SOURCE: “Demons, Portents, and Visions: Fantastic and Supernatural Elements in Ronsard's Poetry,” in Renaissance Rereadings: Intertext and Context, pp. 225-35. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1988.

[In the following essay, Donaldson-Evans discusses the element of fantasy in Ronsard's poetry.]

For anyone who is familiar with much of the recent criticism devoted to le fantastique, the idea of viewing certain poetic texts of Ronsard as examples of this genre might well seem preposterous, anachronistic—indeed fantastic! First of all, Todorov, in his perceptive Introduction à la littérature fantastique, seems to preclude any such possibility when he states categorically: “We see now why the poetic reading constitutes a danger for the fantastic. If as we read a text we reject all representation, considering each sentence as a pure semantic combination, the fantastic could not appear … the fantastic can subsist only within fiction: poetry cannot be fantastic.”¹

A second problem confronting anyone rash enough to consider Ronsard from the perspective of the fantastic is the chronological dilemma. Many critics follow the lead of Castex in equating the rise of the fantastic with Romanticism. Now, while there is little doubt that the nineteenth century represents the Golden Age of fantastic literature, it is my contention—and fortunately I am not alone—that the fantastic is far from being a Romantic invention but is instead a phenomenon which resists such precise dating, one which occurs at least as early as the Renaissance.

However, for the moment, I want to return to the first problem and address Todorov's claim that poetry and the fantastic are incompatible. Obviously the first step in attempting to reconcile Todorov's view and my own is to arrive at a satisfactory working definition as to what constitutes the fantastic.

The etymological source of the word fantastique is a useful, indeed a necessary, place to begin: fantaisie, fantastique, fantasque, fantasme in all their meanings derive from the Greek verb phantazein (to make visible) and phantazesthai (to have visions) which produced the noun phantasia meaning “appearance” and later “phantom,” as well as “faculty of imagination.” So when Ronsard describes himself as being “fantastique d'esprit” as he does in “L'Hymne de l'autonne,” although the primary meaning of the adjective is something like “inventive” or perhaps even “visionary,” it is neither illegitimate nor anachronistic to suggest important etymological and conceptual links between Ronsard's description of himself and the modern literary sense of fantastique. Of course, in sixteenth-century French, as Huguet's dictionary attests, the adjective fantastique also has a negative connotation, since it can mean “fou, insensé, extravagant” (mad or crazy). However, as madness was often considered to be related to the supernatural as well as to the process of literary creation, these meanings complement, without excluding, the etymological content of the word, a content which would be well known to a French Renaissance poet who had studied Greek at the Collège de Coqueret, as had Ronsard.

Perhaps one of the most practical definitions of the fantastic, however, is that given by Pierre-Georges Castex: “The fantastic is characterised by … the brutal intrusion of the mysterious into the context of everyday life.”² Such a definition has the advantage of receiving the approval of Todorov himself and has been glossed by other critics such as Jacques Finné, who proposes the following version: “We can consider as fantastic any human being or in fact any entity encountered on the fringe of everyday human experience and whose sudden appearance violates the accepted rules of human existence.”³ It is this definition which I shall adopt as being the most fundamental account of the fantastic, a definition which aptly describes the many intrusions of the mysterious in Ronsard's verse as well as the many apparitions of beings which come from the periphery of everyday human experience.

Before proceeding, we need to return for a moment to Todorov for whom the fantastique is a peculiarly volatile, even fragile genre, being situated between l`étrange and le merveilleux. Indeed, for him, the fantastique lasts only as long as a certain hesitation either on the part of the reader or of one of the characters in a story as to whether apparently inexplicable events can be explained according to the laws of nature, or whether in fact they are the result of supernatural intervention. Once this hesitation passes, the fantastique will be incorporated either into the category of l'étrange (the supernatural explained) or le merveilleux (the supernatural accepted).⁴ If we were to apply this criterion with total rigor, all the fantastic elements in Ronsard's verse would probably be assimilable to the le merveilleux and yet, as we shall see, there is often a feeling of the uncanny, which creates an atmosphere similar to that found in literature characterized “officially” as fantastique. In fact, Todorov's account of the fantastic is much less rigid than it first appears, and later in his text, when analyzing a story from the Thousand and One Nights, he recognizes the presence of supernatural beings as one of the pervasive features of the fantastique: “The other group of fantastic elements is based on the very existence of supernatural beings, such as the genie and the princess-sorceress, and on their power over human destiny. Both are capable of transforming themselves and others, and both can fly or transport beings and objects in space, etc. This is one of the constants of the literature of the fantastic: the existence of supernatural beings more powerful than men.”⁵ In his hymn “Les Daimons,” Ronsard represents such supernatural beings and stresses their capacity for metamorphosis:

Just as the Demons, whose body is so nimble,
Pliable, supple, active, and transformable,
Quickly change their shape, so that their agile body
Is metamorphosed into whatever form it pleases:

(ll. 91-94)

One ofttimes sees them changed into strange beasts,
Their bodies cut into pieces: one of them has but a head,
Another only eyes, another has but arms,
While only the shaggy feet of yet another remain visible.

(ll. 99-102)⁶

If Todorov can include stories from the Thousand and One Nights in his discussion, it does not seem unreasonable to examine this particular Ronsard text, and in fact many others, from the perspective of the fantastic.

However, what of his objection that the fantastique and poetry are mutually exclusive? Once again we find ourselves confronted by a rigid definition which is less rigid than it appears. In the first place, Todorov himself admits that the differentiation he has already established between poetry and fiction (that fiction is representative while poetic images are nondescriptive) is a matter of degree rather than of binary opposition.⁷ And if we move away from a structuralist/formalist approach, we can allow a certain referentiality, a certain fictionality to be inherent to some and perhaps all poetic genres. While “pure” lyric poetry might best be considered as a hermetic, self-referential verbal construct, other poetic genres, particularly in a period like the Renaissance, are replete with representational, fictional elements which cannot be reduced to a simple “verbal chain” or “semantic combination.” Most of the Ronsard texts we are dealing with fall into such a referential category, which means that these examples of his poetry can in fact be considered to be perfectly legitimate vehicles for the fantastique (as, incidentally, Vax and Vircondelet among others, have already suggested).⁸

Most of the fantastic/supernatural elements in Ronsard's poetry are concentrated in the figure of the demon, that curiously ambiguous creature who makes his appearance in Ronsard's poetry quite early as a positive presence often associated directly with poetic inspiration. In the “Ode à Joachim du Bellay” from the first book of the Odes, Ronsard describes the ministrations of the demons to poets:

A Demon accompanies them,
The most learned Demon of all,
And he instructs them every night, as they dream
So that they learn from him without effort.
Although demigod, he is willing
Mere mortals to inform,
So that man, while yet asleep,
Can learn all knowledge.

(ll. 25-33)⁹

In texts such as this one, Ronsard's portrayal of the demons is positive: they are seen as benevolent manifestations of the supernatural world order which forms part of the poet's cosmos. They do not in any way constitute an incursion into the fantastic.

However, this is far from always being the case and when demons come to personify not only the good, but also the malevolent forces in the universe, it is then that they trigger the frisson and the hesitation which are signs of the fantastic. One of the texts where this is most clearly seen is the enigmatic “Le Chat” from Le Premier Livre des Poemes. This fascinating poem, which begins with a strongly affirmative declaration of religious faith (“God is omnipresent, and is everywhere active, / Beginning, end and middle / Of every living thing, and His soul is contained / In everything and gives life to all creatures, / Just as our soul gives life to our bodies” [ll. 1-5]),¹⁰ quickly reveals a fundamental tension between faith and superstition, between the Christian and the pagan supernatural, a tension which is only superficially resolved in the final lines by the assertion of man's God-given preeminence over the animal kingdom. However, this closing affirmation stands in sharp contrast to the general movement of the poem. The initial paean of praise to an omnipresent divinity leads to a discussion of divination by means of animals, birds, and plants, and includes a number of examples which the poet claims come from his own personal experience.

Firstly, there is the story of the “Thessalienne,” the daphne, a variety of laurel, upon which the poet had been lavishing his most careful attention (“I watered it, kept it free from weeds, dug up the soil around it / Morning and evening; my intention was / To use its branches to make a fine wreath for my head …” [ll. 77-79]). Mysteriously, one brief hour after having given the plant its morning watering, the poet found the formerly thriving plant dying. The only possible explanation was a supernatural one (“One hour later I found it uprooted / By a Demon; no mortal hand / Could have been responsible: it all happened too suddenly” [ll. 84-86]). This was not only an act of malevolence on the part of the Demon in question (and all this in a universe in which God is everywhere, infused in all beings), but a prophecy, since, subsequently, Ronsard fell ill and languished like the daphne, although, unlike the plant, he did not die. The “murder” (Ronsard calls it thus) of the daphne was coupled with another bad omen, as, two months later, one of his servants, mortally wounded by a horse's kick, called to him and fixed his eyes on him at the moment of his death. Both of these omens proved to be accurate and for eleven long months, Ronsard's broken body was wracked by persistent fever. While the attribution of Ronsard's illness to the intervention of a demon might seem to be simply a continuation of a long-standing tradition which goes back to biblical times, the omens themselves, particularly the mysterious death of the plant, represent precisely that transgression of natural laws, that brutal intrusion of the mysterious into everyday life, which constitute the very stuff of the fantastic.

The poet's dread reaches a paroxysm when, after more than a hundred lines, he finally turns his attention to the animal after which the poem is named. The “triste Chat” is the creature which has the most “esprit prophetique” (and which therefore should logically be one of the animals which is closest to God). However, the cat fills the poet with utter dread:

There was never a man living
Who hates cats more than I do;
I hate their staring eyes, their faces,
And when I see them, I flee from their presence,
Trembling all over from head to foot. …

(ll. 114-18)

Throughout this section of the poem a subtle link between demon, cat, and poet is established, a link which perhaps helps to explain the astonishing apprehension Ronsard feels for this particular animal. It is significant that the plant attacked and destroyed by the demon is a daphne, long associated with poetic creation, a plant which Ronsard specifically identifies with his own textual activity by stating that he intended to make a crown of laurel for himself from its leaves. As for the cat, Ronsard establishes a double correlation between it and poetic creation. Firstly, the adjective he uses to describe the dreaded animal is triste, an epithet which suggests melancholy, the temperament favourable to poetic production. Secondly the cat, like the demon, is endowed with prophetic powers, a gift also shared by the poet in Ronsard's literary universe. In this poem the demon (and the cat) represent the reverse face of the demon of poetic inspiration, and the dread Ronsard feels in the face of their intrusion into his everyday world is in fact a metonymy for the ultimate dread of any poet of any age: the fear of the Muses' flight, the phobia of poetic sterility. If all writing is about writing and all poetry about the poetic act, then the inscrutable and unpredictable intrusion of the fantastic into everyday life is the perfect figure for that most unpredictable of events: the outpouring of inspiration, variously seen by poets across the ages as the gift of the gods or as arising from some dark, demonic source.

Of course the poetic text where demons and demonology are most prevalent is the hymn “Les Daimons.” This is a poem which has always particularly intrigued me and which has been the object of a great deal of commentary, thanks in part to Albert-Marie Schmidt's excellent critical edition. Nowhere is both the omnipresence and the ambiguity of the demon more abundantly clear. The demons are the inhabitants of the air and are thus intermediaries between the residents of the heavens (the angels and ultimately God) and those of the earth, mankind. Part air, part fire, their domain of predilection is the turbulent troposphere, “tousjours remply de vents, de foudres et d'orages.” The demons are like their fellow inhabitants of this domain, the clouds, and, as we have already seen they have the same power of metamorphosis, the same ability to create monsters, except that the demons can bring these monsters to earth to frighten mortal men. Just as the air transmits to our eyes the images of objects in the material world, so the demons, creatures of air, transmit to the eyes of our mind, to our imagination, visions:

Just as the Demons reveal their masquerades
To our imagination which is capable of perceiving such things,
Then our imagination transmits them to our minds,
In the same fashion and way
As it imagines them sleeping, or waking,
Then our hearts are assailed by a sudden fear,
Our hair stands up straight upon our heads,
And from our brows, drop by drop,
Sweat drips down to our feet.
If we are abed, we dare not lift our arms,
Nor even turn our body under the sheets;
At such times we think we see our fathers
Dead in their winding sheet, and we hear our poor, dead mothers,
Speaking to us in the night, and we see in visions
Our friends perishing in shipwrecks.

(ll. 125-38)¹¹

And the list of terreurs nocturnes goes on as these supernatural creatures are presented as the source of such phenomena. As we can see from these verses, demons are held responsible for nightmares and portents. They are also associated with what many consider to be the fantastic subject par excellence: the ghost.

There are, however, good demons and it is through these creatures of the air that man receives the gift of prophecy:

The good Demons come down to earth from the heavens
To reveal the will of the Gods to us,
And then transmit to God our prayers and actions.
They free our fettered souls from our bodies
To take them up there, so that they can imagine
What we need to know for our instruction.
They show us in the night, through marvelous dreams,
The true presages of the good and ill that is to befall us.

(ll. 209-16)¹²

These good demons inspire no horror, just as the supernatural elements in fairy stories do not per se provoke fear, so perhaps we should modify Todorov's treatment of the relationship between the fantastic and the supernatural to state that benign supernatural beings and events do not produce the uncanny sensation associated with the fantastic, while malevolent, capricious spirits do. In any case, Ronsard appears to be far more fascinated by the malevolent variety than by the good, and in subsequent verses of the poem he details the activities of the bad demons, which range from the transmission of “pestes, fiévres, langueurs” to the production of apocalyptic signs in the heavens:

They make noises in the air to frighten us,
They make our human eyes see two suns in the sky,
They turn the moon black
And cause a bloody rain to fall from the sky.

(ll. 225-28)

Ronsard then goes on to discuss “Incubes, Larves, Lares, Lemurs, Penates, et Succubes,” all favorite subjects of later fantastic literature, and does not even neglect the somewhat playful, if frightening, activity of the poltergeists:

They move seats, tables and tressles in the night,
Keys, doors, sideboards, beds, chairs and stools,
They count our treasure or hurl to the ground
Now a sword, now a glass. …

(ll. 245-48)

However, the most striking example of le fantastique in this poem is the recital of an encounter with supernatural and diabolical beings which is found in lines 347-70. The poem's persona recounts how, one night, at the witching hour (“Un soir, vers la minuict …”) he was on his way to visit his mistress when he found himself pursued by supernatural hellhounds (“I heard, or so it seemed to me, a barking pack / Of dogs following in my footsteps …” [ll. 351-52]). Leading the hunt is a disquieting skeletonlike figure mounted on a black horse, who stretches out his bony hand to Ronsard:

I saw close to me on a large black horse
A man who was nothing but bones,
Holding out his hand to invite me to mount upon the horse behind him. …

(ll. 353-55)

The protagonist is seized with dread at the sight of these terrible apparitions and although he is wearing armor and is carrying a dagger, sword, and shield, he is nonetheless paralyzed with fear. It is only thanks to the remembrance that demons fear the naked blade of a sword, a remembrance which he sees as divinely inspired, that the poem's protagonist draws his weapon, with the result that the horrible specters flee. Ronsard's persona, when confronted by these demonic manifestations of the supernatural, gives voice to a feeling of dread which even his religious faith seems unable to overcome completely. The poem finishes with a prayer addressed to God which asks for protection from the evil variety of demonic forces and then, in an ironic twist which acts as a kind of poetic exorcism to dispel the fears which the poem has so eloquently expressed, Ronsard calls for the visitation of the demons upon the heads of those who are unappreciative of his poetry:

O Lord God, in whom I put my trust,
For the honor of your name, please grant,
Oh please, that never again will I find
Such apparitions in my path, but rather, Oh Lord,
Send them far from Christendom, send the Turks
These Goblins, Demons, Ghosts and Spirits,
Or else call them down upon the heads of those
Who dare say ill of the poems I sing on my new lyre.

(ll. 421-28)

The perfect revenge of the poet!

However, although demons (good and bad) are treated in many other texts of Ronsard in similar fashion to their portrayal in “Le Chat” and “Les Daimons,” they are not always associated with the uncanny and the fantastic. Even ghosts do not always give rise to a feeling of the numinous in Ronsard's verse. A case in point is the curious “Prosopopée de Louys de Ronsard,” a short work from the Second Livre des Poemes which recounts the appearing in a dream or a vision (it is not quite clear which) of Louis de Ronsard, the poet's deceased father. The poem purports to be a rebuttal of those philosophies which deny any immortality to the soul and is highly stylized with Vergilian overtones of Anchises appearing to Aeneas. It is just before dawn (the most propitious time for reliable dreams or visions) that the poet has this particular encounter with the supernatural:

I saw hovering over my bed an apparition,
Thin, without bones, which possessed the eyes, the face,
The body, the shape, and the voice
Of my dear father when he was of this world.

(ll. 9-12)¹³

The apparition becomes more frightening when it touches him three times, then leaves the bed three times, finally returning to take the poet's left hand and admonish him. What follows this evocation of the specter of his father is however quite unexceptional and we leave the threshold of the fantastic to fall into the sermon, since Louis's advice to his son is a standard paternal homily. At the end of his speech, Louis de Ronsard vanishes, leaving his son literally grasping at thin air:

but the shadowy Form,
Escaping from my clutch, flew away like the wind

and as night yields to day, the poet awakens, marveling (“tout esmerveillé”). Here the merveilleux is relatively benign, even if the image of the father is described as terrifying (“affreuse”) in line 15, and the realm of the fantastic is approached from afar without being entered. What the supernatural frame of the poem does do, however, is to add interest to the rather banal advice the ghost gives to his son, advice he could have found in the Bible or in any number of pious treaties. Here the supernatural is an effective device to capture the reader's attention and to give weight to the father's words, although it does perhaps also bear witness to Ronsard's abiding fascination with the fantastic in its most primal sense.

Are we then justified in considering Ronsard to be a poète fantastique? Perhaps not in the same way or to the same degree as some of the poets of the nineteenth century. I believe, however, we can legitimately describe certain elements in his work as fantastic and we can discover an uncanny, fantastic atmosphere in a small but significant number of his poems. If his brand of the fantastique belongs above all to Todorov's category of the fantastique-merveilleux, we are nonetheless in the presence of an embryonic auteur fantastique whose superstition is never fully conquered by his religious faith and who is able to portray effectively the feeling of the uncanny which results from the brutal intrusion of supernatural forces into everyday reality. The visceral fear of malevolent demons which Ronsard portrays so graphically in his poetry may well be the verbalization of that archetypal poetic fear: poetic impotence and sterility. Harold Bloom would perhaps see in this fear of the demon a metaphor for the anxiety of influence, since, as he says: “our daemon … came to us not from the fire but from our precursors.”¹⁴ However, no matter what psychological or literary explanations we might propose, the fact remains that Ronsard is a poet who is quite capable of provoking in his reader what Louis Vax has called “le frisson du fantastique.”¹⁵

Notes

1. Tzvetan Todorov, The Fantastic: A Structural Approach to a Literary Genre, trans. Richard Howard (Cleveland: Case Western Reserve University Press, 1973), p. 60.

2. Pierre-Georges Castex, Le conte fantastique en France de Nodier à Maupassant (Paris: José Corti, 1951), p. 8 (“Le fantastique se caractérise … par une intrusion brutale du mystère dans le cadre de la vie réelle”). Unless otherwise indicated, all translations from the French are my own.

3. Jacques Finné, La littérature fantastique (Bruxelles: Editions de l'Université de Bruxelles, 1980), p. 13 (“Peut être considéré comme fantastique tout être humain ou toute entité dont la rencontre se situe en marge de l'expérience humaine courante; dont l'apparition viole les règles préétablies …”).

4. Todorov, Fantastic, pp. 41ff.

5. Todorov, Fantastic, p. 109.

6. Pierre de Ronsard, Oeuvres complètes, ed. Paul Laumonier (Paris: Société des Textes Français Modernes, 1935), VIII (“Tout ainsi les Daimons qui ont le corps habile, / Aisé, soupple, dispost, à se muer facile, / Changent bien tost de forme, et leur corps agile est / Transformé tout soudain en tout ce que leur plaist:” [ll. 91-94]; “Bien souvent on les voit, se transformer en beste, / Tronqués par la moytié: l'une n'a que la teste, / L'autre n'a que les yeux, l'autre n'a que les bras, / Et l'autre que les piedz tous veluz par-à-bas” [ll. 99-102]).

7. Todorov, Fantastic, p. 59 (“Poetry too includes certain representative elements, and fiction properties which render the text, opaque, intransitive”).

8. See Louis Vax, La séduction de l'étrange (Paris: Presses Universitaire de France, 1965) and Alain Vircondelet, La poésie fantastique française (Paris: Seghers, 1973).

9. Laumonier, I (“Un Démon les accompaigne / Par-sur tous le mieux instruit, / Qui en songes toute nuit / Sans nul travail les enseigne, / Et demy-dieu ne desdeigne / De les aller informant, / Afin que l'homme en dormant / Toutes sciences appreigne” [ll. 25-33]).

10. Laumonier, XV, “Le Chat,” ll. 1-5: (“Dieu est par tout, par tout se mesle Dieu, / Commencement, la fin et le millieu / De ce qui vit, et dont l'Ame est enclose / Par tout, et tient en vigueur toute chose, / Comme nostre ame infuse dans noz corps”). The French texts for the other sections of this poem are as follows: ll. 77-79 “Je l'arrosois, la cerclois et bechois / Matin et soir; la voyant je pensois / M'en faire au chef une belle couronne …”; ll. 84-86: “Une heure apres je la vis arrachée / Par un Démon; une mortelle main / Ne fist le coup: le fait fut trop soudain”; and ll. 114-18: “Homme ne vit qui tant haïsse au monde / Les Chats que moy d'une haine profonde; / Je hay leurs yeux, leur front et leur regard, / Et les voyant je m'enfuy d'autrepart, / Tremblant de nerfs, de veines et de membre' …”.

11. “Les Daimons,” ll. 125-38: “Tout ainsi les Daimons font leurs masqueures voir / A nostre fantaisie apte à les recevoir, / Puis nostre fantaisie à l'esprit les r'apporte / De la mesme façon et de la mesme sorte / Qu'elle les imagine ou dormant, ou veillant, / Et lors une grand'peur va noz coeurs assaillant, / Le poil nous dresse au chef, et du front, goutte-à-goutte, / Jusques à noz talons la sueur nous degoutte. / Si nous sommes au lict, n'osons lever les bras, / Ny tant soit peu tourner le corps entre les draps; / Adoncq' nous est advis que nous voyons noz peres / Morts dedans un linçueil, et noz defunctes meres / Parler à nous la nuict, et que voyons dans l'eau / Quelcun de noz amis perir dans un bateau.” See also Albert-Marie Schmidt, Les Daimons (Paris: Albin Michel, 1939), for an excellent commentary on this poem.

12. “Les Daimons,” ll. 209-16 (“Les bons viennent de l'air jusques en ces bas lieux / Pour nous faire sçavoir la volonté des Dieux, / Puis r'emportent à Dieu nos faictz et noz prieres, / Et detachent du corps noz ames prisonnieres / Pour les mener là-haut, à fin d'imaginer / Ce qui se doit sçavoir pour nous endoctriner. / Ils nous montrent de nuict par songes admirables / De noz biens et noz maux les signes veritables …”).

    The text of the other quotations from this hymn are as follows: ll. 225-28 (“Ilz font des sons en l'air pour nous espovanter, / Ilz font aux yeux humains deux Soleilz presenter, / Ilz font noircir la Lune horriblement hydeuse, / Et font pleurer le Ciel d'une pluye saigneuse”); ll. 245-48 (“Ilz remuent de nuict bancz, tables, et treteaux, / Clefz, huys, portes, buffetz, lictz, chaires, escabeaux, / Ou comptent noz tresors, ou gectent contre terre / Maintenant une espée, et maintenant un verre”); ll. 351-52 (“J'oüy, ce me sembloit, une aboyante chasse / De chiens qui me suyvoit pas-à-pas à la trace”); Il. 353-55 (“Je vy aupres de moy sur un grand cheval noir / Un homme qui n'avoit que les ôs, à le voir, / Me tendant une main pour me monter en crope”); and ll. 421-28 (“O Seigneur eternel, en qui seul gist ma foy, / Pour l'honneur de ton nom, de grace, donne moy, / Donne moy que jamais je ne trouve en ma voye / Ces paniques terreurs, mais, ô Seigneur, envoye / Loin de la Chrestienté, dans le païs des Turcz / Ces Larves, ces Daimons, ces Lares et Lemurs, / Ou sur le chef de ceux qui oseront mesdire / Des chansons que j'accorde à ma nouvelle lyre”).

13. “Prosopopée,” ll. 9-12: “j'apperceu sur mon lict une image / Gresle, sans oz, qui l'oeil et le visage, / Le corps, la taille, et la parole avoit / Du pere mien quand au monde il vivoit”; and ll. 61-62: “mais la nueuse Idole, / Fraudant mes doigts, ainsi que vent s'envole.”

14. Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), p. 139.

15. Vax, Séduction, p. 60.