete infra l'artifitiosa natura e la umana spetie, ne insegnia ciò che essa natura infra mortali adopera, da neciessità costretta non altrimenti operarsi possa · che la ragion, suo timone, operare le assegni … La sperienza non falla mai, ma solo fallano i vostri giuditi, promettendosi di quella efetti · tali che ne' uostri esperimenti causati non sono.”⁷ The Quinte Essence addresses Pantagruel and Panurge in the same way: “Ce que fait les humains pansemens esgarer par les abismes d'admiration n'est la souveraineté des effects, lesquels apertement ils esprouvent naistre des causes naturelles, moyennenent l'industrie des sages artisans; c'est la nouveauté de l'experience entrant en leurs sens, non prevoyans la facilité de l'oeuvre, quand jugement serain associe estude diligent.” Quintilian had used these categories interchangeably in postulating that “things” and “words” blend successfully by means of art, nature and exercise (II, x, 1; III, iv, 1), and that the similarity of logic, rhetoric and art lies in the ordered methods, practice and useful perceptions they share in common (II, xvii, 41-42). This perception is viewed either as certain judgment of evident facts or as purposeful wisdom (consilium) considering hidden facts where several arguments are compared (VI, v, 3); later he frames the opposition as iudicium against ingenium (X, i, 130). DuBellay appears to follow a similar line of thought in an octave from “Les Amours,” if his grounding in Latin allows us to invest the French words with their original Latin meanings:

Bien qu'imparfaict, j'ay toutefois des yeux,
          Non pour juger de vous parfaictement,
          Mais comme peult l'humain entendement
          Juger à l'oeil de la beauté des Cieux.
Bien qu'ignorant, je n'aye receu des Dieux
          L'art & sçavoir d'escrire doctement,
          Si donnez vous suffisant argument
          De vous louër aux moins ingenieux.

(II, 239)

The Renaissance implicitly made wisdom and virtue characteristics of reason, and thus saw the moral order of the universe as equally rational and virtuous. The Horatian requirement of mixing the useful with the sweet imposed a moral calling to which Du Bellay was always sensitive. For Quintilian the end of eloquence, knowledge and experience was goodness, and in an image with which the Pléiade as a whole was familiar he held that eloquence used for evil ends would make a stepmother of Nature (XII, i, 1; iv-v). Even Caesar in the Gallic War infused a moral tone in his formulaic usus atque ratio (II, xx; III, viii; IV, i). Although Du Bellay employs the same formula, it will be more instructive for our purposes to consider for a moment a transformation rather than a precise analogy. In his edition of Ronsard, Laumonier gives Horace's Espistola, I, ii, 19-22 as one of the sources for the “Ode au pais de vandomois” and contends that Du Bellay had Ronsard's poem before his mind's eye when he composed his famous “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse.”⁸ If that is so, then we witness the significant evolution of “virtus et sapientia” in Horace through “conseil” and “sçavoir” in Ronsard to “plein d'usage & raison” in Du Bellay, which not only points to a community of values but also places in a broader literary perspective the feelings of virtuous isolation and world weariness that underlie the intimate revelations of the Regrets.

Art, nature, exercise and their correlative values are therefore important to an understanding of Du Bellay's method and viewpoint in the Regrets and other collections. In the early sonnets where he proclaims his honesty, he presents the following sequence of poems as “estans de mon coeur les plus seurs secretaires”—the same expression he and Ronsard use in their communication with sympathetic nature: “Bois tristes & solitaires, / De ma peine secretaires” (V, 52), “Saincte Gastine, heureuse secretaire / De mes ennuis,”⁹ but while he seems to say he will not work hard on his poetry, he really indicates that he will not work hard to become a poet. His sonnets are not going to be contrivances from a rattled brain and chewed fingers. Although the simplicity of his style will be like prose, he warns that this studied casualness is not easy. Near the end of the collection, in a group of sonnets replete with figures of sentence on art and virtue, Du Bellay follows the Longinian and Horatian tradition by claiming that perfect art imitates nature and nature is most effective when emended by art: “L'artifice caché, c'est le vray artifice” (II, 167). The significance of this and similar statements derives from the way in which art can mould nature to meet the shifting exactions of the poet's vision:

Autant comme lon peult en un autre langage
          Une langue exprimer, autant que la nature
          Par l'art se peult monstrer, & que par la peinture
          On peult tirer au vif un naturel visage:

(II, 171)

This affinity between poetry and painting was, of course, one of the basic assumptions of Renaissance aesthetic. Horace's famous “ut pictura poesis” became the catchword to express the conception, but its sententious simplicity and lack of elaboration in the Ars poetica led it to be so misconstrued that it often plays a doubtful and inconsistent role in the actual application of poetic theory. Aneau, himself the author of an emblem book entitled Picta poesis (1552), travesties Horace in his criticism of Du Bellay's recommended sad elegies, since the Quintil feels that painting should only delight (p. 117), and Du Bellay adds to the caricature by asserting that poetry and painting are alike in their mutual subjection to vulgar opinion (p. 182). The key words au vif cited in the verses above indicate rather a theory developed at length by the Pléiade's great manifesto, drawn from a non-Horatian source.

In the midst of numerous figures and ornaments that Du Bellay recommends to the would-be poet he includes the term energies (p. 35). Chamard and critics after him have charged Du Bellay with confusing Aristotle's energia, referring to the forcefulness derived from a vividly animated style, with Dionysius of Halicarnassus' enargia which refers to the high visual relief of character, idea or scene, caused by a figured style. Yet the poet's reference to Aristotle in “Le Poete courtisan” bespeaks a limited knowledge (VI, 129-130), and his “Prosphonematique” suggests only a casual acquaintance with Dionysius. Moreover, while a writer like Sebillet uses enargie to describe the uses of imposing vocabulary for drawing out a poet's conception (Art poétique, I, iv) and Peletier uses the related term hypotypose as “l'expression vive des choses par les moz” (Art poétique, I, ix), energia (or energie) has always tended to include all of these related meanings, as it does for Du Bellay. A close reading of Aristotle's Rhetoric, III, xi, finds energia linked to figured and ordered movement (schema), emotion and the reader's vicarious participation through visual immediacy; a medieval rhetorician like Isidore will use it in a similar way.¹⁰ The conception became central to a later Renaissance poet like Sidney through readings of Aristotle, Quintilian and Scaliger.¹¹ But, if precise sources can be ascribed at all, it seems likely that Du Bellay's source was primarily Quintilian, since the figures and ornaments associated with energies are all found in the Institutio (VIII, vi) and Quintilian's discussion of energia, enargia and hypotyposis is the fullest Du Bellay could have known. In Book VIII and elsewhere a premium value is placed on vivid representation that would be true to nature, word pictures formed by the imagination for the mind's eye. The clear conceptions and powerful effects of these illustrations, engendered by a copiousness of thought and figurative language, are designed to persuade our minds and inspire emotions.¹²

This type of imaging is fundamental to the close cooperation Du Bellay seeks between art and a superior nature: “j'estimeroy' l'Art pouvoir exprimer la vive energie de la Nature” (p. 80). Since the painting nomenclature is partially metaphoric, the colors invoked refer more to varied verbal figures, the “couleurs de rhétorique,” than to chromatic pigment. Ronsard, leafing through his books to sort out and choose “le plus beau,” says “en cent couleurs je peints en un tableau, / Tantost en l'autre: & maistre en ma peinture, / Sans me forcer j'imite la Nature.”¹³ Du Bellay's dedicatory sonnet of the Antiquitez similarly purports to place before the king's and the public's eye “ce petit tableau / Peint, le mieux que j'ay peu, de couleurs poëtiques.” His many allusions to painting and light effects are coupled with energie and the use of figures which body forth the poetic intention and express the general through particulars: “la nature / Au plus gay de sa peinture / Me figuroit les beautez” (V, 50), “magnificence de motz, gravité de sentences, audace & varieté de figures, & mil' autres lumieres de poësie: bref ceste energie … comme un peintre peut representer l'ame avecques le cors de celuy qu'il entreprent tyrer apres le naturel (pp. 40-41) … l'ornement & lumiere (p. 60) … l'ornement & illustration” (p. 74).

Nor should we take Ronsard's claim of facile imitation literally or as representative of a relaxed attitude toward the use of poetic diction. Like Quintilian, des Autelz closely associates copious figures, emotion and vivid representation with decorum,¹⁴ implying a controlled use of abundant figures, and Du Bellay likens his word picture “richement ornée” more to sustained work than to loose fancy: “pour le vif la couleur, / N'employant nostre esprit qu'au labeur poëtique” (II, 215). Independently pleasurable sensuality and accurate naturalism are not sought through vivid and energetic representation as much as the accurate expression of the poem's argument or cause; teaching, moving and pleasing, then, work together. An examination of classical myth in the Renaissance shows that its vitality lies partly in the poet's creative reaction to a story that crystallizes and universalizes his experience and vision, and partly in the extension of mythic tale to an ethical exemplum or explicit allegorization. Imagery, whether abundant or spare, florid or bleak, is responsible to the poem's intent and to the reader's reaction. The intention of lively portraiture in prose and poetry alike is a theme that is subject to countless variations. But however varied the rephrasing in theory, in expository writing, in lyric verse or in evaluative criticism, it is rarely disassociated from persuasion to a covert or overt moral point of view. Montaigne's statement in the “Au lecteur” of the Essais that “… je peins. Mes defauts s'y liront au vif,” Du Bellay's self-proclaimed ability “au vif exprimer” Jean Du Bellay's “scavoir, vertu & conduyte” (p. 7), his advice to the poetic picture maker “Qui veult au vif imaginer la face / Du gentil Piéne, alors que sa vertu …” (II, 294) and Edoard's reference to the “Vieille Courtisanne”'s “vive representation de la devote creature introduicte en ses moeurs, actes, conditions, & evenemens respondans aux merites” (V, 181), despite different shades of emphasis, all stress the same relationship. Energia, then, is connected with the allegorizing nature of poetry; in the “Discours au Roy sur la trefve de l'an MDLV,” following a series of sententiae on virtue, the causes and effects of Fortune and the triumph of La Paix over La Discorde, Du Bellay concludes:

Si j'avois tant amis les cieulx & la nature,
Qu'en mes tableaux je peusse au vif representer
Quelque chose qui peust vostre esprit contenter.

(VI, 15)¹⁵

Correspondingly, the failure of poetic figures to direct the reader's attention to a generally apprehensible truth, or of art to accord with nature led to the censure of “vaine peinture.” Usually the tag was reserved for any body of poetry with pronounced and unrelieved substantive or structural pretentions. Ronsard charged the rhétoriqueurs with “forcing Apollo's light” for their too obvious versifying techniques: “Sans plus il gastent l'encre, & broyant la couleur, / Barbouillent un portrait d'inutile valeur.”¹⁶ And Du Bellay's confusing mea culpa in the liminal sonnet of “L'Honneste Amour” seems to single out L'Olive for its “vaine peincture” and “feincte couverture” because it dwelled on “La non encor' bien comprise nature” instead of “imaginant le vif”; the attack is waged in “Contre les petrarquistes” with greater clarity and indignation:

Mais cest Enfer de vaines passions,
Ce Paradis de belles fictions,
Deguizemens de nos affections,
          Ce sont peinctures vaines:

(V, 71)

The maxim attributed by Plutarch to Simonides that painting is silent poetry while poetry is a speaking picture was common currency in Renaissance poetic discussions¹⁷ and insists on the cooperation between senses and mind, imagery and meaning. Pontus de Tyard discusses the conception he wishes to communicate to others, “qu'avec quelque labeur i'ay depeint dans le tableau de mon esprit,” and Pierre Motin bemoans the effort his thought requires, “Si tost que dans ma teste il a peint une image.”¹⁸ The close juncture of eye and mind and the near-identity of expression that involves them shows that poetry speaks with a meaning, a meaning that reflects the poet's point of view and to which he wishes to persuade his listener:

Tout cela que l'oeil apperçoit,
Tout cela que l'esprit conçoit,
Est du poëte, & l'escritture
N'est qu'une parlante peinture.

(V, 68)

This persuasion to the poet's literal point of view appears in verses like “icy je vous supply mettre devant voz yeulx” (VI, 29), followed by a series of “Je voy,” and in

De quelle riche couleur
Peindray-je ma poësie
Pour descrire la valeur
Que j'ay sur toutes choisie?

(V, 41)

after which follow six consecutive “je voy” stanzas and then images based on tactile, aural and oral sensations.

Renaissance theorists of rhetoric and poetic ponderously label this scheme pragmatographia when “lively and ficticious” action is brought before the eyes, such as a battle scene, and ask that the figures and tropes be carefully controlled; in the process, the poet's general truth is praised over the historian's particular truth.¹⁹ In the “Discours au Roy sur la poésie” Du Bellay opposes historian and poet, and lauds the broader truth derived from the artistic imitation of nature:

Cestuy-là sans user d'aucune fiction
Represente le vray de chascune action,
Comme un, qui sans oser s'esgayer davantage,
Rapporte apres le vif un naturel visage:
Cestuy-cy plus hardy, d'un art non limité
Sous mille fictions cache la verité,
Comme un peinctre qui fait d'une brave entreprise
La figure d'un camp, ou d'une ville prise,
Un orage, une guerre, ou mesme il fait les Dieux
En façon de mortelz se monstrer à noz yeux.

(VI, 164)

In accordance with the desire to accompany enargia with auricular, “sensible,” and sententious figures²⁰—a kind of synesthesia leading to moral elevation—the vividly imaginative description of Ronsard's “Exhortation pour bien combattre” transcends the historian's role by deploying a multisensory scheme composed of tropes and figures that reinforce and complement one another: anaphora, compar, neologism and Sannazaro's antithetical traductio vainqueurs-vaincus:

Je voy desja, ce semble, en ordre nos gendarmes,
J'oy le bruit des chevaux, j'oy le choquer des armes,
Je voy de toutes pars le fer etinceller
Et jusques dans le ciel la poudre se mesler,
Je voy comme foretz se herisser les piques,
J'oy l'effroy des cannons, oeuvres diaboliques,
J'oy faucer les harnoys, enfonser les escus,
J'oy le bruit des vainqueurs, j'oy le cry des vaincus.(21)

VARIETY AND IMITATION: THEORY

On the surface Du Bellay's recommendation of pragmatographia runs counter to his sarcastic advice to the “poete courtisan”:

Arguments à propoz il te fault espier:
Comme quelque victoire, ou quelque ville prise,
Quelque nopce ou festin, ou bien quelque entreprise
De masque ou de tournoy: avoir force desseigns,
Desquelz à ceste fin tes coffres seront pleins.”

(VI, 133)

But we must remember that a former Petrarchist is here addressing the excesses of Petrarchanism and that the poetic vices he decries are merely exaggerations of procedures he and many others continued to practice. The allusion to the thesaurus of themes refers to the abundance or copie prescribed by humanists, dialecticians, rhetoricians and poets. Through careful reading and study are acquired a wealth of material used in finding dialectical places, a stock of rhetorical commonplaces, turns of phrase, whole expressions, ideas and proverbial sententiae that could be mechanically applied as do the Petrarchists or skilfully reproduced through assimilation into one's cultural consciousness. Montaigne chides contemporary education where, instead of correcting judgment through applied sententiae, “chascun les couche en sa memoire” (I, 23, p. 114). Although the term embraced all forms of discourse, in a sonnet to Jodelle, Du Bellay lauds his grave tragedy, his doulce comedy and the copieuse veine of his lyric poetry (II, 285). Ronsard praises the artifice by which “meintes choses sont diversement portraittes,” and Peletier's admiration of the “copieuse excellence … es auteurs anciens” is heard throughout the Deffence et Illustration.²² The two ancient writers from whom Du Bellay's treatise draws the most, Cicero and especially Quintilian, provide an index for our understanding of his ideas, and show us again that varied imagery, expressed idea and intended effect are not separated. In De oratore, III, xxxiii, 136, Cicero assumes a necessary coexistence of effective style and copiousness of thought, while Quintilian, like Du Bellay in his respect for the ancients' store of knowledge and experience, recommends a copious flow and careful control of words, figures and sententiae.²³ So the requirement of copie applies equally to invention and style, res and verba, as the catchphrase “copia rerum atque verborum” would indicate.²⁴

The two basic principles of the Deffence, imitation of the classics through the process that Faguet labeled “innutrition” and enrichment of the French lexicon, follow from this requirement. In successive chapters Du Bellay advises “copie et richesse d'invention” (p. 33) and “magnificence de motz, gravité de sentences, audace et varieté de figures” (p. 40). Ronsard's chapters on invention and style in the Abrégé are equally specific in their insistence that abundance of ideas and words be rationally guided toward a coherent meaning.²⁵ George Gascoigne, Du Bellay's English contemporary, asks “What figure might I find within my head?” in order to “expound the case” (“Gascoigne's Woodsmanship,” vv. 131, 135). The poem's argument both orders and includes its accretive details. In addition to the “illumination” and greater intelligibility afforded by copie, it is sought so that art may imitate the “copieuse diversité” of nature, as Ronsard has it, and may create the impression of the unified diversity that inheres in nature, according to Pontus.²⁶ We have seen the requirement of copiousness implied in other related contexts as the desire for expanded invention and as the use of varied figures and lively portraiture in imitation of nature. The remainder of this section will address copiousness on a level of rhetorical and dialectical praxis to show how Du Bellay applied abundant themes and imitated nature through model authors.

VARIETY AND IMITATION: PRACTICE

After castigating the “poete courtisan” for his stockpile of poetic procedures, Du Bellay assails him further: “Il fault avoir tousjours le petit mot pour rire, / Il fault des lieux communs, qu'à tous propoz on tire, / Passer ce qu'on ne sçait, & se montrer sçavant / En ce que lon ha leu deux ou trois soirs devant” (VI, 135). Once again, he is not attacking a basic poetic premise as much as its misapplication. His remarks are foreshadowed in the Illustration where he opposes those who “sont contens n'avoir rien dict qui vaille aux ix. premiers vers, pourveu qu'au dixiesme il y ait le petit mot pour rire” (p. 110). Unlike Verlaine's categorical injunction, “Fuis de plus loin la Pointe assassine,” he is not arguing against the pithiness of the tenth verse nor against its position, but rather against the total subordination of the preceding nine verses. This is evinced by the imperative in the next clause, “mesle le profitable avecques le doulz,” as Martial did, and by the subsequent stress on decorous verse that is formed of varied and sententious figures.

These recommended sententiae, along with exempla, proverbs, apophthegms and maxims, formed part of a corpus of commonplaces and folk wisdom that were traditional since antiquity. In the Rhetoric Aristotle distinguished the specific from the commonplace, since the latter could be applied to many situations, or in Du Bellay's words, “à tous propos on tire.” Montaigne justified his culling of maxims on the broad basis of experientia and usus: “En l'experience et usage de cette sentence, qui est très-veritable, consiste tout le fruict que je tire des livres.”²⁷ Commonplaces could be drawn from the plethora of commonplace books that circulated widely in the Renaissance, often in the form of Poetrias. Aristotle's Topics and Rhetoric, Cicero's De oratore and Topica, Quintilian's Institutio oratoria and the Ad Herennium were all adapted to this end, but the most popular were Erasmus' De copia for amplification and for themes his Adagia and the Progymnasmata of Aphthonius, whom Du Bellay read for the “Metamorphose d'une rose” (V, 182). Commonplaces were either stored for future use in the artificial memory, according to the recommendation of Ad Herennium, III, xvi, 28-29, and so violently opposed by Montaigne, as a treasury “de rare et antique erudition” according to Du Bellay; or else they were located in textbooks and instructional manuals, such as the manuals for the prince. Renaissance emblem books were used to teach rhetoric and educate princes by instilling in the memory a commonplace which was illustrated by a physical image of a virtuous subject.²⁸ In the “Ample discours au Roy” he tells François II that “les livres sont pleins, tant sacrez que gentils, / D'exemples infinis des Princes, qui jadis / Leurs sceptres ont perdus par paresse & par vice, / Et sur tout pour n'avoir honnoré la justice” (VI, 212-213).

Commonplaces invariably counseled traditional wisdom and rewarded virtue with praise and punished vice with dispraise. Since antiquity, praise of virtue and dispraise of vice presupposed a virtuous life on the part of the speaker or narrator. This reward and punishment were intimately bound up with the Renaissance world-view and brought to mind the theme of sublunary mutability embodied in the Wheel of Fortune. On the level of historical change, the Renaissance retained the medieval theme of the triumph of Vice over Virtue occasioned by the passing of the Golden Age. But in the Renaissance judgment and praise of virtue as an abstract quality open to allegorization became increasingly demonstrated in the concrete examples of human conduct and the vivid portrayals of moral types. In an elegy to the Cardinal de Chatillon, Ronsard describes Fortune dispensing and withdrawing Virtue according to her whimsy²⁹ and Du Bellay places even Diane de Poitier's immovable virtue above the realm of the moon and Fortune's province (V, 379). Occasionally he modifies the close connection between virtue and fortune, as in the “Ample discours au Roy” where he says that his own fortune, identified with nature, has forbidden him from being a soldier and so he will sing the king's virtue by conjoining ingenium, ars and disciplina: “J'emploieray mon esprit, ma plume & mon labeur” (VI, 234). But ordinarily he holds to the tradition of paraphrasing in an extended sequence the same basic commonplace, frequently drawn from Martial or the Greek Anthology, as an exercise in copia; praise for the man who can follow the difficult path of virtue when he is enjoying good fortune is immediately followed by a succession of sententiae bearing on the same theme:

Fascheuse de nature est toute adversité,
Mais trop plus dangereuse est la felicité.
Le cheval furieux, aiant le mords pour guide,
Tousjours en sa fureur ne desdaigne la bride:
Le navire agité des vents impetueux
Ne succumbe tousjours aux flots tempestueux:
Et le cours du torrent tombant de la montaigne
S'allente quelquefois au plain de la campaigne.

(VI, 9)

The commonplace of fortune and virtue lent itself naturally to a multitude of variations during the Renaissance, since it subsumed the whole question of man's individual freedom. At times, Nature, Fortune, Destiny and Providence coalesce and subject man to their larger will.³⁰ But in as many cases submissive medieval moral virtue is supplanted by the Renaissance notion of personal accomplishment and ingeniousness where, as Alberti put it, ability directs fortune.³¹ According to Montaigne, “La fortune ne nous fait ny bien ny mal” because the mind is the “seule cause et maistresse de sa condition heureuse ou malheureuse” (I, 14, p. 67). Insofar as fortune is identified with nature, the notion can equally imply the triumph of art and human endeavor over the forces of nature. The most graphic example of this change is found in the “Hymne au Roy sur la prinse de Callais.” After the temporary triumph of the allegorical persona Malheur over Fortune, Vertu decides to fight alongside Henri II. Soon, however, Du Bellay begins speaking of personal “vertu valeureuse” and of how the king's actions can overtake Fortune, “devancé par l'effect” (VI, 22).

The intent of the commonplace was to amplify a poetic discourse, to teach, please and move concurrently, since truth, beauty and goodness were ideally inseparable. In its dialectical function it could have the dual status of an intrinsic and an extrinsic argument. When considered as an inherent theme apart from the body of a poem the commonplace could be viewed as an intrinsic or artificial argument. Melanchthon's discussion on the nature of virtue and its adjuncts centers on their causes and effects, but when he attempts to persuade men to accept the beneficence of virtue, he resorts to rhetorical figures.³² Similarly, Du Bellay's denial that Fortune has determined Henri II's virtue, following his analysis of

Ceste dame Fortune, à qui pour sa puissance,
Dont les divers effects nous donnent cognoissance,
Sans en sçavoir la cause, on a d'antiquité
Donné jusqu'aujourdhuy tiltre de deité.

(VI, 10)

is a way of preparing an amplification of the king's personal qualities that follow in the poem. We have seen that in their function as rhetorical figures of thought, the grammatical structure of proverbs, aphorisms and other sententious matter is more amorphous than that of figures of diction. But with respect to their use within a whole poem, they are ordinarily reserved for the peroration of a poetic discourse, the sestet of a sonnet, the end of a stanza or any other meaning unit. And since they are identical to inartificial arguments, Quintilian considers them in relation to the enthymeme as ways of relating the particular to the general (VIII, v, 3-8). The sententious “La hauteur (du sapin) n'est si ferme & asseurée / Que l'arbrisseau, qui croist par les campagnes” (IV, 120), derived from Horace's Carmina, II, x, not only sums up the particular action of the preceding verses, but also provides the moral focus for the whole “monomachie.” The use of figures of thought to put the foregoing verses in broad perspective is certainly based on the poetic requirement of mixing the pleasant with the profitable and probably inspired Du Bellay's insistence that the epigrammatic tenth verse and the preceding nine be interdependent. This requirement has little if anything to do with the tone of the poem, for in an erotic “Chanson” of the Jeux rustiques he closes a stanza with the proverb “Qui ayme plus grand que soy, / Luy mesme se donne loy” and continues his argument with “Cela vous doit estre preuve” (V, 86), while in his “Lyre chrestienne” he ends a stanza with the ecclesiastical “Mais toutes choses ont leur temps” (IV, 137) and goes on to a discussion of mixing “le doulx à l'utile.” Since in a dozen separate contexts Du Bellay stresses the mixture of components, the useful does not follow the pleasant in an inviolate order. For instance, a poem in the Vers lyriques that prefigures the Antiquitez, where “En ruines grosses / Le tens precipite … Maint palais de Romme … Regnes et empires … Maint peuple puissant” (III, 18-19), contains maxims on the ravages of time scattered at random, like the ruins themselves, from beginning to end; but this arrangement coincides with the poem's intent of persuading the reader to accept the eternal decline and regeneration of unstable life and of restating variations on a sententious theme.

Since belletrists often worked out of the same copy books, or at least with the same commonplaces, and used the same authors as models, the resulting similarity of expression is not surprising. The themes of the Antiquitez recur three more times in the Vers lyriques (pp. 38-39, 41, 51) and on numerous occasions in the Poemata, indicating the extent of the poet's preoccupation, and traditional topoi such as the Dying Rose, ubi sunt and memento mori appear in close juncture (IV, 28). A scholar of Chamard's scope can trace the commonplace that closes the first part of a long poem back through Rabelais and Erasmus (VI, 4) and even “O combien est heureuse,” so severely censured in the Illustration (p. 114), is reworked in the Vers lyriques (III, 90). Du Bellay's astute editors have not failed to notice that too often his treatment of common themes and places is suggestive of “sententiae pueriles” and that his actual imitation of authors and refracting of themes are not always as naturally digested and reproduced as the Deffence et Illustration recommends.³³ Such serious charges deserve serious consideration. The next two sections, then, will examine the successes and failures of Du Bellay's imitations of literary models. Since translation is the most limited and most direct form of imitation, his translations of the Aeneid provide the most extensive demonstration of how he modified and applied his earlier ideas on imitation. L'Olive attests to the vast range of imitative possibilities open to the poet as he borrows and adopts imagery and thematic developments and as a result creates an impression of variety within a cohesive collection of sonnets. Both of these poetic endeavors show that in actual practice Du Bellay's translation, imitation and creation are cooperative activities differentiated by subtle gradations, and not mutually exclusive and clearly distinct categories.

DU BELLAY'S TRANSLATIONS OF THE AENEID

The random and polemic proscriptions in the Deffence et Illustration against translation are so colored by invective against the school of Marot and its defenders that we cannot take them as unqualified and absolute literary principles. Chamard clearly showed that Du Bellay's vituperation derived largely from the need to defend the hegemony of the French language against the cicéroniens and virgiliens. It was especially inspired by the publication of Sebillet's Art poétique which stole the Brigade's thunder and which defended adaptation and translation as the equals of poetic creativity.³⁴ After the battle had been joined and the enmity toward his adversaries somewhat relieved, Du Bellay could casually allow in the preface to his 1552 Aeneid translation that “Je n'ay pas oublié ce qu'autrefois j'ay dict des translations poëtiques: mais je ne suis si jalouzement amoureux de mes premieres apprehensions, que j'aye honte de les changer quelquefois à l'exemple de tant d'excellens aucteurs, dont l'auctorité nous doit oster ceste opiniastre opinion de vouloir tousjours persister en ses advis, principalement en matiere de lettres. Quand à moy, je ne suis pas Stoïque jusques là” (VI, 251). Neither his heated rejection of 1549 nor his mollified allowance of 1552 do justice to the subtle distinctions he raised in the Deffence et Illustration among imitation and the varieties of translation, or the problems these distinctions pose—problems and distinctions which he attempted in varying measure and with varying success to resolve and incorporate in his translations of Books IV and VI of the Aeneid.

In a spectrum ranging from blame to praise, Du Bellay's manifesto alluded to the activities of the traducteur who translates verbatim, the translateur who reproduces ideas closely, the paraphraste who reproduces ideas freely and the imitateur who so assimilates a literary model through innutrition that it becomes part of his instinctive cultural reference (pp. 32-39, 42, 46, 60). These varied activities correspond to the literary education proposed by Quintilian (X, XI) and coincide with part of the rhetorical-poetic rationale that underlies Du Bellay's treatise. We have seen how Chapter V of the Deffence, “Que les Traductions ne sont suffisantes pour donner perfection à la Langue Francoyse,” introduces the system of Ciceronian rhetoric that will be Du Bellay's reference point for poetic terminology, and how the subsequent reduction of his remarks to invention and especially elocution aligns them with the dichotomy of res and verba. It is on the basis of this dichotomy that he criticizes translators and poor imitators who “s'amusant à la beauté des motz, perdent la force des choses” (pp. 34, 46). Imitation should benefit invention insofar as the transformation of a great author into one's intellectual background and literary memory provides a greater wealth of thematic and technical referents for the poet when he goes about “discovering” his subject. As such, imitation could not but enrich and copiously “illustrate” French letters in the new generation. But with the great stress placed on style by the ascending Pléiade—the creative formation of their uniquely personal expression—it was natural for one of their spokesmen to condemn word-for-word translation as a slavery that would vitiate their central purpose.

Du Bellay's conception of the worthy adapter alternates between the translateur and the paraphraste, and he came to see a successful rendition as a foreign author's natural inspiration revealed by a judiciously applied technique. To des Masures on his translation of Vergil's epic he wrote: “Autant comme lon peult en un autre langage / Une langue exprimer, autant que la nature / Par l'art se peult monstrer” (II, 171). He describes the necessary latitude he allowed himself in his version of the “Discours au Roy” of Michel de l'Hospital in order to remain close to the poem's theme and inspiration: “J'ay trahy ou traduit beaucoup plus de la moitié de nostre besogne, mays en vers alexandrins, car les aultres ne me satisfont en si grave matière, et m'eust fallu user d'une infinité de periphrases, dont je me feusse beaucoup eslongné de la nayfveté de mon autheur, que je m'esforce de représenter le plus au naturel qu'il m'est possible.”³⁵ Even more liberally, in the preface to his translation of Aeneid IV he outlines at length his potentially dangerous theory of compensation which takes realistic account of transposing the metrical line of a synthetic language into the syllabic line of an analytic language: “il seroit mal aysé d'exprimer tant seulement l'ombre de son aucteur, principalement en ung oeuvre poëtique, qui vouldroit par tout rendre perïode pour perïode, epithete pour epithete, nom propre pour nom propre, & finablement dire ny plus ny moins, & non autrement, que celuy qui a escrit de son propre style, non forcé de demeurer entre les bornes de l'invention d'autruy. Il me semble, veu la contraincte de la ryme, & la difference de la proprieté & structure d'une langue à l'autre, que le translateur n'a point malfaict son devoir, qui sans corrompre le sens de son aucteur, ce qu'il n'a peu rendre d'assez bonne grace en ung endroict s'efforce de le recompenser en l'autre” (VI, 249-250).

Yet, his views on translation, although differently framed, are not basically original and do not represent the totality of the Pléiade's generation. In the tradition of the Ars poetica (v. 133), and perhaps following Vita, Etienne Dolet's La Manière de bien traduire d'une langue en aultre (1540) held that, through a requisite command of the foreign idiom, the translator should assimilate his author's tone and meaning and avoid word-for-word adaptation. Sebillet himself, whom Du Bellay praised in 1552 for his “docte artifice” in translation (IV, 181), stipulates the same command of idiom and avoidance of literal versions at the expense of meaning and harmonious style. On the other hand, the translations of the Georgics by Guillaume Michel in 1519 and by Richard Le Blanc in 1554 are completely verbatim, and Peletier, while acknowledging the superiority of original creation over translation, encouraged literal translation.

Divergent theories of translation and their execution were normal in an age when a considerable part of the standard collegial education consisted of translation exercises as well as poetic and rhetorical composition based on an assigned subject and argument. Although he had been away from Coqueret for several years when Loys Le Roy published Plusieurs passages des meilleurs poëtes Grecs et Latins, citez aux Commentaires du Sympose de Platon in 1558, the fragments translated by Du Bellay, heavily weighted with passages from Books IV and VI of the Aeneid, bear the characteristics of this type of compositional exercise.³⁶ Their various themes represent a compendium of Renaissance cosmography and poetic attitudes, such as the controlling force of the stars, the microcosm theme (“le monde est en nous,” VI, 441), sublunary mutability, elemental composition, and the glory assured by poetry. Le Roy lauded Du Bellay's efforts for being “translaté,” implying that he reproduced ideas closely, but in fact he frequently reproduces ideas freely and tailors them to the point of view of the Pléiade and its literary doctrines. For instance, in his translation of Pontano's Meteora, the line “Qui sont vulgairement nommez les douze Signes” is justified only within the Pléiade's reproachful attitude toward the “vulgaire odieux,” not within the bland “duodena astra” of the text. And his advocacy of the trope antonomasia in the Illustration (p. 161), led him to expand the verse “Quum premit auratos Nephelaei velleris artus / Phoebus” into “C'est lors que le Soleil entre dans la maison / Du Mouton Phryxëan à la blonde toyson” (VI, 428).

Le Roy also admired the way in which Du Bellay preserved the rhetorical sententiae and “figures, couleurs & ornemens poëtiques” of the original texts. Although the compactness of the Latin “pervidimus omnem” in his translation of Manilius' Astronomicon IV (VI, 441) becomes the clumsy “Toute, en tout, & par tout nous l'avons recherchée,” he was usually able to compensate for linguistic differences. By appealing to the tonic French rhyme, the complexities of Latin rhetorical figures and poetic rhythm are turned into tours de force of translation. The figure traductio, with its progressive variation developed from the same linguistic root, and the alliteration in Cornelius Gallus' “Pande, puella, collum candidum, / Productum bene candidis humeris” are deftly translated by Du Bellay's successive rhymes undoiantes-blondoiantes-blanchissant (VI, 422). Similarly, the internal alliteration in Juvenal's “Dii, majorum umbris tenuem & sine pondere terram” is accurately matched by Du Bellay's “Dieux, permettez qu'une legere terre / A tout jamais noz grandz peres enserre” (VI, 431).

Modern critics have not hesitated to admire his opuscules of Greek and Latin translation. Isidore Silver has shown in detail that Du Bellay's imitations of Pindar are independent of Ronsard's and that, despite his imperfect knowledge of Greek, his competent translation of Homer did not rely on extant versions.³⁷ His masterful command of Latin and his translation of Vergil's Moretum (V, 7), “moins traduit que transposé,” according to Chamard's note, have elicited uniform praise from his commentators for having captured “le naif” of its author.³⁸ But his Aeneid translation, easily his most ambitious undertaking, has been censured by most of those same commentators for its conspicuous failure to approximate Vergil's genius, for the inevitably greater length of the French version, and yet it has received almost no detailed critical analysis.

His attraction to Vergil's genius reflected a major Renaissance predilection, for in that century the Augustan poet became progressively the exemplar of moral and patriotic conduct, a source book of themes, poeticized history and mythology, and the model of elevated style in poetry and rhetoric; for Du Bellay he was especially a source book and model.³⁹ A catchphrase used to describe Vergil's preeminence, derived from Quintilian (X, i, 86 and 106) and the Ars poetica (v. 323), compared his artistic mastery with Homer's natural inspiration as Demosthenes was compared with Cicero. Du Bellay frequently employs the formula in the Deffence (pp. 24, 28, 37) and elsewhere (II, 179, 274).⁴⁰ Vergil himself borrowed language, phrases, whole lines and entire episodes from Homer, but imitated creatively by reshaping and unifying so as to express the collective conscience of Augustan Rome. Du Bellay imitates Vergil in a similar way by using the mythological and historical past as seen in Aeneid VI to explain the present and add perspective to his vision in sonnets “6,” “12” and “15” of the Antiquitez. He reproduces ideas freely in the “Hymne de Santé au seigneur Robert de la Haye” (V, 264-277) where in allegorical fashion he praises health and the eternal glory given by poetry; the transition between these disparate ideas is established by reference to the Vergilian underworld of Aeneid VI, derived from the Odyssey, where one goes after death and where poor shades wander about. Free transposition of the underworld episode was not uncommon, witness François Habert's Visions fantastiques (1541) based on Book VI. But at times it is difficult to distinguish between imitation, close and free reproduction of ideas, as in the poem “Se perpetuo Faustinae memorem futurum” from the Poemata. The incipit, “Quod scelus admisi infoelix? quae numina laesi,” and the fourth verse, “Iratos omnes huic decet esse Deos,” recreate some of the language and basic ideas of the famous fourth and eighth verses of Aeneid I, “vi superum saevae memorem Iunonis ob iram … Musa, mihi causas memora, quo numine laeso,” but Du Bellay applies their epic distance to his radically poignant love for Faustine. Vergil's broad human sympathy and melancholy appear to have held a highly personal appeal for Du Bellay.

Therefore, his willingness to forsake an earlier posture and translate two of the finest books of Vergil's epic bespeaks a commitment to a poet he imitated and freely adapted that transcends his earlier polemical mood. But the question remains: how can the translator conjoin res and verba, how can he capture the meanings of tonal change and shades of mood, “partie certes la plus difficile,” in his author's idiom? The answer requires a close examination into the way Du Bellay addressed the problems of reconciling the Pléiade's poetic canons with his translations, of reproducing the sound, rhythm and syntax of Latin epic style, of his theory of compensation and of faithfulness to divergent cultural peculiarities. Since his translation of Book IV was the only one he saw through to publication, it must receive major consideration.

One of the basic tenets of the Pléiade, adumbrated in the Deffence et Illustration, is the alliance of poetry and music which implies close attention to rhythm and regularized rhyme. It is, then, surprising to find Du Bellay on one occasion egregiously abandon the considered rhyme recommendations of the Illustration, chs. VII-VIII; in the most poorly translated single passage of the two books he allows the narrative of Jupiter's agony to spill colorlessly into dialogue through the successive facile rhymes of similar roots and verb endings: entendit-estendit, vivoient-avoient, mande-commande, esselles-aïles, Dardanien-Sydonien (VI, 273). But usually the richness of the rhymes sustains careful distinctions and poetic value. In the passage of Book IV where the ghost of Anchises brings Aeneas back to the reality of his mission, the alternation between feminine and masculine endings reinforces the chiaroscuro of the description:

Toutes les fois que la nuict froide & sombre
Ce bas sejour couvre d'une obscure ombre
Toutes les fois que les astres brulans
Jettent sur nous leurs yeux etincelans:

(VI, 281)

Du Bellay preserves the order and lambent cadence of Vergil's hexameter when the hero goes to meet his father in Aeneid VI, “spargens rore levi et ramo felicis olivae” (v. 230), and the author of L'Olive uses the rhyme to place in relief the Golden Bough which held a special meaning for him, “De la fertile & bienheureuse Olive” (VI, 355).⁴¹

The name that had the most special fascination for Du Bellay was, of course, Rome itself. Through the Antiquitez it resounds like the boom of a great drum, conjuring up cruel and noble visions of marching legions and victorious generals. “Sonnet 6,” developed from Aeneid VI, 781-787, articulates that imperial power, “Rome seule pouvoit Rome faire trembler.” It appears that translation has here been the intermediary between imitation and creation, because Du Bellay anticipated the sonnet's martial rhythm in his translation, “Romme la grand', Romme, qui sa puissance” (VI, 388), which is barely implicit in Vergil's text, “auspiciis illa inculta Roma / imperium terris” (v. 781). Later, he again exceeds the Latin meter, “Nimium vobis Romana propago” (v. 870) to beat the same cadence, “Le sang Romain, le sang Romain, ô Dieux” (VI, 394). But in between these passages he successfully applies his theory of compensation when, after failing to meet Vergil's balance and concision, “vincet amor patriae laudumque immensa cupido” (v. 823) in his “Mais tout sera vaincu par la memoire / De la patrie, & l'ardeur de la gloire” (VI, 391), he more resoundingly adapts the unimposing “gener adversis instructus Eoïs” (v. 831) with the balanced “Contre Occident les peuples de l'Aurore” (VI, 391). Implied in Roman grandeur and the “memoire de la patrie” is the concept of pietas, easily the most difficult single word in Vergil to translate precisely since it connotes the maintenance of proper relations with the cosmos, Gods, Rome and family, and a sense of justice and responsibility toward all humanity. Du Bellay's compensation adapts well to this difficulty throughout his translation by rendering pius Aeneas now succinctly as “le bon Roy” (VI, 355), now resonantly as “Le pitoyable & magnanime Enee” (VI, 365), so that in the aggregate he hints at the word's collective meaning.

When Vergil's characterizations get in the way of Du Bellay's peculiar preoccupations, he has trouble harmonizing rhythm and meaning. His strange desire to vindicate Dido's honor (VI, 249-252) led him to suppress the incriminating “Praebuerim sceleri brachia nostra tuo” in his translation of Ovid's Heroides VII (VI, 321) and to betray Vergil's evenness and epic repetition in “Speluncam Dido dux et Troianus eandem” (Aen. IV, 124, 165); at first he juxtaposes Dido and Aeneas as Vergil did, “Avec' Didon le Troien capitaine” (VI, 266), but then, while masterfully approximating the dactylic rhythm, he accentuates Dido at Aeneas' expense by substituting la belle for dux in “Didon la belle & le Troien ensemble” (VI, 268). In most cases, however, Du Bellay manages to reproduce closely the Augustan poet's characterization by matching his rhythm in dialogue and the point of view expressed by that rhythm. Many of Aeneas' actions are controlled by an awareness of his divine origin, “nate dea,” and mission, but Dido throws his divine and noble lineage back in his face. Vergil suggests her anger through a striking enjambement and a grating succession of sounds, “generis nec Dardanus auctor, / perfide … cautibus horrens / Caucasus” (vv. 365-367), while Du Bellay achieves the same contrast through the rhymes autheur-menteur and similar sound values (VI, 282). Later, the insistence that calibrates Dido's lament, “Quin morere, ut merita es, ferroque averte dolorem” (v. 547) becomes “Meurs plus tost, meurs, digne de ce malheur” (VI, 295). And when Vergil deploys an expansive movement to imply Anna's growing realization, “Hoc rogus iste mihi, hoc ignes araeque parabant” (v. 676), Du Bellay's verse is progressively expansive: “Ce feu, ce boys, ces beaux autelz secrez” (VI, 304). Dido's assonant prophecy of Hannibal, “Exoriare aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor” (v. 625), is only slightly altered by Du Bellay's “Sor de noz oz, toy, quiquonques dois estre / Nostre vangeur” (VI, 301), but it is usually in alliterative effects that Du Bellay recreates the most faithfully. Even though he could not reproduce the metrical emphasis of Dido's fury in Ovid's “relinquas” (Heroides VII, 133) nor the enclitic structure in Vergil's “Mene fugis?” (Aen. IV, 314), the verbal precision of his “tu me fuys” (VI, 322) and “Me fuis-tu donq'” (VI, 279) equals the Latin models respectively when they are broken down into syllabic count. The Queen's suggestive description of the Massylian priestess' powers, “vertere sidera retro; / nocturnosque movet Manis” (v. 488) returns as “Tu luy verras par ses vers murmurez / Tirer de nuict les espris conjurez” (VI, 291), while the meaning, sound, rhythm and syntax of “nigrantem commixta grandine nimbum” (v. 120) are preserved in “Grosse de pluye & de gresle menue” (VI, 266) and “gravidam imperiis belloque frementem” (v. 229) in “Grosse d' empire & superbe à la guerre” (VI, 273).⁴²

The synclitic nature of Latin, as seen in the last example, authorizes some of the linguistic innovations the Pléiade sponsored for the enrichment of the language. The verbal substantives, neologisms and provignement recommended by the Illustration, ch. VI, recur in Du Bellay's translation as songers (VI, 258), anuytoit (VI, 289) and gallées (VI, 298, 335), but it is principally his mots composés that reveal the verbal texture of the Aeneid. This type of compression allows him not only to condense in his decasyllable, “Bache, Apollon, & Cere porte-lois” (VI, 261), all that is included in the more supple hexameter, “legiferae Cereri Phoeboque patrique Lyaeo” (Aen. IV, 58), but also to stress the role of Ceres the Lawgiver as Vergil did. Du Bellay's “Hecaté troy'-foy'-jumelle” (VI, 293) is no more and no less imposing than “tergeminamque Hecaten” (Aen. IV, 511), but the translation of Monaco (Aen. VI, 830) as Port-hercule (VI, 391) has almost no justification.

This procedure is nearly identical to the tropes antonomasia and periphrasis which imprint Du Bellay's personality on his translation. His Dieu messager (VI, 274) is an adaptation of Vergil's bland Ille (Aen. IV, 238), and his translation of saltem placidis (Aen. VI, 371) as plus doux element (VI, 363) evinces a Renaissance stylistic proclivity. Chamard's flat statement, however, that “Le latin ne dit rien de tel” about Du Bellay's version, “Source du Pau vers l'Aurore courant” (VI, 381), of “unde superne / plurimus Eridani par silvam volvitur amnis” (Aen. VI, 658-659) certainly maligns the translator's license to reproduce ideas closely, since the Eridanus and the Po are names for the same river and l'Aurore is suitable for “the world above.” Du Bellay extends this license to rhetorical structure in Aeneid IV, 525-526, where he invents a chiasmus to suggest the interpenetration of nature implied in Vergil's text:

Quand sur la terre, en l'air & sur les eaux,
Bestes des champs & poissons & oizeaux

(VI, 294)

Yet while this license betrays stylistic and structural preoccupations of the translator, it also coincides with Vergil's intent. The polysyndeton that Du Bellay employed in all types of poetry and that enjoyed popularity among the Pléiade,

Ores le somme & ores le reveil,
Ores les clost d'ung eternel sommeil:

(VI, 274)

accurately reproduces in several verses the rhythm of a single hexameter, “dat somnos adimitque, et lumina morte resignat” (Aen. IV, 244). To charge Du Bellay with redundance and systematic formulae is to charge the Roman poet with the same vices.⁴³ Vergil's avoidance of the fragmentizing effects of asyndeton corresponds to his pervading search for stylistic coherence and logical order. So when Du Bellay transcribes Dido's curse by means of polysyndeton, he is simply responding to a figure that Vergil employed several times in the same passage:

Voicy les sorts, voicy Phebus l'augure,
Voicy apres l'ambassadeur Mercure,

(VI, 283)

Num fletu ingemuit nostro? Num lumina flexit?
Num lacrimas victus dedit, aut misesratus amantem est?
                                                                      … Nunc augur Apollo,
nunc Lyciae sortes, nunc et Iove missus ab ipso

(vv. 369-370, 376-377)⁴⁴

Du Bellay's rejection of the alexandrine in favor of the decasyllable in his translations, thereby forcing many enjambements, and Saulnier's feeling that his poetry “ne se distingue pas dans l'art du rejet et de l'enjambement,”⁴⁵ require extended comment on this syntactical phenomenon. He rarely allows a pointless enjambement in his adaptations of the Aeneid, using it to establish emotional opposition, dramatic emphasis and descriptive action; the point of inquiry, then, should be to what extent this reflects Vergil's style and thought. The sense and syntax of the translation remain faithful to Vergil's skillful manipulation of enjambement for heightened emotional opposition, as in Dido's wavering indecision before her expected fall where Du Bellay maintains the Latin prolepsis, in the implied contrast between the invocation to Rome (“dum conderet urbem,” Aen. I, 5) and the founding of Carthage, and in the description of Dido's actual decline and fall:

Ce seul ici mon ame ballencée
A esbranlé:

(VI, 259)

Qui de nouveau une vile a fondée
A petit prix:

(VI, 272)

Pour toy je suis aux Libyques provinces
Faite haineuse, & aux Nomades princes:
Pour toy aussi le Tyrien m'honnore
Moins que devant:

(VI, 279)

… animumque labantem
impulit:

(vv. 22-23)

… in finibus urbem
exiguam pretio posuit,

(vv. 211-212)

Te propter Libycae gentes Nomadumque
tyranni
odere, infesi Tyrii; te propter eundem
extinctus pudor,

(vv. 320-322)

Even when Vergil's syntax does not authorize it, his meaning justifies the enjambement which Du Bellay uses in both books to establish the opposition of an affirmation to a negation: “Quand tu soumis ta royale grandeur / A ce meschant” (VI, 299; cf. Aen. IV, 597) and “Mais ilz voudroient quelquefois en ces terres / N'estre venuz” (VI, 346; cf. Aen. VI, 86). Concerning dramatic emphasis, Vergil's structure is often followed, as in the message sent to earth from Jove himself (ab ipso), “celeris mandata per auras / detulit” (“M'en a par l'air apporté la nouvelle / Jusques icy,” Aen. IV, 357-358 and VI, 282). More often, however, Du Bellay either justifiably modifies the enjambement, “Exstinxti te meque, soror, populumque patresque / Sidonios urbemque tuam” (“Ta mort, ô soeur! en ruyne delaisse / Moy, ta cité, ton peuple & ta noblesse,” Aen. IV, 682-683 and VI, 305), or else, retaining the sense, fabricates his own: “Osera-il aborder la Princesse / En sa fureur?” (VI, 277). But it is in the descriptions of action that Du Bellay's enjambement abandons the Latin structure in order to capture fully the meaning. His double adverbs emphasize Aeneas' prolonged stay in Carthage, “Es-tu icy au dormir arresté / Si longuement?” (VI, 296), while the Trojan captain's separation from Italy, “Finablement nous touchons l'Italie / Fuyant de nous” (VI, 345) and Palinurus' presumptuous wish to cross the Stygian marsh, “Entreprens-tu, sans congé, de passer / A l'autre bord?” (VI, 364) are similarly expressed.

Despite the adverse criticism heaped on his translations of Vergil's epic and the critical praise bestowed on his minor translations, the brief Aeneid passages he revised for Le Roy's anthology are in most cases inferior to the longer descriptive passages of Books IV and VI from which they are drawn. Two passages of cosmic proportion will show the importance of attention to detail in approximating Vergil's thought. In Aeneid IV, 509-516, Dido invokes “ter centum deos,” which Du Bellay translated as exactly “Trois cens Dieux” for the Le Roy collection (VI, 418). His 1552 version of “Bien troy'-cent Dieux” (VI, 293) is more accurate, however, since “ter centum” and “sex centum” were often used in Latin as vague exaggerations and here add to the mystery and magnitude of the scene. Among the deities invoked is Hecate in her role as three-faced goddess. His earlier translation is more faithful than his 1558 version, since “L'herbe nouvelle à la lune cuillir” is not only closer to Vergil's “ad lunam” than “L'herbe nouvelle on fauche au cler serain,” but the implied reference to the goddess Luna is closer to Vergil's command of the language of Roman ritual. This ritual is repeated in the lower world when Anchises explains the nature of the soul. Du Bellay's translation of Aeneid VI, 724, mirrors Vergil's ordering of heaven, earth and sea, but in the Le Roy anthology he substitutes fire for heaven. The substitution is probably influenced by his translation of Manilius which immediately precedes in the collection and which orders the elements from fire through water. Du Bellay's new ordering creates a serious and confusing redundancy when Anchises proceeds to speak of the fiery life-spirit that issues from those elements. The confusion of the anthology translation is compounded six verses later when Du Bellay omits Vergil's verse “mens agitat molem et magno se corpore miscet.” The ellipsis causes a mistranslation of Vergil's following verse and a misreference of the word Inde in “De cest esprit hommes, bestes, oyseaux,” which is far more accurately reproduced in his translation of Book VI as “Par cest accord, hommes, bestes, oyseaux” (VI, 385).

His translation of Vergil's two books is, naturally, imperfect in more than a few places. It lacks the even faithfulness of des Masures' version, perhaps the best Renaissance translation of the Aeneid. But Du Bellay's work is far better than most of his critics have allowed, who may have paid too close attention to his earlier condemnation and not enough to the actual text of his translations. If he was a traditore to his energetic attack on translations, he was generally faithful in his own role as traduttore. In any case, it seems clear that most of his weaknesses stem from an excessive adherence to the poetic theories he outlined in 1549—yet the translator has an obligation to the idiom of his own generation—and not from a failure to appreciate the style or understand the inspiration of Vergil's great epic. Equally important, we see that after more mature reflection Du Bellay saw no absolute distinctions in theory or in practice between imitation, translation and poetic creativity.

L'OLIVE

The cooperation among the varieties of imitation and translation in poetic creativity are seen as early as L'Olive. In the 1550 preface Du Bellay outlines the way in which art assists nature through imitation of “docte et ingenieuse” Latin and Italian poetry. His untempered answer to Sebillet, “je me vante d'avoir inventé ce que j'ay mot à mot traduit des aultres,” is quickly qualified and explained by his contention that in his poetry there is “beaucoup plus de naturelle invention que d'artificielle ou supersticieuse immitation.” What he means by “natural invention” is clearly, if blithely, articulated as a restatement of the natural memory—ingrained in the intellect and consubstantial with the normal flow of thought—described in Ad Herennium III, xvi, 28-29: “Si, par la lecture des bons livres, je me suis imprimé quelques traictz en la fantaisie, qui apres, venant à exposer mes petites conceptions selon les occasions qui m'en sont données, me coulent beaucoup plus facilement en la plume qu'ilz ne me reviennent en la memoire, doibt on pour ceste raison les appeller pieces rapportées?” Since in the Deffence et Illustration he advised the future poet to school himself in the precepts of antiquity, to study nature as it is faithfully imitated by classical writers and to assimilate these eternal literary archetypes on which he himself would develop variations, Du Bellay was not in the least disturbed by the results of natural invention: “Si deux peintres s'efforcent de representer au naturel quelque vyf protraict, il est impossible qu'ilz ne se rencontrent en mesmes traictz & lineamens, ayans mesme exemplaire devant eulx. Combien voit on entre les Latins immitateurs des Grecz, & entre les modernes Italiens immitateurs des Latins, de commencemens & de fins de vers, de couleurs & figures poëtiques quasi semblables?” Once again attacking the “rimasseurs” for having neglected the language's “nayfve proprieté si copieuse & belle,” he especially stresses the need to “enrichir nostre vulgaire de figures & locutions estrangeres.” But he makes the important qualification that he will strive to resemble only himself despite his borrowing of traditional figures. According to Du Bellay, then, the foremost question of L'Olive is how his borrowings, ranging from outright but limited translations to complete modifications of themes, images and structures, reflect his own natural inclinations; how assimilation and reproduction of archetypes, more than servile copying of appearances, allow him to remold tradition and establish a place for himself.

Du Bellay's commentators have generally applauded his innovations in the sonnet, have on a few occasions congratulated his choice of a poetic form that lends itself well to rhetorical configurations and discursive argument, yet most praise has been reserved for his later expansion of the sonnet sequence to include both elegy and satire.⁴⁶ Although L'Olive is the first of many French sonnet sequences in the Petrarchan tradition, the poet's early experiments with the form itself have often been relegated to the status of juvenilia and his critical comments on it are considered inadequate. Following Sainte-Beuve, Chamard pointed out that Du Bellay is more concerned in the Deffence et Illustration with abstracted forms of art than with its contents, and that his comments on the sonnet form are incomplete.⁴⁷ To be sure, his observation that the sonnet's adherence to certain rules and limits differs from the ode's considerable freedom (p. 121) and his later exaggerated opposition of the laborious Italian sonnet to the versatile ode (IV, 47) want further comment. But the search for freedom within accepted limitations essentially defines Du Bellay's attitude toward the sonnet, even in the early collections. Despite the unchallenged assumption that Ronsard regularized the French sonnet in the Amours, published in October, 1552,⁴⁸ we should credit Du Bellay's “XIII Sonnetz de l'honneste amour,” published on February 1, 1552, with this accomplishment. There the four tercet rhyme schemes are created by alternating masculine and feminine rhymes in the CCDEED and CCDEDE dispositions. Since Ronsard refashioned several of these poems in his Cassandre sonnets and since Du Bellay's sequence is highly unified and Ronsard's is not, it would be absurd to suppose that Du Bellay imitated Ronsard's still unpublished manuscript. His initiative in the early sonnets is greater than is often conceded, and his awareness of the importance of rhyme and of the possibilities of innovation in the tercets is clearly seen in L'Olive.

Such a realization is, of course, essential when adapting Italian verse—where repeated tonic stress within a given verse diminishes the importance of rhyme—to French where rhyme is one of the primary determinants of meaning in a poem. On occasion, the poor quality of the rhymes deffence-offence (“Sonnet 63”), in disregard of the Illustration’s sound precepts for rhyming, may condemn a quatrain to a facile Petrarchan antithesis that prejudices the remainder of the sonnet. And while the end of the first tercet of “Sonnet 32” “Non la vertu, l'esprit & la raison” opposes not only the ephemeral pleasures of nature described in the preceding verses but also opposes the ten feminine rhymes that fade like those sensual attractions, it fails to correspond in meaning to the other line of masculine rhyme at the end of the sonnet, “Ny la rigueur de la froide saison.” But Du Bellay's rhyming achievements lie in his more frequent awareness of the ability of semantically oppositional or complementary rhymes to forward the argument of a sonnet, and in this awareness we can appreciate how imitation can become creation.

As a possible source for Du Bellay's “Sonnet 13,” Chamard proposes Giovanni Mozzarello's “O bella man che'l fren del carro tieni” which contains such uninspiring rhymes as tieni-mantieni. If this sonnet is indeed Du Bellay's source, then his major modification consists of lightening the grammatical punctuation so as to expand his poem into one fluid sentence where the B rhymes punctuate the flow of thought leading up to the main action in the first tercet, “a gravé le protraict”:

La belle main, dont la forte foiblesse
          D'un joug captif domte les plus puissans,
          La main, qui rend les plus sains languissans,
          Debendant l'arc meurtrier qui les coeurs blesse,
La belle main, qui gouverne & radresse
          Les freinz dorez des oiseaux blanchissans,
          Quand sur les champs de pourpre rougissans
          Guydent en l'air le char de leur maistresse, …

The octave itself is composed of two balanced tableaux vivants in which the descent of puissans into languissans illustrates the debilitating force of “La belle main” and the background “pourpre rougissans” places the “oiseaux blanchissans” into broad relief. Again, the action in the sestet of sonnet 88 adheres to the CCDEED rhyme disposition:

La forest prent sa verde robe neufve,
          La terre aussi, qui naguere etoit veufve,
          Promet de fruictz une accroissance pleine.
Or cesse donq' l'hiver de mes douleurs,
          Et vous plaisirs, naissez avec' les fleurs
          Au beau Soleil, qui mon printemps rameine.

as neufve-veufve and douleurs-fleurs juxtapose affirmative and negative statement, while pleine-rameine abandon Petrarch's Christian pietate-onestate in order to reinforce the idea of natural rebirth as the analogue of the poet's feeling.⁴⁹

This careful attention to the rhyme as the normal terminus and focal point of each verse and his ability to establish the individual contribution of each of the sonnet's five basic rhymes to the collective statement augment the impact of enjambement as a means of amplifying various stages of the poetic argument. Sannazaro's pleasurable vision of Arcadia, “vedendo per li soli boschi gli affettuosi colombi con soave mormorio baciarsi,” is filtered through Du Bellay's memory in “Sonnet 84” and condensed as the languid “Resvant au bien qui me faict doloreux, / Les longs baisers des collombs amoureux.” As an index to the contrast between the scene he witnesses and the pain he feels, the second quatrain begins with “Heureux oiseaux, que vostre vie est pleine / De grand' doulceur!” where the overflow of plenitude into the following verse becomes the spatial coefficient of the poet's thought. Sonnet 103 formulizes its Petrarchan model by beginning the quatrains with “Mais quel hiver” and “Mais quele main.” This rigidity gives way in the first tercet to “As-tu [Nature] done faict une chose si belle / Pour la deffaire” which graphically reproduces the affirmation and denial of Petrarch's simple “far cose e disfar.” That Du Bellay tries to distinguish his poem from his models by means of rhyme alterations is obvious in numerous sonnets. His “Sonnet 5,” which changes Petrarch's Easter Morning to Christmas Eve, also modifies the character of the line endings. Whereas Petrarch's sonnet 3 alternates parataxis in the first quatrain with hypotaxis in the second, Du Bellay completely reverses the procedure in his quatrains; and while the last sestet of the French sonnet is hypotactic, his model for the last six verses, Ariosto's sonnet 2, is entirely paratactic. A convenient example of Du Bellay's transformation of one or perhaps two models simultaneously is the first quatrain of “Sonnet 3”:

Loyre fameux, qui ta petite source
          Enfles de maintz gros fleuves & ruysseaux,
          Et qui de loing coules tes cleres eaux
          En l'Ocean d'une assez vive course:

Caldarini proposes A. G. Corso's

Fiume, che in Adria in più spacievol giri
          Ricco di mille fonti altier discendi,

in addition to Giovanni Guidiccioni's

Arno, puoi ben portar tra gli altri fiumi
          Superbo il corno; & le tue Nimphe belle
          Riverenti venir a farle honore.

as sources from which the French sonnet is derived.⁵⁰ In both cases the description is primarily adjectival in order to stress the aura of the river's magnificence. Du Bellay's version stresses the river's movement for a different effect as, through verbal action and enjambement, the stream swells into the river and the river flows into the ocean.

If his enjambement focuses on rhyme precisely by disregarding the momentary stasis it assumes, his calculated use of assonance and especially internal rhyme accentuates the role of similar sounds and their thematic and semantic values, yet without ever contesting the importance of end rhyme through rimes équivoquées. The rhyming variations in lines like

Mere d'Amour & fille de la mer
          Du cercle tiers lumiere souverene,

(“Sonnet 52”)

may seem contrived at first glance, and an examination of his source, “Figlia di Giove & madre alma d'Amore” shows that Du Bellay strove for the rhyme by inverting Lelio Capilupi's components. But the word arrangement integrates the personae into the mythological family that inhabits L'Olive and links it to “Sonnet 48” which begins “Pere Ocean, commencement des choses.” Similarly, verses like “L'heureux malheur de l'espoir qui m'attire, / Si le plaisir, suject de mon martire” (“Sonnet 46”) with their similar sounds sustain the oxymoron that blends the theme of pleasure and pain. Du Bellay apparently delights in expanding a brief allusion to sound effects into the main attraction of his verse or in reducing disparate segments of his model into one commanding image. “Sonnet 87” draws upon Girolamo Volpe's “dolce suono mormorate” and “Questo vaso d'amono & croco pieno” and, through a full range of linguistic resources including onomatopoeia, alliteration, assonance and internal rhyme, develops it into

Vent doulx souflant, vent des vens souverain,
          Qui voletant d'aeles bien empanées
          Fais respirer de souëves halenées
          Ta doulce Flore au visage serain,
Pren de mes mains ce vase, qui est plein …

Four sonnets later he welds Bernardino Tomitano's “rendete al Sole … l'oro” into “Rendez à l'or cete couleur, qui dore.” The internal rhymes, both perfect and imperfect, of the last two examples recur in L'Olive, frequently in a conventional 4 + 6 verse that avoids confusing one decasyllable with two five syllable verses and that repeats the same sounds in subtly altered sequences for an incantational effect. Brief examples drawn both from quatrains and tercets illustrate the pervasiveness of this internal rhyming through the full range of the sonnet.⁵¹ The quatrains of “Sonnet 58” end with closely balanced lines that encompass similar but more randomly organized sounds:

          De tes yeulx sort le feu qui me devore.
Donques le prix de celuy qui t'honnore,
          Est-ce la mort & le marbre endurcy?
          O pleurs ingratz! ingratz soupirs aussi,
          Mon feu, ma mort, & ta rigueur encore.

“Sonnet 96” is patterned on Petrarch's expeditio, but while the Tuscan poet limits his negative enumeration to the octave, Du Bellay extends it throughout the sonnet in a procedure he will make famous in the Regrets. His first tercet introduces a series of internal rhymes which he doubles in order to vary the otherwise monotonous rhythm and amplify the richness of the subject he describes,

Ny les piliers des sainctz temples dorez,
          Ny les palais de marbre elabourez,
          Ny l'or encor', ny la perle tant clere

although the second tercet contains the unfortunate alliteration, “Ny le plaisir pouroit plaire à mes yeulx,” initiated in the preceding verses.

Du Bellay's desire to expand his source, as with Bernardo Accolti's “Che l'cor mi tra' del corpo e'n cielo il porta,” occasionally creates a halting rhythm unjustified by the sonnet's context and exceeding even Scève's most copious series of abstractions (cf. Délie 56): “Coeur, corps, esprit, sens, ame & vouloir emblent” (“Sonnet 4”). But his progressively expansive invocations, such as “Sacrée, saincte & celeste figure” (“Sonnet 38”) condensed from Francesco Maria Molza's cluttered “Santa, sacra, celeste & sola imago,” and conclusions like “Saincte, pudique & chaste Cyprienne” (“Sonnet 104”), rival those of the best sonneteers from Ronsard to Mallarmé. His powers of elaborative condensation are seen in “Sonnet 77” where his last tercet abandons his model, Petrarch's “Lieti fiori,” to bring together all of the natural forces invoked and developed in the body of the poem: “je seroy' fleuve & rive, / Roc, source, fleur, & ruisselet encore”. Ronsard, focusing partially on the same model and perhaps imitating Du Bellay, closes his sonnet in like manner, yet without ever indicating the particular value of each enumerated component “Tailliz, forestz, rivages & fontaines, / Antres, prez, fleurs, dictes le luy pour moy.”⁵²

Like the bee moving from one flower to another, to use the Pléiade's favorite description of their multiple inspiration, Du Bellay frequently condenses two or three sources into the development of a sonnet in a multitude of ways. His amalgamation may include imagery combined from Petrarch and Vergil followed by a revised passage (“Sonnet 31”) from the Orlando Furioso; or it may comprise disparate segments from the same poet, as in “Sonnet 70” which brings together and alters a quatrain and tercet from the beginning of Petrarch's Rime sparse with those from another sonnet that is located near the middle of that collection; or, in “Sonnet 62,” it can remold the theme of one sonnet from the Rime to the development of the following sonnet in Petrarch's sequence. But however ingeniously varied these borrowings may be, they rarely harmonize the individual charm and greatness of divergent poetic visions. Representative of that deficient coordination is “Sonnet 33” with its twin sources of Petrarch and Ariosto, and Du Bellay's extrapolation of those sources:

O prison doulce, ou captif je demeure
          Non par dedaing, force ou inimitié,
          Mais par les yeulx de ma doulce moitié,
          Qui m'y tiendra jusq'à tant que je meure.
O l'an heureux, le mois, le jour & l'heure,
          Que mon coeur fut avecq' elle allié!
          O l'heureux noeu, par qui j'y fu' lié,
          Bien que souvent je plain', souspire & pleure!
Tous prisonniers, vous etes en soucy,
          Craignant la loy & le juge severe:
          Moy plus heureux, je ne suis pas ainsi.
Mile doulx motz, doulcement exprimez,
          Mil' doulx baisers, doulcement imprimez,
          Sont les tormens ou ma foy persevere.

In the first half of the poem Du Bellay's awareness of rhyme value permits him to sustain tensions that correspond to the poem's argument: the coexistence of pleasure and pain. The paradoxically matched rhymes demeure and meure, the counterpoint of the two verses between them, and the grammatical similarities of verses 5 and 7, 6 and 8 that offset the introverted rhymes ending those lines, all contribute to the mood of paradox and especially to a synthesis of sources, since verses 5 and 6 are basically Petrarchan while verses 7 and 8 come primarily from Ariosto. Petrarch's roughly sequential expansion and contraction of time, “Benedetto sia 'l giorno e 'l mese e l'anno / e la stagione e 'l tempo e l'ora,” is reduced and unified by Du Bellay, and the Petrarchan beatitude is applied to Ariosto's knot that binds. But despite his plaintive assonance in that quatrain and his alliteratively descriptive use of m's that seal the lips in the last tercet, the facile rhyming of exprimez with imprimez and the considerable distance between the D rhymes detract from that success. Even more serious, the apparent insertion of the Petrarchan passage separates “j'y fu' lié” (v. 7) from its supposed referent “prison doulce” and leaves that whole hemistich grammatically and logically vague. This vagueness is compounded by the substitution of “Bien que” for the blessing Petrarch gives his torment, since Du Bellay thus transforms the tension of paradox into a contradiction that he fails to develop. Moreover, the sudden and absolute address to the prisoners in Du Bellay's allegorization of Ariosto (v. 9) forces an uncomfortable contrast with the necessarily indecisive mood of the first quatrain. So it seems that Du Bellay was either unaware of the subtle distinction between the paradox he found in his two sources and simple contradiction, or else his imitation was unable to give rise to recreation in this sonnet.

Aneau was quick to realize these shortcomings and repeatedly brought them to the poet's attention. He corrected Du Bellay's grammatical referents in a sonnet overladen with logical connectives (“20”), and in his grammatical lesson on “Sonnet 10” he jocosely, although perhaps accidentally, stressed Ramus' important conceptual term liens in attacking the poetic logic: “Tout ce sonnet est de connexion mal jointe, & mal liez y sont les liens avec le feu & le trait. Car traitz liez ne font nul mal, & le feu pourroit bien brusler les liens.” The significance of this criticism derives from the way in which the combined Trivium furnishes Aneau his aesthetic criteria, for he concludes his objection with the rhetorical terminology: “Appren donq à bien figurer.” Du Bellay apparently learned his lesson well by “Sonnet 93” where we see him borrowing Petrarch's “effetto” and “cagion” as he moves from effect to the cause of his alternation between pleasure and pain. From there he proceeds to the logically introduced first tercet, “Madame donc,” and incorporates Ariosto's Wheel of Fortune as the causal and pictorial analogue of the effect he undergoes.

The extent to which he learned his rhetoric properly remains a contentious point. Guido Saba occasionally admires it while Chamard invariably laments it.⁵³ But whether he was its master or its victim, normative rhetoric assumes a dominant position in L'Olive and therefore deserves more than the allusive treatment it has so far received. Du Bellay's condensation of Ariosto's “chiara eloquenzia che deriva da un fonte di saper” into “en esprit, en faconde” (“Sonnet 18”) evinces a concern for the normal passage from invention to elocution in poetic composition. Salmon Macrin's 1550 dedication to L'Olive associates “Facunde Bellaï” with Horace and Quintilian (I, 4-5), and Du Bellay's own “l'ecolle de faconde” (“Sonnet 8”) is a revealing paraphrase of Ariosto's “alti stili” and “scole insegnaro” that implies the persuasive power of a forceful style. Even when his eloquence succumbs to the ineffable beauty of his love, he is merely following a rhetorical topos that Curtius has traced from the beginning of poetry.⁵⁴

The 1550 preface to L'Olive underlines the need to enrich French poetry with poetic figures, “elire pour decorer.” But rather than compiling a list of the figures he uses, it is often more instructive to see how he modifies his borrowings to obtain those figures and to see how his borrowing accordingly alters the poetic vision. For instance, his modification of Navagero's loosely organized

Quanto ringrazio il ciel et la mia stella,
Ch'in sorte dato m'han si dolce ardore,
Quanto amor, che t'aperse al cor la via.

to obtain the common polysyndeton we discussed in the last chapter,

Combien le ciel favorable je clame,
          Combien Amour, combien ma destinée,

(“Sonnet 22”)

stresses the essential relatedness of the forces that pleasantly conspire against him. The modification may add only prolixity, witness the expansion of Petrarch's “destra” and “manco” into “main la plus forte” and “le flanc qui est le plus debile” (“Sonnet 69”). Or it may restructure and refine the entire imitation, as the following example indicates. The octave of “Sonnet 24” flows more freely than Battista della Torre's sonnet which specifies Echo in the opening verse, paratactically arranges the poet's address and presents the nymph's response by means of the balanced line called compar or isocolon

Tu radoppi i miei tristi ultimi accenti:
          Tu col mio spesso il tuo dolor confondi:
          S'io grido Furnia, & tu Furnia rispondi;

(vv. 5-7)

Du Bellay's reference to Echo is not made specific until his seventh verse where he eschews controlled balance in favor of the figure epizeuxis for heightened emotion: “Olive Olive: & Olive est ta voix.” The progressively diminished voice created by this imbalance returns in “France, France, respons à ma triste querelle. / Mais nul, sinon Echo, ne respond à ma voix” (II, 59), where Echo enters as an indifferent witness to the poet's torment. In L'Olive Echo commiserates with him and Narcissus becomes the mythic analogue of the unfeeling Olive. Elsewhere Du Bellay makes similar verses physically intimate the idea of reflection between tercets and between physical and ideal beauty:

Ceste beauté, seul miroir de mes yeux:
Ceste beauté, dont la saincte merveille,

(II, 249)

Similar configuration in “Sonnet 24”

Pareille amour nous avons eprouvée,
          Pareille peine aussi nous souffrons ores.
          Mais plus grande est la beaulté qui me tue.

intimates the reciprocity of pleasure and pain. Moreover, it frames the beauty of Narcissus which is the source of those feelings in Echo and ultimately the source of his own demise, and prepares the even greater beauty that plagues the narrator who finally individualizes his predicament in the last verse. The slight modification that Du Bellay effected in eschewing the third egual in

Eguale arde ambidue fiamma amorosa:
          Eguale è'l nostro amor, pari le pene;
          Et ambidue già vinse egual bellezza.

preserves the desired duality of his second tercet. The restatement of the Echo-Narcissus myth to connect reflected beauty with death returns in “Sonnet 79”:

Le ciel courbé se mire dans ses yeulx:
          Echo respond à sa divine voix,
          Qui faict mourir les hommes & les Dieux.

The concern for the reflection in and through art of beauty and the emotion it causes responds to the 1550 preface's idea of “representer au naturel quelque vyf protraict.” But although in that context Du Bellay is speaking of the inevitability of reproducing imagery similar to the poetry he imitates, his concern for vivid portraiture is greater than any of his models. “Sonnet 74” attends to Olive's beauty, “Ce que le Ciel, les Dieux & la Nature / Ont peint en vous, plus vivante peinture,” moving Platonically from her physical charms, “la vive et immortelle image,” to her spiritual attraction, “au vif l'esprit te fera voir,” and in the following sonnet he asks nature's help in painting his reaction to that beauty. These two sonnets are apparently Du Bellay's independent creations, and when in “Sonnet 29” he does borrow a passage from the Orlando Furioso he superimposes his own terminology and alleges this time that nature's forces “De ceste forme en moy si bien emprainte / N'effaceront la vive protraiture.” His insistence on painting a convincing picture of her beauty and of his feelings relates to his rhetorical wish to convince the reader that she is worthy of his efforts and to persuade her that he deserves her consideration. He tells her in “Sonnet 50” that if he could express his true feelings “au vif,” this “preuve certaine” would allow him to bend her will to his point of view and “mouvoir tout l'univers.”

Aside from antithesis, which is so universal a thought pattern as to obviate any necessary association with rhetoric, the most recurrent figure in L'Olive is anaphora. Du Bellay works it into his self-inspired verse, superimposes it on his imitations and elaborates it when his models themselves use it. Leo Spitzer has shown how the four verses beginning with La in the famous “Idea Sonnet” (“113”) extensively direct the poet's and the reader's point of view.⁵⁵ The poem is written in a cyclic pattern from the fallen state of the speaker who begins with the universal occurrence of human transience, “sans espoir de retour.” He then relates that occurrence to his personal experience which results from the universal condition. The La anaphora, borrowed from Bernardino Daniello and modified, gives the impression of rising through three modes of time, earthly, edenic and the poet's participation in both:

La, est le bien que tout esprit desire,
          La, le repos ou tout le monde aspire,
          La, est l'amour, la, le plaisir encore.
La, ô mon ame au plus hault ciel guidée!
          Tu y pouras recongnoistre l'Idée
          De la beauté, qu'en ce monde j'adore.

“Sonnet 81” is based on a similar but less successful deployment of the same anaphora which is absent from Du Bellay's apparent source, Ludovico Dolce. Beginning with the earthly “mon desir” in the first verse, the full La anaphora of the second quatrain directs the eye to the eternal values Olive incarnates, while in the second tercet it redirects the point of view back to earth and brings the poetic vision full circle:

La n'est ma soif aux ondes perissante,
          La mon espoir & se fuit & se suit,
          La meurt sans fin ma peine renaissante.

Thematically, cyclic time and space can be seen as the correlatives of man's emotional experiences. They help to associate the poet's mental world with nature and the transformations of the sun, the moon and the elements, with the narrative lines of myth and the mutations of history. Since Fortune's Wheel bespeaks the instability of human existence, the cycle may suggest either desired rebirth or unwanted recurrence.

Cyclical development is one of the basic structural principles of many sonnets in L'Olive and of the sequence as a whole; it will become the major organizing principle of his later sequences. The linking of consecutive poems, through either the use of the same vocabulary and rhymes or similar thematic development, helps to make L'Olive a traditional sonnet sequence. Frequently the closing direction of a sonnet will be countered or complemented by the opening direction of the following sonnet (e.g., “13-14,” “16-19,” “86-87”). The descent of “Sonnet 106,” “Ainsi d'Amour le feu puisse descendre,” is met by the rise of the following poem, taken from Saint Paul, “Sus, sus, mon ame,” which introduces the group of religious sonnets at the end of L'Olive and the triumph of the Psalms' purgatorial flame over Eros' infernal fire: “D'un nouveau feu brusle moy jusq' à l'ame, / Tant que l'ardeur de ta celeste flamme. …” The end of the “Idea Sonnet” returns the speaker to earth whereas the following sonnet ends with elevation, “Courez par l'air d'une aele inusitée” and introduces the Icarus theme at the end of the collection. Even when they are not consecutive, many sonnets are placed in close proximity by the common source they share, as in the case of sonnets “29,” “35” and “39” each of which reshapes two different stanzas from Bradamante's plea in Orlando Furioso XLIV, 61-66. Overall conjoining of sonnets is increased by the end of the first sonnet, “Egal un jour au Laurier immortel,” and the end of the last sonnet, “Jusq' à l'egal des Lauriers tousjours verds,” which announce the opening and the closing of the sequence, and by the liturgical rhythm that encompasses them between the “Christmas Eve Sonnet” (“5”), following the traditional explanatory invocations of sonnets “1-4,” and the numerous rebirth sonnets at the end of the collection.

Du Bellay's peregrine muse led him to syncretize the Christian cycle with classical myth in an effort fully to join the activities of man with the workings of the cosmos. In L'Olive we encounter the standard conceits of her depersonalized attributes meeting the anthropomorphized forces of nature and of myth (“Sonnet 86”) or the equation of her perfection with the harmonized elements. Yet this correspondence between the microcosm of man and the macrocosm of nature is usually associated with a rebirth motif or a cyclical movement: the setting sun of a quatrain that pacifies the elements rises again in the tercets where Olive “Semble renaitre avec la belle Aurore” (“Sonnet 27”), the rising and falling wheel that controls the poet's fortune conjures up the movement of elements (“Sonnet 35”), the progressively concrete descent from heaven which becomes “amoureux de la terre” and the resulting advent of spring contrasts with the poet's interior world of the last verse, “Un triste hiver sen' en moy renaissant” (“Sonnet 45”) and the elements extend their sympathy as the poet's precious tear in the “jardin de son ame” brings forth “mile amoureuses fleurs” (“Sonnet 73”).

This movement unfolds within both spatial and temporal dimensions. In “Sonnet 95” the reader's eye descends with the poet's tear as it blends with the water and rises as his mind is projected into the past:

Dieu qui reçois en ton giron humide
          Les deux ruisseaux de mes yeulx larmoyans,
          Qui en tes eaux sans cesse tournoyans
          Enflent le cours de ta course liquide,
Quand fut-ce, ô Dieu! qu'en la carriere vide
          De ton beau ciel, ces cheveux ondoyans,
          Comme tes flotz au vent s'ebanoyans,
          Deça dela voguoient à pleine bride?

In answer to his question, we are thrust further into an arcadian past when the Gods and time conspired to make “Renaistre l'ore de l'antique saison.” The reference to the passing of the Golden Age recurs in “Sonnet 101” where the descent of vices to earth in the first tercet is counter-balanced by the ascent of virtues to heaven in the second. Similarly, in “Sonnet 11” we descend through the imperfect and pluperfect tenses from a threatening sky to a tumultuous sea, and, as Du Bellay modifies Ariosto's temporal scheme, rise suddenly to a clearing sky in the present tense and in the presence of Olive rescued from the sea.⁵⁶ The same poem of Ariosto is imitated and altered in “Sonnet 59” where Du Bellay's song charms the rocks and trees below him as Orpheus had done before the gates of Erebus; after snatching his prize from the “bord oblivieux” he returns in the last tercet to the upper world and the source of light.

A more extensive look at descent and return as expressed by myth will show some of the possibilities inherent in the procedure and Du Bellay's exploitation of them:

Qui a peu voir celle que Déle adore
          Se devaler de son cercle congneu,
          Vers le pasteur d'un long sommeil tenu
          Dessus le mont qui la Carie honore:
Et qui a veu sortir la belle Aurore
          Du jaulne lict de son espoux chenu,
          Lors que le ciel encor' tout pur & nu
          De mainte rose indique se colore:
Celuy a veu encores (ce me semble)
          Non point les lyz & les roses ensemble,
          Non ce que peult le printemps concevoir:
Mais il a veu la beauté nompareille
          De ma Déese, ou reluyre on peult voir
          La clere Lune & l'Aurore vermeille.

(“Sonnet 16”)

Following her mythological role, Diana descends from the moon in the first quatrain toward Endymion to whom Jupiter granted perpetual youth. The Endymion myth coincides well with the various themes of L'Olive, since it has usually suggested the vain search for lasting satisfaction, aspiring love and poetic dreams. The Moon Goddess is met by her sister Aurora as she rises in the second quatrain and who was traditionally accompanied by the Pleiads. Aurora—Olive's other surrogate—occasionally loved mortals, such as her “espoux chenu,” the feeble-voiced Tithonus; she carried him away from the earth to assure his immortality, unlike Diana, but forgot to have Jupiter grant him perpetual youth. The tensive differences between the two myths is somewhat resolved in the sestet and the distanced point of view of the first verse is sharpened by Du Bellay's parenthetical “ce me semble” which interprets the significance of redness and whiteness and brings these colors together again in the last verse. The function of the two myths in the poem and the numerous equivalences between them and the poet's situation create concision and depth in Du Bellay's sonnet and suggest the Pléiade's theory of myth as a reflexion of supra-literal truth.

Depth is also created by the blend of scriptural and para-Christian themes, which he accomplishes in a single poem or by contrasting several poems. In “Sonnet 112,” for instance, the Platonic “occultes Idées” that introduces the octave syncretizes rather obviously with the apocalyptic “Le Juste seul ses eleuz justifie” of the first tercet. More skillfully, the third verse of “Sonnet 76” (Isaiah XI, 6) and the remainder of the poem (Revelation VI, 12-14):

Quand la fureur, qui bat les grandz coupeaux,
          Hors de mon coeur l'Olive arachera,
          Avec le chien le loup se couchera,
          Fidele garde aux timides troupeaux.
Le ciel, qui void avec tant de flambeaux,
          Le violent de son cours cessera,
          Le feu sans chault & sans clerté sera,
          Obscur le ront des deux astres plus beaux.
Tous animaulx changeront de sejour
          L'un avec' l'autre, & au plus cler du jour
          Ressemblera la nuit humide & sombre,
Des prez seront semblables les couleurs,
          La mer sans eau, & les forestz sans ombre,
          Et sans odeur les roses & les fleurs.

give the poet's love a backdrop that ranges from the Old to the New Testament. The first Scriptural passage, dealing with the everlasting Branch of Jesse, prophesies an eventual reconciliation in the world of nature after innumerable afflictions, and the second passage prophesies the opening of the sixth Seal to unleash cosmic woes, announcing that martyrs will be avenged for their sufferings. Du Bellay thrusts us into a distant, mysterious future that adumbrates his deliverance from torment and blends the spirituality and vast dimensions of his sources with the olive branch, symbol of his enduring love.

Equally subtle is the way in which sententiae and exempla at the conclusion of numerous sonnets teach lessons that defy specific definition as either Platonic or Christian until the latter part of the collection: “Vivant par mort d'une eternelle vie” (“Sonnet 22”), “Tu sers d'exemple, à qui ose aspirer / Trop hardiment à chose non mortelle” (“Sonnet 51”), “Que l'homme en vain contre Dieu s'evertue” (“Sonnet 63”), “Qui sans mourir, & sans voler aux cieulx, / Peult contempler le paradis en terre!” (“Sonnet 80”), “Et morte soit tousjours pour moy la mort” (“Sonnet 110”), and “Qui en mourant triomphe de la mort” (“Sonnet 111”). Judging from the first tercet of “Sonnet 68”

Ainsi courant de sommez en sommez
          Avec' Amour, je ne pense jamais,
          Fol desir mien, à te haulser la bride.

which is recast in the Christian tercets of sonnet 6 of “L'Honneste amour,”

Ainsi l'esprit dedaignant nostre jour
          Court, fuyt, & vole en son propre sejour
          Jusques à tant que sa divine dextre
Haulse la bride au folastre dezir

it appears that Du Bellay continued to drape mythological deities in Christian robes and to practice this contaminatio of the Platonic dualism of Idea and matter with the Pauline war of Spirit and flesh, perhaps through the use of natural memory, over several years.

In L'Olive Du Bellay introduced the French sonnet sequence and leavened it with equal amounts of translation, imitation and original creation. Some of his sonnets, such as “83” and “113,” are lasting anthology pieces, but many are merely technical successes and elicit our respect only on that level. The cyclical movement to which man and nature are subject returns in the Antiquitez, but the poet's point of view is considerably altered by the sights of Rome and their meaning. “Sonnet 83” of L'Olive, for instance, presents a prelapsarian scene in which the universe is abstractly painted, steeped in perfection and lacks specificity of place. In the Antiquitez this Parnassian detachment and its final crescendo give way to a pilgrim's involvement with the world of fallen man and a concern for the causes that led to Rome's historical decline. The added dimension of Du Bellay's actual experience before the ruins of Rome, coupled with the scenes of his mind's eye, supplant the “double cyme” with its special and therefore limiting point of view that often dominates the sonnets of L'Olive.

.....

LES ANTIQUITEZ DE ROME

Rome: its very name, fated to rule the world according to Tibullus, invokes proud visions of legions marching triumphantly through a vast empire whose perimeter was coextensive with the frontiers of civilization, of marble temples whose blood-splashed altars offered sacrifice to benevolent gods, of Roma Aeterna whose seemingly superhuman accomplishments overshadowed its merely human mold. Its greatness was both created and reflected by Vergil, Horace and Ovid, while the poignancy of its dissolution summoned the attention of Renaissance humanists like Petrarch, Castiglione and Buchanan, all of whom Du Bellay knew and assimilated into his own testimony to the ruins of Rome. Even the impressions of a Poggio Bracciolini, which predate the Antiquitez by more than a century and which Du Bellay may not have known, demonstrate the same concern for the former greatness of the magna parens, mistress of the world, whose buildings were once believed to lie beyond fortune's reach but now lie prostrate like a giant corpse, concern for the lesson of fortune's inconstancy that Rome's fall teaches us, and yet also for the former dignity the ruins cannot fully hide.⁵⁷

Of the numerous ideological and philosophical complications that defied full resolution in the Renaissance, the conflict of Classical and Christian visions of the world was preeminent. Christianity divided Renaissance humanists from the time of Rome, and “it certainly did not allow them in practice to mold their behavior in accordance with either the Greek or the Roman example. The ancient trust in the world's being more permanent than individual man and in political structures as a guarantee of earthly survival after death did not return, so that the ancient opposition of a mortal life to a more or less immortal world failed them. Now both life and world had become perishable, mortal and futile.”⁵⁸ The basic disquietude of sixteenth-century man may be easily seen by contrasting Renaissance attitudes toward the secularized society. While men like Rabelais believed that despite their mortality they could become the authors of their own destiny and achieve an individual permanence, still, with Calvin, they were realizing that by its own fault and free will fallen nature had succeeded divine nature and in the process had divorced itself from its divine origin and from God, the source of its immortality.⁵⁹

Du Bellay's vision of the ruins of Rome falls between these two polarities. He looked on the classical rubble and experienced conflicting responses that the medieval observer—if he looked at all—would not comprehend. Erwin Panofsky has explained that “the Roman ruins inspired the medieval mind with a mingled feeling of admiration for the lofty magnificence of the original buildings, demoniacal fear because these structures were the work of unbelievers, and pious triumph because their decay betokened the defeat of paganism.”⁶⁰ Renaissance eyes came to see the ruins in a fresh way and sought to balance a calm archaeological interest in them with a nearly romantic sentiment. In literature as well as painting of the Renaissance, the theme of far-off Arcadian innocence and tombstone wreckage—both associated with Du Bellay's appreciation of the Antiquitez—appealed “not so much as a Utopia of bliss and beauty distant in space as a Utopia of bliss and beauty distant in time.”⁶¹ This generalization of an important fact correctly implies that such a spatial and temporal breach would not have held true during the Middle Ages. The full force of any latent nostalgia Du Bellay felt for the brilliance that was Rome revealed itself only when he got to Rome, where he was no longer removed in space from the ruins but only in time. Nostalgia, melancholy, sadness, regret—all these feelings obviously do mark his Antiquitez, but an awareness of the two separate reactions of the poet and their historical dimensions is a necessary part of our attempts to understand the poetry.

Chamard's Histoire de la Pléiade included a comprehensive study of the Antiquitez; but while his survey avoided a vague response to the poems, nevertheless it overlooked questions of thematic unity and relevant contexts. Of special interest to Chamard were the “plusieurs idées” treated in the sequence, but his discussion is basically a list of four themes: (1) “la grandeur colossale de la Rome d'autrefois,” (2) Rome the “victime de la Némésis vengeresse,” (3) Rome “tombée par les guerres civiles” and (4) Rome “le monceau de ruines”—a fact which induces men either to marvel at the sight or to meditate on various profound matters.⁶² These four themes are, of course, present in the sonnets, but by sharpening Chamard's categories we will discover a slightly different grouping of topics, one which can provide us with a more revealing thematic map to the poems and at the same time help deepen our appreciation of the melancholy and nostalgia that pervade Du Bellay's collection.

With varying success, most of the sonnets seem to develop one of these four themes: (1) the fact of the present ruins (sonnets “3,” “16,” “20,” “26,” “29”), (2) the symbolic value of the ruins (“4,” “7,” “9-15,” “17,” “21-24”), (3) the fact of the dead civilization (“2,” “18,” “25”) and (4) the living idea and spirit of Roman civilization (“5,” “8,” “19,” “27”). The development in no one sonnet will encompass all four ideas, but one sonnet may treat one or two together. Moreover, unlike the sonnets of the Songe which insistently press only the first or second theme, the thirty-two sonnets of the Antiquitez (with the exception of sonnets “16-19”) reveal no attempt to take up the four themes in consecutive order. But certain affinities of logic are evident among the four ideas: the meditative process may involve a movement from the inspiration of (1) and (3) to the broader reflections of (2) and (4) respectively. Similarly, a loose unity of association can relate sonnets (1) and (3) with (2) and (4). A brief examination of some representative sonnets can show how Du Bellay manipulates these four large themes.

1.

The fact of the present ruins is for Du Bellay a strong visual reminder of the transitory quality of the world. As a man-made artifact, Rome becomes in its ruined state an exemplum of the inevitable decay that claims all things. Rome is “proye au temps, qui tout consomme,” as the chiasmus in the poet's sententious paradox indicates:

Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit,
Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistance.

(“Sonnet 3”)

The same cosmic sadness, achieved through a masterful use of alliteration, imbues his awareness that

Rome vivant fut l'ornement du monde,
Et morte elle est du monde le tumbeau.

(“Sonnet 29”)

2.

Immediate implications of these ruins evolve, in other sonnets, into broader contemplations of the futility besetting any ambitious worldly enterprise. In a sense, a collapsed process of meditation is at work: the physical rubble reminds man of his earthly mortality and this fact becomes symbolic of the mortality inherent in everything terrestrial. Sonnets of this second type reflect on the lessons of ambition, pride and decadent self-destruction. Rome's earthly aspirations were thwarted by Jove and Mars (“4,” “11,” “12”) when, like the Giants, the children of Chaos, the sons of Romulus threatened the hegemony and balance of the world. It is impossible ever to be like gods since they are always there, watching. But not only did the gods crush Rome, for human ambition itself, leading first to conquest, then to leisure and softness, finally brought on civil war (“10,” “21,” “23,” “31”). A combined allusion to the macrocosm of pagan destiny and perhaps the microcosmic sin of Genesis suggests that both fatality and human frailty invested Roman ventures from their inception:

Estoit-ce point (Romains) vostre cruel destin,
          Ou quelque vieil peché qui d'un discord mutin

(“Sonnet 24”)

As the civilization corrupted at home, the neighboring barbarians—long ago conquered by Rome—come back to erase their own defeat (“Sonnet 23”). Barbarians, Romans, Giants—they all took part in the typical human cycle of aspiration and loss. And Rome is now an accumulation of stones. Du Bellay meditates on the ravages of time and discerns in the fall of empires his own expiration (“Sonnet 7”). Suddenly glimpsing the omnipotence of time and realizing that all beneath the moon—man, his works, the powers of nature—will disappear one day, the poet boldly prophesies to the reader:

          Je ne dy plus la sentence commune,
          Que toute chose au dessous de la Lune
          Est corrompable & sugette à mourir:
Mais bien je dy (& n'en veuille desplaire
          A qui s'esfforce enseigner le contraire)
          Que ce grand Tout doit quelquefois perir.

(“Sonnet 9”)

3.

While these first two groups of sonnets are thematically connected in their melancholic contemplation of worldly decay, two other themes permeating the sequence explore a more optimistic idea. At times, Du Bellay drops the saddening perspective that envisions a futile end to human accomplishments and he exudes an altogether human delight for mortal creations. The other side of the fundamental dilemma that faced earlier poets like Villon and Chaucer—the flowers are fair though they pass; though passing, the flowers are fair—asserts itself. Du Bellay can see that on an earthly scale there is a value and resilience in Roman achievement. In “Sonnet 18,” by finding in Peter's successor the return to a pre-Roman pastoral world, Du Bellay intimates, albeit ironically, a rebirth of effort that characterizes human existence. The wish of “Sonnet 25” to be able to restore Caesar's genius and Vergil's art conveys an excited admiration for the matchless Roman splendor.

4.

Recognizing that the visible ruins can recall human grandeur as well as earthly mortality, the poet dwells on the particulars of that Roman heritage. The spirit of Rome has survived along with the ruins, though “le temps destruit les republiques.” The downfall of Rome “did not mean the annihilation, but the transfiguration of Roman grandeur,” writes Alfred Adler, and “The sight of ruins did not always move to sadness, but to serene resignation.”⁶³ “Sonnet 8” affirms a belief in such endurance:

Le temps ne mist si bas la Romaine hauteur,
          Que le chef deterré aux fondemens antiques,
          Qui prindrent nom de luy, fust découvert menteur.

What the Empire means for the Renaissance observer is not eternally buried in the dross of sublunary earth (sonnets “5” and “9”). Human endurance has refused to let the ruins halt the progress of Rome; conscious of its remote glory and of its recent new fame, the present city “fouillant son antique sejour, / Se rabatist de tant d'oeuvres divines”(“Sonnet 27”).

In the Antiquitez, then, Du Bellay adopts no one rigid stance as he surveys the civilization's ruins. The sonnets in all four categories demonstrate the poet's many-sided mood. For different reasons, he had, in John C. Lapp's words, a “frequent poetic interest in the kinetic potential of objects,”⁶⁴ and he can perceive rebirth as well as decay. It is clear that Literary and Christian traditions, contemporary religious dissension and the Renaissance reverence for classical antiquity, exerted a combined influence on his view of the transitoriness and endurance of human achievement. On the one hand, Rome, like the world, was ephemeral and the Christian should condemn the city of man, knowing that the City of God awaited him. On the other hand, Rome's history was a proud, admirable one and it elicited the new Renaissance culture's approbation.

The various points of view in the Antiquitez and the means of establishing them assume considerable importance, because the meaning of the experience before the ruins depends largely on the vantage point and attitudes of the person undergoing or witnessing the event, and on the person or object he addresses. This meaning is identified with and is conditioned by the poet's conception of his “cause.” The initial sonnets of the Regrets relate to the reader the emotional “adventure” and psychological circumstances that occasion Du Bellay's point of view in the rest of that collection. As Ramus put it, “la vérité des choses comprises ès ars est ainsi naturellement proposée à l'esprit comme est la couleur à la veüe, et ce que nous appellons enseigner n'est pas bailler la sapience ains seulement tourner et diriger l'esprit à contempler ce que de soymesme il eut peu apercevoir s'il se fut là tourné et dirigé.”⁶⁵ In turn, his cause determines what and how many details are selected and how they are seen. Saulnier has commented elegantly on the immense choice of material that must have faced Du Bellay in his attempt to conjure the image of Rome's greatness and Chamard slighted the poet's one-sided “peinture partielle” of modern Rome that fails in its presentation of “la vérité pure.”⁶⁶ Du Bellay did not attempt a photographic account of Rome, but rather selected and arranged individual moments from the total spectacle that confronted him, excluding others, for the particular response they would elicit.

For any poetry that has at least one foot in rhetorical tradition, point of view is of utmost concern since rhetoric brings into being a specific or hypothetical audience and attempts covertly or overtly to gain its assent. Satterthwaite insists that Du Bellay “indulges in no personal statements of opinion at all, no reflections loaded with moral lessons. He is content to pass from description to description, from image to image, and to leave the reader to draw his own conclusions.”⁶⁷ But this is true only in the sense that, as distinct from post-Romantic poetry, interest shifts from the private feelings of the poet to his expression as an artist, away from the personality of the arguer to the force of his argument. In a liminal sonnet of the Regrets—essentially, a poem about poetry—he claims that “la Muse demande / Le theatre du peuple & la faveur des Roys” (II, 58); and in the “Sonnets divers” he instructs the dramatized reader as to the proper attitude he should assume with respect to the poetic experience—not unlike the Ancient Mariner and the accosted wedding guest—before explaining the myth-laden octave and relating it in the last tercet to his Roman experience: “Cesse, passant, de t'en donner merveille” (II, 265). The same desire to teach and move through pleasure is central to the Antiquitez. The more openly allegorical Songe and the lesson of Ecclesiastes which opens and closes that sequence, “tout n'est rien que vanité,” is brought forth in the Antiquitez through the use of naturalistic imagery or sketched historical development. After the simile of vapor condensation and rain, Du Bellay ends “Sonnet 20” with the ironic rhyme soustenir-devenir and the sententious proof “Monstrant que tout en rien doit un jour devenir.” Even though the selection of events or analogies is inevitably limited, the conclusion creates at least the impression of moral omniscience. Instead of simply telling, the poet pleasurably but compellingly shows the involved reader what his reaction must be, and the imagined reader occasionally experiences the action through the eyes of the unobtrusive narrator:

Ces grands monceaux pierreux, ces vieux murs que tu vois,
          Furent premierement le cloz d'un lieu champestre:
          Et ces braves palais, dont le temps s'est fait maistre,
          Cassines de pasteurs ont esté quelquefois.
Lors prindrent les bergers les ornemens des Roys,
          Et le dur laboureur de fer arma sa dextre:
          Puis l'annuel pouvoir le plus grand se vid estre,
          Et fut encor plus grand le pouvoir de six mois:
Qui, fait perpetuel, creut en telle puissance,
          Que l'aigle Imperial de luy print sa naissance:
          Mais le Ciel s'opposant à tel accroissement,
Mist ce pouvoir es mains du successeur de Pierre,
          Qui sous nom de pasteur, fatal à ceste terre,
          Monstre que tout retourne à son commencement.

(“Sonnet 18”)

We witness the calm, pastoral origin of Rome in the first quatrain, accelerate through history in the second to the zenith and transformation of Imperial power in the tercets and, along with the poet, didactically complete the cycle. The last four verses can be read as a quatrain built on introverted rhymes and thus heighten the shock of Rome's collapse by countering the sonnet's traditional divisions.

Familiar second person address is varied by altering the speed of verses and thus making the reader experience Rome's life from a shifting perspective, but the didactic function of that address is the same. In the expansive verses that begin “Sonnet 27” Du Bellay establishes complicity with the implied reader (or viewer) by giving him his cue, “emerveillé,” and justifies that wonder in the second half of the quatrain by radically accelerating the rhythm as he passes in review the glories of Rome:

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 & ces temples,

The beginning of the next two stanzas controls the reader's vision by the imperatives “Juge” and “Regarde apres,” while the last tercet controls his conclusion as well, “Tu jugeras,” that the spirit of Rome attempts to revive its lost grandeur.

Perspective (but not the conclusion it leads to) is modified not only by changing grammatical person, but also by shifting pronouns within the same person for an altered viewpoint. The reader may perceive the action from a distance through the limiting “Qui a veu quelquefois” (“Sonnet 28”) or he may be more involved through the more general “Non autrement qu'on void” (“Sonnet 20”). Quintilian had discussed person change, classifying it somewhere between trope and figure of thought, in terms of the effect it intends (IX, iii, 22-23), and Renaissance critics treated narrative style where the poet speaks in his own person, dramatic or imitative style where he assumes the reaction of another person, as in prosopopoeia, and combinations of the two.⁶⁸ Du Bellay evinces a similar concern in all types of poetry; his desire in the “Prosphonematique” to paint the king's glory “au vif” leads to a continually displaced point of view and altered address (III, 61), in an amorous piece the narrator apostrophizes mythological deities and reports their dialogue (III, 138), and his satire especially relies on multiple perspective, such as his derisive collation of sequential portraits and implied conversations of Pierre de Paschal that obliquely suggest the narrator's opinion (VI, 113). Not only is form of address inflected in the Antiquitez, but also referents are transferred within the same pronoun. Such transfer creates a desirable vagueness at the beginning of “Sonnet 31” where Du Bellay enumerates forces that had nothing to do with Rome's fall:

De ce qu'on ne void plus qu'une vague campaigne,
          Ou tout l'orgueil du monde on a veu quelquefois,
          Tu n'en es pas coulpable, ô quiconques tu sois
          Que le Tygre & le Nil, Gange & Euphrate baigne:

The pronoun on refers to different points of view in the past and present, while Lucan's concrete “Non tu, Pyrrhe ferox” becomes the purposefully indecisive “quiconques tu sois.” The referent of tu is altered and specified in the first tercet as the poet apostrophizes Rome, “Tu en es seule cause, ô civile fureur,” and in the last verse he returns to subordinate clauses and the third person, “La Romaine grandeur, trop longuement prospere, / Se vist ruer à bas d'un plus horrible sault,” which is vague enough in meaning to include both Rome and the barbarians as witnesses to the turn of Fortune's Wheel. The crucial witness, of course, is the alternately objective or subjective narrator. A near translation of a sonnet by Castiglione (“Superbi colli, e voi sacre ruine”) allows him to bring the ruins which he apostrophizes into close focus and describe their significance in the second person as a means of relating his own reaction to a more general occurrence in the last tercet:

Tristes desirs, vivez donques contents:
          Car si le temps finist chose si dure,
          Il finira la peine que j'endure.

(“Sonnet 7”)

The image of Rome that inspires his feelings becomes his own creation to the extent that he modifies and yet preserves the driving alliteration of his model: “Qui le seul nom de Rome retenez” (“Che 'l nome sol di Roma anchor tenete”); “Las, peu à peu cendre vous devenez, / Fable du peuple & publiques rapines!” (“E fatte al vulgo vil favola al fine”).

The Regrets tell of the literary fortune Du Bellay had hoped to make in the Eternal City, of the Golden Fleece he would like to have brought back to France,⁶⁹ and from the beginning of the Antiquitez to the end he presents himself as the intercessor who can recreate, or at least adumbrate for us, the glory that once was Rome. In his dedication to Henri II he claims to have painted “en ce petit tableau … de couleurs poëtiques” so that it “Se pourra bien vanter d'avoir hors du tumbeau / Tiré des vieux Romains les poudreuses reliques.” The antithetical beginning of “Sonnet 1,” “Divins Esprits, dont la poudreuse cendre,” introduces the theme of the surviving animus of lifeless stones, the weighty archaisms “Gist,” “loz” and “abas,” and the triple invocation that surrounds Du Bellay's stance as the earthly priest who can recall the spirits from the Elysian Fields. If he lacks the skill of Orpheus, Amphion or Vergil (“Sonnet 25”), he at least can claim to be the first French poet to have sung Rome's name (“Sonnet 32”). The significance of his conscious use of art, whether demonic or poetic, to summon Roman achievement before our eyes derives from his conception that surpassing art has made Rome endure beyond the grasp of nature and fortune:

Qui voudra voir tout ce qu'ont peu nature,
          L'Art & le ciel (Rome) te vienne voir:
          J'entens s'il peult ta grandeur concevoir
          Par ce qui n'est que ta morte peinture.
Rome n'est plus: & si l'architecture
          Quelque umbre encor de Rome fait revoir,
          C'est comme un corps par magique scavoir
          Tiré de nuict hors de sa sepulture.
Le corps de Rome en cendre est devallé,
          Et son esprit rejoindre s'est allé
          Au grand esprit de ceste masse ronde.
Mais ses escripts, qui son loz le plus beau
          Malgré le temps arrachent du tumbeau,
          Font son idole errer parmy le monde.

(“Sonnet 5”)

The insistent conjoining of art with nature and the powers of heaven, which Du Bellay added to his models in L'Olive “23,” “74” and Songe “12,” is seen again here in his modification of Petrarch's “Chi vuol veder quantunque po natura / E'l ciel tra noi, venga a mirar costei.” The ruins, the “morte peinture,” do not permit the viewer to understand their full and hidden meaning; only art, as the alliterative final verse tells us, assures the survival of its idole (from εἴδωλον) with its appropriate meanings of vision, phantom, portrait, image or idea.

Alliteration, rhythm and rhyme themselves are effective means of recreating the various faces of Rome and of directing the narrative “point of view” as well. Before Ronsard's recommendation of “lettres heroïques,” m and doubled r on Vergil's example, and probably before Peletier's stress on “l'expression vive des choses par les moz: savoer ét, les soudeines e hatives, par moz briéz e legers: et les pesantes ou de travalh, par moz lons e tardiz,”⁷⁰ Du Bellay separates alliterative and rhythmic statement from flat didacticism and impels it toward a significant formality and even ritualism:

Nouveau venu, qui cherches Rome en Rome
          Et rien de Rome en Rome n'apperçois,
          Ces vieux palais, ces vieux arcz que tu vois,
          Et ces vieux murs, c'est ce que Rome on nomme.
Voy quel orgueil, quelle ruine: et comme
          Celle qui mist le monde sous ses loix,
          Pour donter tout, se donta quelquefois,
          Et devint proye au temps, qui tout consomme.
Rome de Rome est le seul monument,
          Et Rome Rome a vaincu seulement.
          Le Tybre seul, qui vers la mer s'enfuit,
Reste de Rome. O mondaine inconstance!
          Ce qui est ferme, est par le temps destruit,
          Et ce qui fuit, au temps fait resistance.

(“Sonnet 3”)

The narrative sequence of sounds caught by the unnamed reader's ear reinforces emotional effects, but he is unceasingly reminded that he is not experiencing the real object of mimesis as much as the object transmuted into symbolic form and meaning. The theme “Rome n'est plus Rome” (Regrets, 131)⁷¹ with its martial cadence is insistently hammered throughout the sonnet by the two close repetitions of the city's name in the first quatrain (vv. 1, 2) and by the similar repetitions in the first tercet (vv. 9, 10) which condense respectively the meanings of the two quatrains. In order to insure the swift recurrence of the name in three of the four instances, Du Bellay resorts to the rhetorical device of hyperbation, the inversion of customary word order for special emphasis. This emphasis ironically undercuts the implied Imperial might because it opposes Rome's glorious past to its faded present, an affirmation to a negation. The “nouveau venu” 's field of vision narrows in its triple descent from the large “palais” to the “arcz” to the anonymous “murs” as he progressively discovers that the only vestige of Rome's past is the hollow echo of its name: the imperative “Voy” of the second quatrain is really an invitation to hear the descriptive alliteration. Equally descriptive are Du Bellay's rhetorical figures: the zeugma, following the antithesis involving the abstract orgueil and the concrete ruine, fractures verbal and logical continuity in a rhythmically unbalanced line; and the traductio seul monument-seulement creates a shortened refrain that underlines Rome's diminished stature.⁷² The only new thought added to the synoptic first tercet is verse 11 which visually escapes its stanza and comes to rest in the last tercet—the logical accommodation of statement to form. Du Bellay repeated precisely the pattern involving enjambement of these two verses in L'Olive “103” for the same effect, and will do so again to conjoin the tercets in Antiquitez “29,” Songe “11” and “Amours” “15.” While successful sonnets do not always inhabit a world of logic, their forms do. And just as the world of dialectic is composed of unchanging propositions, the stichic or strophic components of poetry which belong to that world assume the permanence of art, despite the lesson of inconstancy they teach.

Much of Du Bellay's craftsmanship in the Antiquitez lies in his knowing when the sonnet's stringent conditions should be overlooked and when they can be turned to advantage by adhering to them. Often he intentionally disregards the theoretical divisions of strophic forms and just as often exploits the force of rhymed words as means of directing poetic statement. In the first quatrain of “Sonnet 8,” for instance,

Par armes & 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 & de l'onde.

the A rhymes connote a global dominion and enclose rhyme words whose suggested limits only reinforce Roman hegemony. This assertion is made more specific in the second quatrain by a veiled allusion to Octavian Augustus, grandnephew of Julius Caesar, and by a reference to the papacy's eventual power, “Mesura le hault ciel à la terre profonde”; the power of empire is thus simply transformed into spiritual strength. “Sonnet 11” brings together the similarly rhymed verses “Ce peuple adonc, nouveau fils de la Terre,” and “Puis se perdit dans le sein de sa mere”; Rome rose from and disappeared into Cybele the Great Earth Mother who, along with her mate Saturn, was among the oldest and most important Roman deities and whom Du Bellay glossed in the famous “Sonnet 6.” The antagonism between divine will “juste jugement,” and human actions, “ferme fondement,” is again amplified through alliteration and rhyme in the final tercet of “Sonnet 24.”

The poet's concern—we could say obsession—over these human actions is not limited to the classical line of Roman literature which guarantees its survival, but extends as well to the former majesty of the crumbled ruins he sees before him. Whether it be a triumphal arch or the Temple of Vesta with its eternal flame, Rome's buildings reflect its culture and aspirations. Its massive construction and even its serene remains show that Rome built for eternity. Roma Aeterna surely became a literal and unalterable reality for whoever looked upon the formal splendor of Augustan architecture. Roman geography and architecture assume an important role in most of the Antiquitez as Du Bellay seeks the reasons for Rome's physical demise and attempts to recreate the compass of its strength in the construction of his sonnets. Some of his attempts suffer from the excessive rigidity that characterizes some Roman architecture. “Sonnet 19” builds an extensive anaphora of six verses beginning with Tout, and relieves it only by the imposing synonym Rome which begins the seventh verse. In “Sonnet 4,” on the other hand, it is the rhyme words and octave-sestet opposition that make the implicit but rather obvious commentary.

Celle qui de son chef les estoilles passoit,
          Et d'un pied sur Thetis, l'autre dessous l'Aurore,
          D'une main sur le Scythe, & l'autre sur le More,
          De la terre & du ciel la roundeur compassoit:
Juppiter ayant peur, si plus elle croissoit,
          Que l'orgueil des Geans se relevast encore,
          L'accabla sous ces monts, ces sept monts qui sont ore
          Tumbeaux de la grandeur qui le ciel menassoit.
Il luy mist sur le chef la croppe Saturnale,
          Puis dessus l'estomac assist la Quirinale,
          Sur le ventre il planta l'antique Palatin,
Mist sur la dextre main la hauteur Celienne,
          Sur la senestre assist l'eschine Exquilienne,
          Viminal sur un pied, sur l'autre l'Aventin.

The imperfect tense of all A rhymes and the B rhymes composed of nouns in the first quatrain and adverbs in the second, all preserve the relative animation of the octave which describes Rome's assault on heaven and its defeat; the unrelieved rhyme words in the sestet, however, are the names of six of Rome's seven hills which pin down the captured victim like dead weights and also display the poet's disregard for precise Roman geography. Sonnets “2” and “26” are more accomplished in their attempt to represent physically the dominion of Rome through the disposition of the sonnet and the figures it contains. In the first instance the self-conscious narrator details the seven wonders of the ancient world in a colorless list marked by unevenness of verse and stanza. This unevenness is sustained until the end of the poem when he states his proposed undertaking:

          … quant à moy, pour tous je veulx chanter
Les sept costaux Romains, sept miracles du monde.

Repetition of the mystical sept and juxtaposition of the physical fact of Rome with the spiritual in the balanced hemistichs—figures of words a rhetorician would identify respectively as reduplicatio and compar—amplify Rome's catholicity and calm assurance.

The clearest example of Du Bellay's verbal imitation of Rome's physical and temporal dominion is “Sonnet 26”:

Qui voudroit figurer la Romaine grandeur
          En ses dimensions, il ne luy faudroit querre
          A la ligne & au plomb, au compas, à l'equerre,
          Sa longueur & largeur, hautesse & profondeur:
Il luy faudroit cerner d'une egale rondeur
          Tout ce que l'Ocean de ses longs bras enserre,
          Soit ou l'Astre annuel eschauffe plus ta terre,
          Soit ou soufle Aquilon sa plus grande froideur.
Rome fut tout le monde, & tout le monde est Rome.
          Et si par mesmes noms mesmes choses on nomme,
Comme du nom de Rome on se pourroit passer,
La nommant par le nom de la terre & de l'onde:
          Ainsi le monde on peult sur Rome compasser,
Puis que le plan de Rome est la carte du monde.

His invitation to figurer Rome's greatness is an invitation to create its physical image for the mind's contemplation,⁷³ and that is precisely what he does in the first tercet by using three rhetorical figures that function together. The epanalepsis Rome-Rome in the first tercet illustrates the “egale rondeur” which introduces the serialized four elements in the second quatrain, literally encompasses the ancient and modern world and graphically outlines the idea of the last tercet that Rome can be measured only in global terms. The combination in the same line of enallage or the change of verb tense for dramatic effect (fut-est) with compar follows Quintilian's recommendation⁷⁴ and supports Du Bellay's argument that Roman civilization is simply transformed. Rome once defined the frontiers of the Western World and now that world is shaped by the Roman patrimony. Chamard's note indicates only Horace and Ovid as the sources for Du Bellay's idea in the tercets and we find Rome's world dominion similarly framed in his “Patriae desiderium” as “Roma orbis patria est, quique altae moenia Romae” (v. 11). But this theme and the inseparable theme of cultural transformation take on greater significance because the classical sources of the sestet are complemented by Biblical sources (Zechariah II; Revelation XVI, XXI) that can be seen in the octave.

The rise and decline of Imperial might and the transformation of the temporal strength of the Palatine into the spiritual strength of the Vatican find their natural expression in the cyclical rhythm of these sonnets. This rhythm generally operates on the related levels of the microcosm and the macrocosm which conspire against Rome's permanence, and for their realization Du Bellay dramatizes traditional motifs. “Sonnet 31” associates the impersonal wheel of fortune with the civil war between Caesar and Pompey, while the mirrored action of the Giants and Romans in the octave and sestet of sonnet 12 and the forceful opposition of these poetic divisions in Songe “7” repeat the tragic rhythm of areté hubris-nemesis. The microcosm relates the internal human causes of Rome's decline, such as the civil war which is seen “Comme l'humeur en un corps vicieux” (“Sonnet 23”), and adheres to the Renaissance theory that good health relied on the correct proportion and distribution of the four bodily humors. Since the composition of human anatomy corresponded with the four elements that compose the natural universe, “Sonnet 22” presents Rome's physical disappearance in terms of a discordant relationship of the natural elements. Again, “Sonnet 13” invokes Fortune's Wheel, descends in cosmic value through the elements from “la fureur de la flamme enragee” which corresponded to hot and dry choler to the moist and cold phlegmatic element “Qui tant de fois t'a couvert de son onde,” and ends with the fitting antithesis, “la grandeur du rien.” Correspondence of the natural, human and supra-human that pervades these sonnets along with Renaissance cosmology as a whole, warrant a more extensive look at four different cyclical poems and the ways in which Du Bellay's rhetoric serves his poetic cause.

“Sonnet 16,” which lacks the self-intrusion of the poet with its impersonal on, claims an ambivalent and ironic understanding.

Comme lon void de loing sur la mer courroucee
          Une montaigne d'eau d'un grand branle ondoyant,
          Puis trainant mille flotz, d'un gros choc abboyant
          Se crever contre un roc, ou le vent l'a poussee:
Comme on void la fureur par l'Aquilon chassee
          D'un sifflement aigu l'orage tournoyant,
          Puis d'une aile plus large en l'air s'esbanoyant
          Arrester tout à coup sa carriere lassee:
Et comme on void la flamme ondoyant en cent lieux
          Se rassemblant en un, s'aguiser vers les cieux,
          Puis tumbler languissante: ainsi parmy le monde
Erra la Monarchie: & croissant tout ainsi
          Qu'un flot, qu'un vent, qu'un feu, sa course vagabonde
          Par un arrest fatal s'est venuë perdre icy.

Since it shares certain prosodic and thematic similarities with other sonnets in the collection it seems, through its multiple and perhaps paradoxical logic, to argue the usual contemptus mundi lesson; but in fact it urges us to mourn ephemeral glory. This ironic outcome depends chiefly on the poem's structure and its metaphorical development. Just as Du Bellay discarded conventional topics of the Petrarchan sonnet in composing the Antiquitez, he here disregarded the standard sonnet separation of quatrains and tercets. In comparing the rise and fall of Rome to similar processes in nature, he chose to divide the poem at verse 11, and in the middle of that verse. The one long sentence that comprises the sonnet moves resolutely through the analogies of waves, wind and fire to the central fact of Rome. The uniform punctuation and grammatical dependency of all three comme clauses serve to blend the similes together. In addition, words in one unit occasionally recur in another: ondoyant (vv. 2 and 9), flotz (vv. 3 and 13), aigu and s'aguiser (vv. 6 and 10), arrester (vv. 8 and 14) and of course the formulaic comme and ainsi. Moreover, Du Bellay so fashioned his three similes that features of one element overlap another; the waters, for instance, are a montaigne d'eau, le vent causes the wave's gros choc, and la flamme shines in the sky, the dominion of l'aquilon.

By juxtaposing words and running the clauses together, Du Bellay merges the three illustrations of growth and decline drawn from the world of nature. In like manner, although he seems to present a sequence of immediately significant rhymes—for example, the first eight rhymes are all appropriately verbals, suggestive of the energies of nature—he actually, in various ways, undermines the apparent meaning. First of all, the firm rhyme of ondoyant and abboyant has a basis in sense, but a comma halts ondoyant, and abboyant must grammatically proceed to the next verse where its meaning is subverted by se crever. In the same way a trick of syntax upsets the pairing of tournoyant and s'esbanoyant. Secondly, Du Bellay toys with his rhymes to produce unexpected oppositions: although lieux rhymes with cieux and both plural forms connote expansiveness, lieux goes syntactically into the singular un (v. 10) and cieux descends into tumber. And while monde and vagabonde make for a perfect coupling in meaning, vagabonde is incomplete without the contradictory arrest (v. 14).

Such typographical and grammatical techniques not only tightly integrate the three similes with one another and with the last three verses but they underscore as well a pattern of incongruities—unexpected alterations of our initial impressions. Exactly why this pattern exists becomes clear when we analyze the implications of the three elements: water, air and fire. The relentless logic of the poetic argument (Come … Comme … Comme … Ainsi) suggests that just as huge waves split, furious winds dissipate and shimmering fires wane, so the Roman Empire, a creation of human civilization, must also decline and decay. This triple metaphor from nature that subsumes the destiny of a man-made thing is derived from the hierarchy that separated the four elements, placing earth (the lowest and heaviest) at the dregs of the cosmos and fire (the highest and lightest) at the edge of the lunary realm. Clearly the imaginative function of the elements was to associate human actions with the workings of the universe.

Du Bellay employs this metaphoric frame of reference in a complicated manner. There are actually five planes of matter in the poem: (1) the inferior earth—dry land, the de loing of the speaker's vantage point; (2) the higher stratum, water; (3) even higher, the winds and air; (4) the highest plane, fire; (5) and, once again, the lowly region of la Monarchie, le monde. Significantly, the only spatial movement begins and ends with earth, the dull sublunary zone of eternally futile human efforts; the poem journeys out and back, but the important borders are fixed by the key words that open and close the sonnet: de loing and icy.

The course of Rome, as it expanded and contracted, is like the swelling and collapsing of natural forces, and inasmuch as it was a thoroughly earthly (and indeed un-Christian) venture it was doomed to fall. The three similes function to place Rome under the rule of “physical” laws and not to imply “moral” or Christian judgments. Like Roman ambition, each element achieves a form only to return to formlessness. Waves aspire—to crash, winds blow—to die, flames sharpen—to wither; and it is their terminations that receive the greater emphasis, at the beginning of verses 4, 8 and 11. Entropy constantly threatens the natural world: mountainous waves with mille flotz, the expanding winds d'une aile plus large, the solitary flame once en cent lieux, now en un—they all run down, their noise and fury ending in silence. Despite their great or manifold powers, they each encounter the inescapable arrest fatal; the place may be un roc, the time tout à coup, the personified attitude languissante. Cosmologically, diminishment follows expansion. It is important, then, that nature's eternal flux be described in present participles, verb forms which dramatize the tension of active forces. These forces do have a temporary cessation, expressed by infinitives (se crever, arrester, tumber), but Rome, once croissant, met an irrevocable fate, one underlined by the finality of the present perfect s'est venuë.

Therefore, in this sonnet the structure, syntax and metaphoric comparisons work in unison to integrate and sharpen the conclusion drawn in the last tercet. The poem starts and finishes at the earthly locus of the poet, amid evidence of vanity and immortality, after ranging beyond human confines. Ainsi parmy le monde cannot be noticeably divorced from the previous examples because the inevitability of history closely parallels the inevitability of nature; the enjambement of verses 11-12 stresses the point and prevents the example of Rome from receiving too much separate attention. Versification, along with the unvaried punctuation and repetitive clausal structure, support the logic of the argument. But is the poem simply a subtle but didactic pronouncement, a traditional contempt of the world lesson? It would seem not. For one thing, the described activity of the three elements occurs in a continuous or eternal present (-ant), and the observations we make with Du Bellay (on void) are impersonal and timeless. Opposed to these seemingly illustrative images is the fate of imperial Rome which, while compared with the elements, is fatally different. Nature is eternally cyclic, the wind and fire are phoenix-like. Although Rome—like the elements, like the water breaking on the rocks—is historically transformed in a circular pattern (“Sonnet 18”), the magnificence of its Golden Age died once as it lived but once.⁷⁵

That the three similes chosen to exemplify the principle of rise and fall are not truly similar enough produces, at the end, a note at once sad and ironic. Anonymous waters, winds and fires cannot die the particular and lasting death of Caesar's Rome; there is, it turns out, an abyss between the lessons of nature and the human condition. In his attempt to see the Roman ruins from a detached perspective, the poet fails. Nostalgia and sadness—arising from an ambivalent sense of being proudly human yet uniquely mortal—become, finally, the sentiments that overshadow Du Bellay's apparent interest in contemptus mundi or ubi sunt themes. So it is that in the last line Du Bellay masks his sense of loss by using an explicit spatial metaphor, as the empire erra parmy le monde until sa course vagabonde reached an end, when the decayed monuments before him tell a story whose dimensions are temporal. Les Antiquitez de Rome is a poetic unit, and this sonnet must be read in logical relation to the poems that precede and follow it. Like some of the others, its subjects is the scattered ruins, the futility of human endeavor; unlike the others, it does not make a pointed moral preachment. It is an eternal note of sadness, a mood and not a moral, that closes the poem.

The basic simile of “Sonnet 30” again suggests an imprecise resemblance between the natural cycle and the evolution of Rome:

Comme le champ semé en verdure foisonne,
          De verdure se haulse en tuyau verdissant,
          Du tuyau se herisse en epic florissant,
          D'epic jaunit en grain, que le chaud assaisonne:
Et comme en la saison le rustique moissonne
          Les ondoyans cheveux du sillon blondissant,
          Les met d'ordre en javelle, & du blé jaunissant
          Sur le champ despouillé mille gerbes façonne:
Ainsi de peu à peu creut l'empire Romain,
          Tant qu'il fut despouillé par la Barbare main,
          Qui ne laissa de luy que ces marques antiques,
Que chacun va pillant: comme on void le gleneur
          Cheminant pas à pas recueillir les reliques
          De ce qui va tumbant apres le moissonneur.

Despite the assertions of Chamard that the sonnet was inspired by the Georgics I, 314-317 and of Vianey that it came from an epigram of Martial,⁷⁶ a close examination of the theme and its development shows the more likely and more fitting source to be Mark IV, 26-29, since Christianity represented the present state of Rome's evolution from Du Bellay's historical vantage point. To emphasize the perpetually changing present, Du Bellay skilfully resorts to the figure gradatio. Far from mechanically establishing the chain sequence between the end of one verse and the beginning of the next verse as the rhétoriqueurs did, he sets the connecting words (verdure-tuyau-epic-saison) inside the verse and instead uses the verbal A rhymes to describe the continuity of action and the adjectival B rhymes to indicate the effect of that action. The importance of continuity established by the figure between the quatrains is that man is involved in a legitimate relationship with nature and partakes of its plenitude. But in the sestet where we are suddenly thrust into the past (vv. 9-12) and where the excess of relative pronouns impedes the flow of thought, cooperative harvest turns into plunder. The smooth transition of the quatrains (assaisonne-saison) becomes antithetical enjambement in the tercets, “ces marques antiques, / Que chacun va pillant,” which comments unfavorably on the anonymous and undistinguished situation of the humanist in sixteenth-century Rome. And when we return to the present and to the original comparison at the end of the poem, the resemblance of the humble gleaner slowly moving “pas à pas” to the increase of Rome's power “peu à peu” creates a subtle but devastating irony. Due to the poet's careful insertion of Rome's example within the larger simile drawn from nature, the sonnet moves from present to past and back to present. But the cycle is incomplete since the ironic awareness at the end precludes a return to the optimism of the outset.

Yet Rome survives because of its artistic and intellectual contribution to its humble survivors. Sonnet 6, perhaps the best known of the collection, substantiates this survival by using Aeneid VI, 781-787 as its basis and point of departure:

Telle que dans son char la Berecynthienne
          Couronnee de tours, & joyeuse d'avoir
          Enfanté tant de Dieux, telle se faisoit voir
          En ses jours plus heureux ceste ville ancienne:
Ceste ville, qui fut plus que la Phrygienne
          Foisonnante en enfans, & de qui le pouvoir
          Fut le pouvoir du monde, & ne se peult revoir
          Pareille à sa grandeur, grandeur sinon la sienne.
Rome seule pouvoit à Rome ressembler,
          Rome seule pouvoit Rome faire trembler:
          Aussi n'avoit permis l'ordonnance fatale
Qu'autre pouvoir humain, tant fust audacieux,
          Se vantast d'égaler celle qui fit égale
          Sa puissance à la terre & son courage aux cieux.

We are here at the important moment where Anchises takes his son Aeneas by the arm and prophesies Rome's future greatness through the myth of the Berecynthian goddess Cybele, and the Aeneid itself roughly marks the transformation of Roman folklore into mythology. Looking back into an imaginary past just as Vergil did, Du Bellay insists on the gradual transformation of mythos in the first quatrain into the logos of historical reality. His sonnet preserves the Vergilian concern for establishing parentage between Troy and Rome, and to this end the two quatrains are drawn together by repetitions (plus-plus, ceste ville-Ceste ville) and by parallel structure (vv. 1-2 and 5-6). Radical distinctions are blurred and antitheses are mitigated by a mute e at the caesura (vv. 7, 14). But the one long sentence that comprises the octave is formed of balanced repetitions of sounds and words, Telle que dans son char-telle se faisoit voir, which in fact oppose legendary Troy to superior Rome and Rome's glorious past to the inglorious present, jours plus heureux, plus que la Phrygienne. Foisonnante en enfans, despite its mortal reference, is grammatically less limiting than Enfanté tant de Dieux of the first quatrain. The return of “Sonnet 5”'s insistent quatrain rhymes voir-revoir appears reinforced by the iterative prefix re—which bore the full idea of repetition in the sixteenth century; but these rhymes and the compar of verse 8 with the confrontation of “grandeur, grandeur” at the caesura actually deny the possibility of repeating Rome's greatness.⁷⁷ Completed actions (fut-Fut) and passivity (se faisoit voir-se peult revoir) characterize most of the slow, elegiac octave. But toward the end le pouvoir (v. 6), the only B rhyme that is not an infinitive, is placed in relief and introduces a series of explosive alliterations.

In the couplet formed by verses 9 and 10 Du Bellay exchanges the paraphrase and hypotaxis of the octave for parataxis and martial resonance in which he alters narrative perspective by naming ceste ville and dramatically asserting its power. Rhetorically, the use of Rome forms a polyptoton, a figure of diction that repeats various forms of one word in a single thought, while the juxtaposition of the two verses is of course anaphoric. Quintilian recommends the figure for either contrast or reaffirmation (IX, iii, 36-37); here, and elsewhere (I, 78; VI, 13), Du Bellay uses its rhythm and structure to enforce and reinforce the idea—the two verses affirm one another and the ideas of resemblance and military strength.⁷⁸

The last four lines form a quatrain and resume the elegiac tone and hypotactic structure. This third stage in the sonnet's development relegates Rome's momentary power to the past and completes the movement from Rome's mythic origin to its realization to its ultimate destiny. Finally, the analogies of “Oeuvres et noms finablement atterre” in “Sonnet 7” and the cyclic return of Rome to Cybele the Earth Mother in “Sonnet 11” argue an ambivalent reading of the last verse which implies at once Rome's dominion and its demise, “fit égale / Sa puissance à la terre.”

Du Bellay's integration of Vergil and other Latin poets into his sonnets is a way of bearing witness to the various meanings of Rome and of revealing the reality of its greatness. In the opening sonnets of the collection Du Bellay presents himself as the mystic poet who can invoke and restore the “poudreuses reliques.” Again, “Sonnet 15” pieces together fragments from Aeneas' descent to the nether world and his own witness to the torment of the condemned shades (Aeneid VI, 325-439):

Palles Esprits, & 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 enlaçant d'un trois fois triple tour,
          N'enferment point voz images umbreuses)
Dictes moy done (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?

The Latinate hortatory subjunctive following a hopeless wish (ainsi, v. 5: sic) and the infinitive construction (v. 14) are both found in Vergil's passage. An imbalance between the brief clarity of creation and the dominance of shadowy destruction is supported by the melancholy A rhymes that deal only with ashes, dust and shadows. Umbres refers to the ancient belief that unless a person received proper burial, his soul would be forced to wander as a shade and never attain peace in death. The disheveled ruins of Rome evidently do not constitute proper burial. While the first quatrain presses the rapidity of Roman creation, the long parentheses of the following verses accentuate the difficulty of the spirits' return. The spirits which pass over the encircling Styx are not capable of answering an invocation. Only the cyclic return of poudreuse, of dust to dust, is assured. But the scattered ruins of Rome and the spiritual presence they belie survive in Vergilian accounts of their greatness and as well in Du Bellay's testimony to their full history.

This sequence tells the story of Rome's—and, one step beyond, of man's—transience and endurance. As the intermediary which translates the complex lessons of Roman history for the reader, Les Antiquitez de Rome brings nature and art into coincidence by resolving even the dead ruins into the sounds and sights of a palpable reality. Du Bellay's shifting moods control our awareness of and reaction to the way's Fortune's cycle transforms civilization, and this cycle structures his vision and conditions its expression. Seen through a veil of reminiscent nostalgia, his intermittently impersonal longing for the peace and glory of an ideal past gave way to a bitter and more personal accusation against Rome's too real present in the Regrets.

Notes

1. Joachim du Bellay (1900), p. 221; “Mythological Imagery in Du Bellay,” Studies in Philology, LXI (1964), 122.

2. Ed. Laumonier, XIII, 77. Cf. Robert J. Clements, Critical Theory and Practice of the Pléiade (1942), p. 213; Donald Stone, Ronsard's Sonnet Cycles (1966), p. 219; Jacques Peletier du Mans, Art poétique (1555), I, ii, 12; Montaigne, I, 20, p. 85; d'Aubigné Les Tragiques, II, 773-784; and Jamyn's “Les hommes, le plus souvent, adjoustent créance plus volontiers à la vérité quand elle est embellie de couleurs et de douceur de paroles: toutesfois, pourceque la vérité simple et nue se trouve parmy les vertueux plus luisante sans aucun artifice qu'autrement, à raison qu'elle est assez ornée de soy mesme et qu'estant fardée de paremens extérieurs, elle se corrompt. Le mensonge, au contraire, ne plaist sinon par l'apparence extérieure d'un embellissement emprunté s'evanouyssant et s'escoultant, si elle n'est polie de fards qui l'embellissent,” quoted by Edouard Fremy, L'Académie des derniers Valois (1887), p. 361.

3. Ed. Laumonier, VII, 325, variant.

4. This same phrase recurs in widely divergent Renaissance texts. Cf. “ad laudem atque virtutem naturam sine doctrina, quam doctrina sine natura valuisse,” Henrici Cornelii Agrippae ab Nettesheym … Opera in duos tomos concinne digesta, et nunc denuò, sublatis omnibus mendis, in ϕιλομούsων gratiam accurantissimè recusa … (Leyden, n. d.), II, 4.

5. Cf. Montaigne: “Feu mon pere, homme pour n'estre aydé que de l'experience et du naturel, d'un jugement bien net,” I, 35, p. 220, and “L'art n'est autre chose que le contrerolle et le registre des productions,” III, 3, p. 802. See also III, 10, p. 980. Discussions of this relationship inevitably entail related comment on principles that are basic to rhetoric; cf. Conteurs français du XVI^e siècle (1965), p. 709.

6. Scritti inediti (1874), pp. 312 and 316.

7. Ramus, La Dialectique, pp. 153-155; Scritti letterari (1883), II, 288. Cf. Cicero's Pro Archia, VIII, 15, and Quintilian, II, xix, 2.

8. II, 95-96. Cf. Montaigne's “exercice de sagesse et de vertu,” I, 11, p. 45, and Baïf's “C'est estre fol que d'estre sage / Selon raison contre l'usage,” Euvres en rime de Ian Antoine de Baïf (1881-1890), V, 9.

9. Ed. Laumonier, IV, 128. Cf. XVII, 163.

10. “Energia est rerum gestarum aut quasi gestarum sub oculos inductio,” Isidori Hispalensis episcopi Etymologiarum sive Originum libri XX (1911), II, xxi, 33.

11. Donald Lemen Clark, Rhetoric and Poetry in the Renaissance (1963), p. 85.

12. This summary incorporates all of the basic terms (illustratio, evidentia, oculis mentis, imago rerum, etc.) of Institutio, IV, ii, 123; VI, ii, 32-34; VIII, iii, 61-63, 70, 88-89; IX, ii, 40-41. For a detailed account of the picture-making faculty of the imagination, see Grahame Castor, Pléiade Poetics, ch. 17. Cf. Montaigne, II, 37, p. 1613; III, 5, p. 826; and III, 11, p. 1012.

13. Ed. Laumonier, XV, 252.

14. See my ch. II, note 41; Scaliger's chapter on “Efficacia” for the controlled use of figures of diction for persuasion to certain emotions, Poetices libri septem (1617), pp. 270-272; d'Aubigné, Les Tragiques, VII, 7-8; and W. F. Patterson, Three Centuries of French Poetic Theory (1966), p. 622. Jacques Tahureau expresses the same idea as Du Bellay in identical language: see Odes, sonnets et autres poésies (1869), pp. 66-67. Later Renaissance discussions of chiarezza are certainly close to Quintilian's requirement of clear illustration and conception and to the Pléiade's desired clarity of meaning. Cf. Clements, Critical Theory, ch. III; Antonio Minturno, De poeta (1559), p. 118 and L'Arte poetica (1725), p. 24; Tasso, “Discorsi del poema eroico,” Opere (1824), III, 186. “Le jugement des yeux” unaccompanied by a judgment of the mind is unacceptable to Pontus in Le Premier Curieux (The Universe of Pontus de Tyard, A Critical Edition of “L'Univers” [1950], p. 122).

15. Cf. Deffence, p. 43; II, 270; V, 26; VI, 195. It is perhaps not accidental that the verbs used by the Pléiade (feindre) and other Renaissance writers like Alberti (fingiere) in Della pittura to convey the meaning represented graphically by allegories and derived etymologically from fingere, find their semantic equivalent in the verb sχημăτιζω meaning figurative and imagined movement. Bruno lumps together philosophers, painters and poets, and concludes that “a man who does not know how to paint and feign is no philosopher,” Opera latine, II, ii, 134. The Pléiade did, of course, legislate against any willful obscurantism implied by feigning. See Clements (The Peregrine Muse [1959], pp. 8-9): and Jean Seznec (The Survival of the Pagan Gods [1961], p. 112) for remarks on feigning, painting and allegory. In Aneau's Picta poesis poetry and emblems illuminate one another by holding eye and mind on such polarities as ingenium and labor (p. 17), sapientia and eloquentia (p. 20) and natura and ars (p. 54).

16. Ed. Laumonier, XIV, 196.

17. See Clements, Picta poesis, Literary and Humanistic Theory in Renaissance Emblem Books (1960), p. 174; Rosemond Tuve on Sidney in “Imagery and Logic: Ramus and the Metaphysical Poets,” Journal of the History of Ideas, III (1942), 392; Le Caron's dialogue on poetry, “laquelle nous appellons la vive ou parlante peinture,” quoted by Castor, p. 73; the accord between concept and internal visual design, Robert Klein, “The Figurative Thought of the Renaissance,” Diogenes, XXXII (1960), 114; E. H. Gombrich, “Icones Symbolicae,” Journal of the Warburg and Courtaud Institutes, XI (1948), 168-176.

18. Pontus de Tyard, Discours philosophiques (1587), p. 2^vo; Pierre Motin, Oeuvres inédites (1882), p. 66.

19. Cf. George Puttenham, The Arte of English Poesie (1936), pp. 62, 238-239.

20. Ibid., pp. 158-161.

21. Ed. Laumonier, IX, 7-8.

22. Ibid., XIII, 85; Peletier quoted in Chamard's Du Bellay, p. 33; Deffence et Illustration, pp. 48, 84, 139. Du Bellay's equation of elegance and copiousness is anticipated by Pierre Saliat; see J. Chocheyras, “En marge de la Défense et illustration, Pierre Saliat: une préface critique de 1537,” BHRen, XXVIII (1966), 677.

23. V, x, 51; VIII, pr. 1; V, i, 15 and 108; XII, iv, 1: XII, v, 1. Following a description of a freshly picked bouquet of flowers, Ronsard concludes with the usual moral lesson, “cela vous soit un exemple certain” (ed. Laumonier, VII, 152) and commenting on Ronsard's Amours I, Muret holds that imagery must not contravene the poem's intention and must be meaningful in order to maintain logical relations: Les Oeuvres, p. 14.

24. Cf. Erasmus' De duplici copia verborum ac rerum.

25. Ed. Laumonier, XIV, 13, 15. Cf. the Claude Deroziers translation of Dion Cassius' Des faitz et gestes insignes des romains (1542): “coppie de parolles, a icelle fin qu'elle (la loy) soit plus manifeste à tout homme,” bk. XXXVIII, ch. 7, and Donald Stone, Ronsard's Sonnet Cycles, p. 180.

26. Ed. Laumonier, I, 47; Pontus de Tyard, The Universe, ed. Lapp, p. 122. For a good illustration of the interrelation among copia of words, figures and commonplaces, energia, enargia, illumination, invention and style, see Montaigne, III, 5, p. 851.

27. III, 3, p. 805. “A faute de memoire naturelle,” he goes on to say, “j'en forge de papier,” III, 13, p. 1071. Scaliger, for instance, associates exempla with inductive proof, III, 71.

28. Cf. Robert Garnier's Bradamante (1949), vv. 237-238.

29. Ed. Laumonier, X, 333-334.

30. Cf. ibid., I, 89; VIII, 105-114; X, 335; XIII, 212; and Du Bellay, V, 288.

31. In the Proemio to “Della famiglia,” Opere volgari (1844), II. Cf. Ronsard, ed. Laumonier, XVII, 195; Du Bellay, V, 393; Howard R. Patch, The Goddess Fortuna in Mediaeval Literature (1927), p. 25; and Descartes, Discours de la méthode, p. 64. The modern attitude probably dates from the conversation of Franciscus and Augustinus in the Secretum. See Francesco Petrarca, prose (1955), pp. 32-34, and for rhetoric and the individual as the cause of fortune, see pp. 70-76, Epistolae familiares (ed. Rossi and Bosco [1933-1942], XXII, 13, and Epistolae seniles (Opera omnia [1581]) VIII, 3.

32. Elementorum rhetorices libri duo (n. p., 1572 [1st. ed.: 1519]), pp. 13-14. Cf. Richard Sherry's Treatise on Schemes and Tropes (1550), pp. 70-72. Ramus uses examples very similar to Du Bellay's to describe the effects of fortune and virtue (La Dialectique, pp. 69, 72). Montaigne dismisses the “imagination mesme de la vertu” as “jargon de colliege” (I, 37, p. 225), and further illustrates his condemnation by referring to “les deffinitions, les divisions et particions de la vertu” (II, 17, p. 644). His discussion of virtue and fortune in “De l'art de conferer” is a general denial of a stringent cause-effect syndrome (III, 8, pp 911-913), but elsewhere he speaks of “la cause generale,” “l'effect d'une vertu” (III, 1, pp. 780-781) and “un effaict du sort plus que de la raison” (II, 21, p. 659).

33. Cf. the introduction of Eugénie Droz to Les Antiquitez de Rome et les Regrets (1945), p. xi; of Pierre Grimal to Les Regrets suivis des Antiquitez (1948), p. 32; of Verdun Saulnier to Divers jeux rustiques, pp. xxix and xxxiii; Deffence, p. 79; and Montaigne, I, 26, p. 171.

34. Chamard, Histoire de la Pléiade (1961-1963), I, 183, 188. See also Joseph Vianey, Les Regrets de Joachim du Bellay (1946), p. 19, and Stephen G. Nichols, Jr., “Marot, Villon and the Roman de la Rose,” Studies in Philology, LXIII (1966), 135. The numerous publications of Saint-Gelais' Aeneid translation (1509, 1514, 1529, 1532, 1540) may also have goaded Du Bellay.

35. Lettres de Joachim du Bellay, pp. 29-30.

36. Without pursuing the point any further, Marcel Raymond observed that Du Bellay's Latin translations resemble a “devoir d'école,” L'Influence de Ronsard sur la poésie française (1927), I, 106.

37. “Pindaric Parellelism in Du Bellay,” French Review, XIV (1941), 461-472; “Du Bellay and Hellenic Poetry: A Cursory View,” PMLA, LX (1945), 66-80.

38. See Henri Weber, La Création poétique au XVI^esiècle (1956), p. 415; Alice Hulubei's excellent “Virgile en France au XVI^e siècle,” Revue du seizième siècle, XVIII (1931), p. 57; Vianey, Les Regrets, p. 148; Chamard, Histoire, II, 213-214 and for l'abbé Goujet's judgment, p. 341.

39. Vergil was also, but not primarily, the exemplar of patriotism for Du Bellay. For the debt of the Illustration, ch. xii, to Georgics II, see Alexander Haggerty Krappe, “Une Source virgilienne de la Défense et Illustration de la langue française,” Revue du seizième siècle, XV (1928), 342-343.

40. Ramus, who used numerous excerpts of Du Bellay's translation of Aeneid IV to demonstrate dialectical method, says in the preface to Scholae in liberales artes (1569) that “cette méthode se trouve dans Virgile et dans Cicéron, dans Homère et dans Démosthène.” Quoted in La Dialectique, p. 25.

41. Salmon Macrin's 1550 ode to Du Bellay refers to his “Felix Olivae” (I, 5). Although his antipathy toward the rhétoriqueurs forbade him from approaching the richness of Vergil's internal rhymes, as in “duras immittere curas” (Aen. IV, 488), he often compensated by fashioning the same rhythm: “deslïer les captives pensées” (VI, 291).

42. Cf. VI, 226, with Aen. IV, 131-132, where by preserving Vergil's initial consonants and zeugma Du Bellay recreates the military cadence and single purpose of the hunt; VI, 274, with Aen. IV, 247-248; VI, 302, with Aen. IV, 651; VI, 393, with Aen. VI, 857.

43. And indeed one of Vergil's major critics, Richard Heinze, makes this charge in Dido's plea to Aeneas. Virgils epische Technik (1915), pp. 425-426.

44. The repetition of Du Bellay's “Desja desja” and of his anaphora “Je l'ay receu … Je l'ay logé … J'ay garanty” suggests Dido's frenzied “Iam iam” (v. 371) and “Eiectum litore, egentem / excepi” (vv. 373-374). Cf. VI, 303 with Aen. IV, 660. Elsewhere Du Bellay's fault lies in being actually less repetitive and rhetorical than his model (VI, 94-95).

45. Du Bellay, p. 148. In another context Saulnier implicitly approves of the decasyllable, pointing out that the dactylic hexameter is longer than one alexandrine but shorter than two: “Joachim du Bellay et son Regret latin de la patrie,” Fin du moyen âge et renaissance (1961), p. 272.

46. See Grimal, p. 31; Max Jasinski, Histoire du sonnet en France (1903), pp. 56, 58; Alfred Satterthwaite, Spenser, Ronsard and Du Bellay: A Renaissance Comparison (1960), p. 64; Weber, p. 419; Chamard, Du Bellay, pp. 378, 522.

47. C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française au XVI^esiècle (1843), p. 344; Chamard, Histoire, I, 195-196.

48. See Vianey, “Origines du sonnet régulier,” Revue de la Renaissance, IV (1903), 88-90; Ronsard, ed. Laumonier, IV, xvi; Chamard, Histoire, IV, 97; cf. Saulnier, Du Bellay, p. 72.

49. References to Petrarch are from Rime, Trionfi e poesie latine (1951). The sonnet of Sansovino that Ernesta Caldarini suggests as a possible source affords thematic but not rhyme similarities to Du Bellay's tercet: “Nuove fonti italiane dell'Olive,” BHRen, XXVII (1965), 433. Sonnet 75's octave rhymes present the opposite arrangement, with the complementary blanchissans-rougissans, verdissans-florissans followed by the oppositional decloses-encloses. In sonnet 2 he transforms Sansovino's coloration and theme of Christian spirituality into a progression from physical to pagan spirituality, largely through the rhymes: “Son chef de l'or, ses deux levres des rozes”—“Mist en l'esprit ses semences encloses” (vv. 10, 13).

50. P. 420.

51. Cf. “Ores qu'en l'air le grand Dieu du tonnerre” (sonnet 45) and “Chasse noz jours sans espoir de retour” (sonnet 113).

52. Ed. Laumonier, IV, 60.

53. Saba, La Poesia di Joachim du Bellay (1962), p. 80; Chamard, Joachim du Bellay, p. 186 and Histoire, I, 239-240.

54. European Literature and the Latin Middle Ages (1963), pp. 159-162. In his commentary on “Ny de son chef le tresor crespelu” of Amours I, Muret surmises that Ronsard “n'a point esté asservi par les beautez corporelles de sa dame, ains sculement par le bon esprit, & par l'eloquence qui est en elle”: Oeuvres, p. 25.

55. “The Poetic Treatment of a Platonic-Christian Theme (Du Bellay's Sonnet of the Idea),” Comparative Literature, VI (1954), 193-217. Cf. the similar function of the Ici-Là anaphora of ch. II, p. 61.

56. The imbalance created by the seven-syllable line and the perpetually altered time sequence in the “Complainte du désespéré” is a reflection of the poet's inner turmoil and his unmeasurable, dreamlike feelings that incorporate autobiography and myth.

57. See Poggio Bracciolini, “De varietate fortunae,” in Latin Writings of the Italian Humanists, ed. F. A. Gragg (1927), pp. 112-116. Cf. Etienne Gilson, La Philosophie au moyen âge (1962), p. 341.

58. Hannah Arendt, “The Concept of History: Ancient and Modern” in Between Past and Future (1961), p. 74.

59. Pantagruel, ch. 8 and Institution de la religion chrestienne, I, iv, 1; see also Douglas Bush, “The Isolation of the Renaissance Hero” in Prefaces to Renaissance Literature (1965), pp. 91-106.

60. “Et in Arcadia Ego: On the Conception of Transience in Poussin and Watteau” in Philosophy and History: Essays Presented to Ernst Cassirer (1963), p. 245. For comment on the Italian view of Roman ruins, see Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy (1961), pp. 149-155.

61. Panofsky, “Et in Arcadia Ego …” in Meaning in the Visual Arts (1955), p. 303. This essay is a revised version of the one that appeared in the Cassirer collection originally published in 1936.

62. II, 41-44. For the vague response, see Sidney Lee, The French Renaissance in England (1910), pp. 200, 215, and Walter Pater, “Joachim Du Bellay” in The Renaissance (1902), p. 182.

63. “Du Bellay's Antiquitez XXXI: Structure and Ideology,” BHRen, XIII (1951), 194.

64. “Mythological Imagery in Du Bellay,” Studies in Philology, LXI (1964), p. 127. Because of this I cannot accept Alfred W. Satterthwaite's opinion that “Du Bellay's melancholy is unequivocally black” [“Moral Vision in Spenser, Du Bellay and Ronsard,” Comparative Literature, IX (1957), 141] nor Frank M. Chamber's single-source theory that “the whole conception of the Antiquitez is due to Lucan” [Lucan and the Antiquitez de Rome,” PMLA, LX (1945), 946].

65. La Dialectique, p. 61.

66. Saulnier, Du Bellay, p. 76; Chamard, Histoire, II, 253.

67. “Moral Vision …,” p. 142. Cf. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (1966), p. 319, and Henri Weber's astute observation that Du Bellay's impersonal address to the reader is a means of diverting attention from him to the argument he is expounding: La Creation poétique au XVI^esiècle (1956), pp. 116, 418, 425.

68. See Bernard Weinberg, A History of Literary Criticism in the Italian Renaissance (1961), I, 61.

69. “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage, / Ou comme cestuy là qui conquit la toison” (Regrets, 31). The apparent dissemblance between the stories of Ulysses and Jason, and the ill-fitting allusion to Jason in this sonnet may be justified on the grounds that the Jason myth estabilshes continuity between the two collections, since it is also found in Antiquitez 10, and that it may be an allusion to the Order of the Golden Fleece which was awarded to Catholics of noble lineage for distinguished accomplishment. The allusion, and many similar ones in volume II, could have been inspired by the momentous abdication of Charles V, the first act of which was his resignation as Grand Master of the Order on October 22, 1555, during Du Bellay's stay in Rome. The captured Fleece symbolizes virtue rewarded (II, 184), and the poet refers to Charles as the Master of the Fleece (II, 271).

70. Ronsard, XVI, 347; Peletier, Art pöetique, I, 9.

71. Cf. Scève's Délie 20, “A Romme alla, a Romme desolée,” and Andre Six, “Explication française: Du Bellay, Antiquités de Rome-Sonnet III,” Romance Notes, VIII (1967), 281-284.

72. Zeugma bespeaks an inarticulate dialectic based either on cause and effect or on proper and opposite cause, as in Ronsard's “Regrettant mon amour, & vostre fier desdain,” ed. Laumonier, XVII, 266. Saulnier points out the Latin meaning of monument as “a reminder of a past event” in “Commentaires des Antiquitez de Rome,” BHRen, XII (1950), 139. Traductio is found in Du Bellay's anonymous model, Roman-Roma-Romae, in addition to extensive alliteration: “viden' velut ipsa cadavera,” “Vicit ut haec mundum, visa est se vincere: vicit.”

73. As is also evident from the similar imagery in IV, 220:

    On peult feindre par le cizeau
    Ou par l'ouvraige du pinceau
                        Toute visible chose,
    Mais d'Amour le seul poingnant traict
    Vous peult figurer le protraict
              De ma tristesse enclose.
    On peult diffinir au compas
    De tout ce qu'on void ici bas
                        La forme en rond unie,
    Mais on ne scauroit mesurer
    Le mal que me fait endurer
                        Mon amour infinie.

    The nexus of seeing and understanding is at the heart of Muret's comment on Ronsard's first Cassandre sonnet, “Qui voudra voir”: “Le poëte tasche à rendre les lecteurs attentifs: disant, que qui voudra bien entendre la nature d'Amour, vienne voir les effects qu'Amour produit en luy,” Les Oeuvres, p. 1. For Johannes Scotus Erigena, every attempt at definition outlines the shape of a universal, and the dialectical category of topos implies the area in which ideas are traced.

74. IX, iii, 80 and VIII, iii, 66-70. The figures of words here create the figure of thought called commutatio by rhetoricians; see Quintilian, IX, iii, 85; [Cicero], Rhetorica ad Herennium, IV, xxviii, 39; Horace's Epistles, II, i, 257. Although poetry that is oriented toward rhetoric tends to repeat similar combinations of figures and formulaic phrases, the function and tone of such repetitions often differ considerably, witness the styling of

    C'est ores, mon Vineus, mon cher Vineus, c'est ore,
    Que de tous les chetifs le plus chetif je suis

    (Regrets, 42)

    which closely resembles the configuration of verses 9-10 of the sonnet under discussion, but not at all the mood and intent. Quintilian's additional recommendation in IX, iii, 80, of compar combined with traductio appears in Du Bellay's adaptation of Sannazaro, “Et osent les vaincuz les vainqueurs desdaigner” (sonnet 14), which intimates Rome's steady confidence even in defeat, while Ronsard uses it to imprint France's victory in the heat of battle: “J'oy le bruit des vainqueurs, j'oy le cry des vaincus” (ed. Laumonier, IX, 8). Cf. Laumonier IX, 103: “Meintenant le veinqueur, meintenant le veincu.”

75. Cf. Ronsard's “La matiere demeure, et la forme se perd,” quoted by Laumonier in Ronsard et sa province (1924), p. 213, and “Mourir, quand la forme en une autre s'en va,” ed. Laumonier, VIII, 178.

76. Chamard, II, 27; Vianey, Le Pétrarquisme en France au XVI^e siècle (1909), p. 325.

77. The facile rhymes voir-revoir, in disregard for the precepts of the Illustration, ch. 7, and the unequal syllabic count of verses 12 and 14 are perhaps justified by the ironic distance they create between form and meaning. Cf. Ferdinand Brunot, Histoire de la langue française (1927), II, 267.

78. His use of polyptoton is similar to Aeneid IV, 83, and VI, 247, which he translated around the time he was composing the Antiquitez. Regrets 136 uses a similar structure (vv. 12-13), latinism (“liberté contrainte”) and paraphrases Aeneid VI, 425, as well. Cf. Aeneid V, 447-448; XII, 640; Cicero, Pro Deiotaro, IV, 12.

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