[In essay that follows, Lein examines two epigrams Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux, an Ancient, directed against the Moderns, noting the “potency of the invective” Boileau employed.]

One of the most distinctive cleavages distinguishing contemporary poetic taste from that of earlier periods lies in our modern lack of appreciation for epigrams, and this dislocation in taste unfortunately conditions the direction of criticism and scholarship. The epigrams of Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux supply a good case in point. They have stirred little critical interest and seem to be condemned universally as possessing little poetic or intellectual significance. Nothing could be farther from the truth, as a close examination of two epigrams related to the controversy of Ancients and Moderns can demonstrate.

Although the intellectual and literary roots of the quarrel of the Ancients and the Moderns clearly lie more than a century earlier, formal hostilities opened in the Académie française on 27 January 1687, a day set apart by the Academy “pour marquer publiquement sa joie de la parfaite guérison du roi.”¹ As part of the celebration, Charles Perrault read his latest panegyric, Le Siècle de Louis le Grand. Boileau's immediate reaction was vitriolic:

Despréaux, dit le Furetiriana, ne put entendre cette lecture sans éclater et faire des protestations publique de leur fausseté. Il promit hautement d'écrire contre, sitôt que son emploi lui en laisseroit le temps.²

Boileau's fury at Perrault's seemingly scandalous assessments of the ancients and at his blind, ebullient praise of such poetasters as Sarasin, Rotrou, Gombauld, Mainard, and Godeau could barely be controlled by the tactful admonitions of Abbé Huet. At the conclusion of the reading, Boileau stalked off, his mind teeming with designs for poetical revenge.

At this point the quarrel actively progressed to the stage of literary ambush and assassination, with murderous epigrams as the principal weapons.³ Boileau's behavior at the meeting made him especially vulnerable; one epigram survives in manuscript which indeed attacks him on that ground:

          Dans le corps de l'Academie
          Où l'on ne dit point d'infamie,
          Chacun pense comme il lui plaît;
Elle est sans passion, et sans prendre interet
          Dans les ouvrages qu'on lui montre,
Ecoute avec plaisir et le pour et le contre;
Elle laisse un auteur travailler tout son saoûl
          Et le sujet qu'il a pris pour sa tâche
Et sans s'inquiéter regarde comme un fou
          Tout homme qui s'en fâche.(4)

Boileau also turned instinctively to epigrams, quite a few of them, which clearly record his disgust over the abhorrent incident. Two of them, however, “Sur ce qu'on avoit leu a l'Academie des vers contre Homere et contre Virgile” and the later “Sur l'Academie,” have lost much of their meaning primarily because of our ignorance of the geographical literature of the time. When we supply the correct context for them, they pulse with a new intensity and illuminate quite accurately Boileau's blazing passion over the incident and his mischievous (not to say malign) response to Perrault's newly publicized position.

Before one can appreciate the potency and savagery of Boileau's invective, however, he must know the precise character of several doctrines of Perrault and the Moderns. The foundation for their perceptions was a mentality of progress; the rehearsal or exposition of scientific advancement since antiquity became the first maneuver of every Modern treatise. But more important for the context of the epigrams is their curious insistence upon progress in rationality, in the assimilation of such human experience as sentiment, religion, and moral awareness—since men, they argued, benefited from and applied the knowledge of thousands of years of accumulated human thought and action.⁵ Each Modern described and applied these advances somewhat differently, but all fundamentally agreed upon them.

Frequently the Moderns projected their sense of such universal progress through powerful metaphors. Of these metaphors, the most significant was undoubtedly the Augustinian analogy between historical growth and human growth which appears with the insistence of a leitmotif throughout the writings of the Moderns. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin advanced it in the earliest stages of the immediate controversy in his preface to Marie-Madeleine (1669).⁶ He repeated it the very next year in his Traité pour juger des poètes grecs, latins et français, bolstered with additional analogies to the seasons and to the contrast between civilization and primitivism:

Bien que l'antiquité soit vénérable pour avoir défriché les esprits aussi bien que la terre, elle n'est pas si heureuse, ni si riche, ni si savante, ni si pompeuse que les derniers temps qui sont véritablement la vieillesse consommée, la maturité et comme l'automne du monde, ayant les fruits, les richesses et les dépouilles de tous les siècles passés, et le pouvoir de juger et de profiter de toutes les inventions, de toutes les expériences et de toutes les fautes des autres, au lieu que l'antiquité n'est que la jeunesse et la rusticité du temps, et comme le printemps des siècles, qui n'a que quelque fleurs. … Et qui voudrait comparer le printemps du monde avec notre automne? C'est comme qui voudrait comparer les premières maisons des hommes avec les somptueux palais de nos rois.⁷

Fontenelle advanced the same analogy in his Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688), with greater stress on powers of reason:

Ainsi cet homme [humanity] qui a vécu depuis le commencement du monde jusqu'à présent, a eu son enfance où il ne s'est occupé que des besoins les plus pressants de la vie, sa jeunesse où il a assez bien réussi aux choses d'imagination, telles que la poésie et l'éloquence, et où même il a commencé à raisonner, mais avec moins de solidité que de feu. Il est maintenant dans l'âge de virilité, où il raisonne avec plus de force et a plus de lumières que jamais.⁸

Fontenelle was exceptionally careful, however, to note the limitations of the analogy: man did not degenerate: “il sera toujours également capable des choses auxquelles sa jeunesse était propre, et il le sera toujours de plus en plus de celles qui conviennent à l'âge de virilité.”⁹ Perrault developed this concept of the child and the adult profusely in his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1688), even mischievously suggesting that the age of Louis within itself conformed to the pattern of a man's life, and that the current disparagement of the present was a sign of senility.¹⁰

These comparisons have resonances even wider than the foregoing examples suggest. The comparison of the ancients to children was not merely a literary affectation; it formed a progressively larger part of the Enlightenment perspective upon pagan antiquity, a view stimulated and sustained by anthropological comparisons with contemporary “barbarian” cultures. The religions of the ancients, particularly their myths and rites, had intriguing parallels with primitive groups which were being seriously scrutinized for the first time. Frank Manuel in his recent brilliant researches has amply demonstrated the genesis and development of the theory of “infantile primitive mentality.”¹¹ By 1680, seven years before the famous event in the Louvre, Fontenelle, for example, had privately decided upon the justice of the comparison of the early Greeks with American aborigines; he reasoned that the myths of the gods in both cases originated from anthropomorphic attempts to explain nature and carried unmistakable traces of a primitive, ignorant, childish, and barbaric state of existence.¹² The progress of man, Fontenelle conjectured, was visible primarily in a slow but inexorable development of reason, a point he emphasized repeatedly in his Digression in 1688: “raisonnement … se perfectionne avec une extrême lenteur, et se perfectionne toujours.¹³ The ancients, he believed, excelled in imaginative matters but stumbled in the realm of reason. The age of Louis le Grand, however, excelled in the latter; it was one of its greatest accomplishments: “Et en effet, ce qu'il y a de principal dans la philosophie, et ce qui de là se répand sur tout, je veux dire la manière de raisonner, s'est extrêmement perfectionné dans ce siècle.”¹⁴

The two other major dimensions of the comparisons—Christianity and an elevated, more delicate moral sense—easily ally with these other features and extend their significance. The exalted spirituality of Christianity in comparison with the religion of contemporary primitive groups and of the ancient civilizations easily afforded ammunition for the prophets of progress. The actions of the pagan gods fell under increasingly more severe attacks. Bayle, for example, waged a long war against the repugnant activities of the Greek gods, portraying them as a disgustingly repetitive cycle of rapes, incest, murder and cannibalism. Pagan poets necessarily suffered in the eyes of many Moderns through their subscription to the details of these actions. For the Moderns the Christian God also made a qualitative difference in poetic powers of representation. Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin in his early pamphlet La Vérité des fables (1648) insisted that the ancients did not attain the loftiest realms of poetry because of their inability to conceive of perfect gods and heroes. In his preface to the third edition of his poem Clovis (1673), he restated the same theme: “qu'ayant eu une entière liberté de faire leurs Dieux tels qu'ils voulaient … ils les ont faits vicieux … n'ayant pu leur donner un caractère noble, haut, divin … Ainsi faute d'idée de perfection pour leur Dieu et pour leurs Heros, et faute du vraisemblable que sa seule véritable Religion peut donner, ils n'ont pu approacher de la perfection de la haute Poésie.”¹⁵ To supply this lack in ancient poetry, as early as 1633, Godeau, in a Discours de la poésie chrétienne, had pleaded for a new Christian poetry and drama based on the lives of the martyrs and on other Biblical subjects. The subsequent decades witnessed an outpouring of such efforts: Corneille, Polyeucte (1643); Le Moyne, Saint-Louis (1653); Saint-Amant, Moyse sauvé (1653); Godeau, Saint-Paul (1654); Desmarets de Saint-Sorlin, Clovis (1657); Chapelain, La Pucelle (1655); Louis Le Laboureurs, Charlesmagne (1664); Carel de Sainte-Garde, Childebrand (1666); Jacques de Coras, Jonas (1663) and David (1665); Saint-Sorlin, Marie-Madeleine (1669) and Esther (1670). Charles Perrault added to this list himself in 1686 with his Saint Paulin, a poem which served as a favorite butt for the sharp satire of both Racine and Boileau.

Here then are the essential elements of the Modern's vision: man at a point of superbly virile, rational development, of great spiritual and moral enlightenment through the contributions of Christianity, and—a part of the vision only hinted at before—through the actions of Louis XIV and his support of the arts, participating in the most refined, elegant, and eloquent stages of civilization. Boileau heard in Perrault's Le Siècle de Louis le Grand an enthusiastic amplification of all of these elements. He heard Perrault insisting upon the achievement of French civilization by a comparison with the height of Roman civilization: “Et l'on peut comparer sans craindre d'estre injuste, / Le Siecle de LOUIS au beau Siecle d'Auguste.”¹⁶ That spectacularly tangible symbol of French civilization, Versailles, a monument which captivated Perrault's imagination throughout his life and appropriately became the scene for the later Parallèle, was also introduced as proof of the advanced state of French culture. Describing the streams flowing through the gardens of the palace, Perrault exclaimed: “Que leur peut opposer toute l'Antiquité, / Pour égaler leur pompe & leur varieté?” (p. 168). Perrault's criticisms of Homer perfectly projected that perspective of elevated moral refinement which the Moderns claimed man had recently attained and which necessarily altered his literary sensibility. Assessing Homer, Perrault remarked that if Homer had only been born in Perrault's time, “[Sa] verve auroit formé ces vaillans demy-Dieux, / Moins brutaux, moins cruels & moins capricieux” (p. 165). The barbaric character of Homer's heroes he thus silently accorded to a primitive stage of human development, as did Fontenelle. But Perrault also specifically insisted upon the higher social morality of his time: owing to Louis's exceptional leadership: “La pureté des loix par tout est restablie / Des funestes duels la rage est abolie” (p. 170). And, fortunately, France possessed her own Homer to create literary embodiments of this new sensibility—Corneille—whom Perrault deliberately employed within his poem as a counterweight to the classical poet. Instead of the brutal, cruel, capricious heroes of Homer, Corneille's genius had been able to comprehend, grasp, and project a new type of hero: “Qui sçût si bien mêler aux grands evenemens, / L'héroïque beauté des nobles sentiments?” (p. 166).

This is the context that one must know in order to understand Boileau's brutal and bitter observations. He revealed his assessment of the event instinctively in his outburst to the Academy, where, in the fever of his passion, he suggested that the Academy forge a new medal for itself: “Il voudrait qu'on donnât pour emblème à l'Académie une troupe de singes se mirant dans une fontaine avec cette devise: Sibi pulchri, charmants pour eux seuls.”¹⁷ This savage, bestial comparison he refined a bit but did not alter in the comparisons in his epigrams.

The first epigram, “Sur ce qu'on avoit leu à l'Academie des vers contre Homere et contre Virgile,” which Boudhors tentatively dates within two months of the public reading of Perrault's poem, reports that:

Clio vint l'autre jour se plaindre au Dieu des vers,
          Qu'en certain lieu de l'Univers,
On traitoit d'Auteurs froids, de Poëtes steriles,
          Les Homeres et les Virgiles.
Cela ne sçauroit estre; on s'est moqué de vous,
          Reprit Apollon en couroux:
Où peut-on avoir dit une telle infamie?
Est-ce chés les Huron, chés les Topinamboux?
—C'est à Paris.—C'est donc dans l'Hospital
des Fous.
          Non, c'est au Louvre en pleine Academie.(18)

The general tenor of the lines is certainly clear enough, and the strategy of the brief poem is quite clever in terms of the pretensions of the Moderns, for Boileau contradicts each of the major assumptions. Such inane judgments upon the ancients as Perrault makes are those of idiots (not wise, exceptionally rational men), of savages (not highly cultured men), of pagans (not Christians).

But the fury of the poem and its later companion explodes with the identification of the one strange group—the Topinamboux. No commentator has ventured to identify them accurately or to gloss the line fully. In his edition of the 1701 impression of Boileau's works, Alphonse Pauly tersely glossed the line “Est-ce chés les Hurons, chés les Topinamboux?” with the identification, “peuplades sauvages de l'Amérique.” But this remark is most surely a guess based solely on the identification of the Hurons; if not, Pauly would have said more.¹⁹ The most common reaction to the term is to consider it as a coinage of Boileau's, as a catchy neologism for foolishness, stupidity, and perversity. André Hallays and Hippolyte Rigault, for example, certainly employ it this way. But for the man of the seventeenth century acquainted with the geographic literature of discovery, the word had a potent, sinister meaning.

The seventeenth-century reader knew the Topinamboux, or the Tuppin Imbas, to be one of the most savage tribes of wild Indians in Brazil, a tribe noted, moreover, for its cannibalism. The most vivid knowledge of them came through a remarkable eye-witness account by Hans Stade, a German gunner in the employment of the Portuguese who was captured by this tribe of Indians, lived with them for ten and a half months, finally escaped, and in 1557, at Marpurg, published the account of his captivity as Warhafftige Historia unnd beschreibung einer landtschafft der Wilden, Nacketen, Grinmigen, Menschfresser Leuthen in der Newen Welt America gelegen.²⁰ The brief work immediately stirred up interest, was reprinted the same year at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and was translated into Flemish the following year. The work created an incalculable impression, however, when Theodore De Bry included it in a Latin translation by Teucrius Annaeus, a townsman of Stade, in his magisterial collection Grands Voyages, a collection J. H. Parry declares “no gentleman's library was complete without.”²¹ Stade's work formed a part of the third section of De Bry's collection, Americae Tertia Pars. Memorabile provinciae Brasiliae Historiam contines, and it undoubtedly made an even profounder and, to civilized Europe, a more horrifying impact here through De Bry's sensational illustrations for the narrative.²² Throughout the entire third section, De Bry's illustrations focus upon the notorious cannibalism of the aboriginal Brazilians. The frontispiece to this part of the collection displays a native male and female on columns, both devouring human limbs, while an inset depicts some natives roasting parts of a body over a flame while others are busy sampling parts already cooked. Other illustrations throughout the third part present the same elements in varying ways. One illustration exhibits natives eating and cooking a corpse. An especially hirsute native raises his axe to chop off a limb from an already well-amputated corpse while a second native busies himself with removing the entrails. Women and children carry arms, legs, and heads gleefully to a pot in which they are to be cooked. Other illustrations reveal such scenes as a circle of women and children dining upon entrails and heads and a communal slaying of prisoners and butchering of bodies.²³ All these scenes derive from a long chapter near the end of Stade's account in which he minutely described the rituals followed by the Tuppin Imbas in slaying their prisoners.²⁴

As any reader in the early accounts of the New World knows, the Tuppin Imbas were hardly the only cannibals in the area. Nevertheless, Stade's account, especially as disseminated in De Bry's collection, gained them a notoriety greater than that of any other tribe. The importance and thoroughness of Stade's account, moreover, can be gauged by the observation of one historian who claimed that “the history of his adventures is a book of great value, and all subsequent accounts of the Tupi tribes rather repeat than add to the information which it contains.”²⁵

But a fuller understanding of the image of the “Topinamboux” in the French mind of the time can be gained by glancing at the mention of them in other authors, for Stade was not alone in considering them. Readers could find comments on them in Claude d'Abbeville's Histoire de la Mission des Pères Capucins en l'Isle de Maragnan et terres circonvoisines (1614), in Yves d'Evreux's Voyages dans le nord du Brésil, fait durant les années 1613 et 1614 (1652), in the anonymous Description de l'Amérique et des parties d'icelle (1619), and, to go back further, in André Thévet's Les Singularités de la France Antarctique (1557) and Jean de Lery's Histoire d'un voyage fait en la terre du Brésil (1578), to mention only a few.²⁶ They were sufficiently known for a writer like Michel Baudier to refer to them securely in his Histoire de la religion des Turcs (1625). Of the varying comments these authors deliver upon the “Topinamboux” the ones most pertinent to this discussion are those stressing their paganism. “Les Toupinamboux n'ont ny Dieux ny Temples, et n'ont nulle cognoissance de la Creation du Monde,” attested the author of the Description de l'Amérique. “Les Indiens Topinamba,” wrote Father Claude d'Abbeville, “n'ont ny Foy ny aucune umbre de religion, ils n'ont aussi aucune Loy ny police pour le public, sinon quelque parcelle de la Loy de nature.”²⁷

The most interesting consideration of this feature, however, comes from Léry:

Cette sentence de Cicéron est reçue et tenue d'un chacun pour maxime indubitable: à savoir, qu'il n'y a aucun peuple si brutal, ni nation si barbare et sauvage, qui n'ait le sentiment de quelque Divinité. Tant il y a, néanmoins, qu'en considérant de près nos Topinambours de l'Amérique, je me trouve assez empêché touchant l'application de cette sentence à leur endroit.

Car en premier lieu, ils n'ont nulle connaissance du seul et vrai Dieu … Ils ne confessent, ni n'adorent, aucuns dieux célestes ni terrestres; et par conséquent, n'ayant aucun formulaire ni lieu député pour s'assembler afin de faire quelque service ordinaire, ils ne prient par forme de religion, ni en public, ni en particulier, quelque chose que ce soit.²⁸

Léry thus recounts the seminal ideas that define the passion of Boileau's epigram. Enraged by Perrault's puerile literary criticism and infuriated by his concurrent smugness about contemporary genius and the grandeur of French civilization, Boileau launched a comparison that savagely obliterated every proud premise of the Modern position. Perrault and company were no better, if such was their taste, than lunatics or cruel, primitive, ignorant, notoriously pagan, cannibalistic savages with their “infantile mentality”. The main Modern prides—of rationality, of maturity, of moral refinement—all are viciously denied. Such abnormal judgments on the ancients as Perrault delivered could only be the products of insanity (which could then be forgiven) or of the most debased level of civilization.²⁹ Boileau could hardly have removed Perrault farther imaginatively from a reincarnated “beau Siecle d'Auguste.”

Boileau remained convinced about the justice of his observation. In a letter to Maucroix on 29 April 1695 he repeated with obvious conviction his earlier position: “Que j'aurois de plaisir a vous y embrasser et a deposer entre vos mains les chagrins que me donne tous les jours le mauvais goust de la plupart de nos Academiciens gens asses comparables aux Huron et aux Topinamboux comme vous scaves bien que je l'ay deja avance dans mon Epigramme Clio vint l'autre jour, etc.”³⁰ He included in this letter, moreover, a second epigram on the topic written many years earlier in which he extended his vision to encompass the entire Academy:

          J'ay traité de Topinamboux
          Tous ces beaux Censeurs, je l'avoue,
Qui de l'antiquité si follement jaloux
Aiment tout ce qu'on hait, blasment tout ce qu'on
                    louë,
          Et l'Academie entre nous
          Souffrant chés soi de si grands fous
          Me semble un peu Topinambouë.(31)

The second epigram is thus a variation upon the insult Boileau had hurled at the Academy in his initial fury, when he suggested a new medallion depicting a herd of monkeys. Perhaps one can even find more than a touch of that “malice railleuse” Gustave Lanson spot-lighted in his sketch and estimation of Boileau,³² for here Boileau has decided to honor Perrault's claims of civilization but in the most mischievous and devastating manner possible. The only restraint the brilliance of the Academy wins is the genteel “un peu.” Boileau persisted, too, upon the idiocy of Perrault's position: the Moderns are “si grand fous” and “follement jaloux.”

Obviously when one considers the ramifications of the idea, he sees that it goes too far, but for that very reason it illuminates the vigorous preeminence of a literary passion in Boileau's character. For him, the defining criterion of culture remained literary taste.³³ Without that, all other intellectual equipment floundered, and under the pressure of passion, the only apt analogy he could find for the gross and insensitive palate of Perrault and those who tolerated his observations proved to be the New World savages.

Additionally, in the first epigram, the choice of characters has greater significance than one might ordinarily suspect. Apollo's presence, for example, is extremely important. As sovereign of Parnassus, Apollo is the natural choice for a complaint over the literary outrages of the Academy; but for the Academy Apollo also had a more immediate value. In 1672, through the favor of Louis XIV, the Académie française moved to new lodgings in the Louvre. To celebrate the occasion, the Academy struck a special medal, one designed by Perrault, with the inscription Apollo Palatinus, a brilliantly evocative allusion to the temple of Apollo on Mount Palatine erected by Augustus Caesar within his palace walls.³⁴ Nor did Louis overlook the ramifications of the association, for he presented the Academy with a library of 660 volumes upon their installation, a gesture consciously parallel to Augustus Caesar's creation of a library next to the temple. The thorough identification of Louis with Augustus Caesar on this occasion may account for the incessant comparisons, particularly in the literature of the Academy, between the two monarchs throughout the period. More important for Boileau's poem, however, is the fantasy of Apollo as the titular deity of the Académie française. Boileau's maneuver in the epigram proves then to be even wittier, for what greater shock could the god of the Academy receive than to learn that the barbarous judgments he scorns come from the inhabitants of his temple?

The selection of Clio, the Muse of History, to initiate the action of the poem is significant for a reason that lies rooted in Boileau's affairs. At the time of the quarrel Boileau no longer regarded himself primarily as a poet. For some time he had dedicated himself to a new Muse, the goddess of history. In 1677 Louis had ordered Racine and Boileau to abandon poetry and to compose instead a history of his time.³⁵ Boileau referred to this fiat once pointedly in his letters: “Si l'Histoire ne m'avoit point tiré du metier de la Poësie,” he wrote to the Baron de Walef, “je ne me sens point se épuisé que je ne trouvasse encore des rimes pour répondre a une aussi obligeante Epître.”³⁶ The poem thus reveals Boileau's new Muse alerting his old one about the recent scandalous event.

And if one grants this personal symbolism as embedded in the poem, is it not possible that the provocative epigram contains yet further symbolic dimensions of wit in its immediate historical context? Just as pervasive as the cultured identification of Louis with Augustus Caesar was the repeated association of Louis with Apollo, an association rampant in the iconology of Versailles.³⁷ And if this association forms part of the intellectual and metaphoric matrix of the poem, the epigram might well contain one of the most brilliantly realized strategies of Boileau's poetic career. The poem, recording a visit of Boileau's current Muse to his former one, the god of poetry Louis himself, may treat symbolically a private conversation. On the one hand, Boileau matches the adulation of Le Siècle de Louis le Grand effortlessly. He pays tribute to Louis as the divine source and distributer of all poetic truth and vision, one of the favorite images, or rather, self-aggrandizements, of the King. But Boileau actually manipulates this image for a devastating attack upon the Moderns. The poem declares that Louis, whom the Moderns so lauded and endeavored to enlist on their side, was a thorough Ancient, who instinctively rejected the propositions of the Moderns as puerile, insane, and absurd. The poem thus delivers not only a telling attack on the poetic sensibility of the Moderns by the god of poetry, but contains the savage hint that not even Louis could tolerate the literary stupidity of Perrault and his allies.

Neither the intensity of invective nor the wit in the epigrams, of course, proved an effective response to the broad challenge of the Moderns, the fact which most disappoints contemporary readers. Nevertheless, some knowledge of the geographic allusions in the poems and of the immediate intellectual environment serves to demonstrate the potency of the invective for the time and explains more adequately why “Au sentiment de bien des gens, c'est la meillure Epigramme de Mr. Despréaux.”³⁸

Notes

1. André Hallays, Les Perrault (Paris, 1926), p. 148.

2. Quoted by Charles-H. Boudhors, ed., Oeuvres complètes de Boileau, 7 vols. (Paris, 1934-43), 3:179. For fuller accounts of the incident see Hallays, pp. 148-54, and Hippolyte Rigault, Oeuvres complètes, 4 vols. (Paris, 1859), 1:138-67.

3. On the flurry of epigrams see Antoine Adam, Histoire de la littérature française au XVII^e siècle, 5 vols. (Paris, 1948-62), 5:82; and Rigault, 1:222-25. According to both Adam and Rigault, Pierre Bayle cited several of the epigrams in his September issue of Nouvelles de la république des lettres. Perrault even went to the trouble to translate one Latin epigram addressed against him by Gilles Ménage:

   Cher Sabellus, ton bon ami Perrault
   A fait des vers que le Siècle
   il appelle,
   Où le bonhomme assure et dit tout haut
   Que nos Le Bruns en savent plus qu'Apelle,
   Que nos brailleurs font mieux que Cicéron,
   Que nos rimeurs l'emportent sur Maron.
   O Siècle fade et de peu de
   cervelle!

   For the original and Perrault's comments on it see Rigault, 1:223-24.

4. Quoted by Boudhors, 3:179-80.

5. This simplistic reduction of complicated issues draws for its proof upon the remarks of Charles Perrault in Le Siècle de Louis le Grand (1687), in L'Epître sur le génie (1688), and in his Parallèle des anciens et des modernes (1688-97); the remarks of Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle in the Dialogues des morts (1683) and in the Digression sur les anciens et les modernes (1688); in the scattered remarks of Pierre Bayle in reviews for his Nouvelles de la république des lettres; as well as upon the modern studies of the quarrel by Hallays, Adam, and Rigault.

6. Julian E. White, Jr., Nicolas Boileau, Twayne World Authors Series (New York, 1969), p. 170.

7. Quoted by Hallays, pp. 142-43.

8. Bernard le Bovier de Fontenelle, Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes and Digression sur les anciens et les modernes, ed. Robert Shackleton (Oxford, 1955), p. 172.

9. Ibid.

10. Charles Perrault, Parallèle des anciens et des modernes en ce qui regarde les arts et les sciences, Theorie und Geschichte der Literatur und der schönen Künste, no. 2 (München, 1964), p. 114.

11. The Eighteenth Century Confronts the Gods (1959; reprinted, New York, 1967), pp. 15-53.

12. Manuel, p. 42. This early date is important, for we have a very difficult time tracing the discussions of the members of the Academy. It is highly unlikely Fontenelle remained totally silent about his observations (which he wrote down between 1691 and 1699) during the period of the growing opposition between the Ancients and Moderns.

13. Entretiens, p. 166.

14. Ibid.

15. Quoted by Hans R. Jauss in his introduction to Perrault's Parallèle, p. 35.

16. Parallèle, p. 165. All quotations from Le Siècle are from this edition and are subsequently cited in the text.

17. Hallays, p. 155. Rigault cites D'Alembert's Éloge de Charles Perrault as his source for this anecdote (1:159).

18. Oeuvres complètes, 3:47, 179.

19. Oeuvres de Boileau-Despréaux, Texte de 1701, 2 vols. (Paris, 1894), 1:448. Pauly's remark may even be a silent editorial transcription of the same annotation in a 1735 edition of Boileau's works. See Oeuvres de Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux avec des éclaircissemens historiques, donnez par lui-même … par Bernard Picart le Romain, 4 vols. (Amsterdam, 1735), 2:230.

20. I have relied upon the edition of this work prepared by Richard Burton for the Hakluyt Society: The Captivity of Hans Stade of Hesse, In A.D. 1547-1555, Among the Wild Tribes of Eastern Brazil, trans. Albert Tootal, Hakluyt Society Works, no. 51 (London, 1874). The complicated history of references to the Topinamboux is a bibliographical labor I am unequipped to pursue. I only intend to discuss the most noted discussion of them, to trace part of its dissemination, and to note a few popular channels for this knowledge to Boileau.

21. The Age of Reconnaissance (New York, 1964), p. 49.

22. I have consulted several editions of De Bry's collection in the Lilly Library at Indiana University. They agree in all essential respects. I shall refer here to the edition Grands Voyages, 10 vols. (Francofurti Ad Moenum, 1590-1634).

23. Grands Voyages, 1:127, 128, 71, respectively. Since De Bry's collection is not generally available, the reader who wishes to see a sample illustration may examine Parry (Illustration 61).

24. The Captivity, pp. 155-59. The illustrations for Stade's narrative duplicate illustrations scattered earlier in the third part of the collection. Evidently De Bry had the illustrations made from Stade's account and then generously displayed them throughout the entire third section.

25. Quoted by Burton in his introduction to The Captivity, p. xciv.

26. See Burton's long list of publications containing significant remarks on Brazil in his introduction to The Captivity, pp. lxxvii-xciv; and Geoffroy Atkinson, Les Relations de voyages du XVII^e siècle et l'évolution des idées (Paris, n.d.), pp. 30, 41-42, 116-17, 122-23, 133.

27. See Atkinson, pp. 41-42, 122, 30, for the quotations.

28. Quoted by Geoffroy Atkinson in Les Nouveaux Horizons de la renaissance française (Paris, 1935), p. 97. Also see the comments of D'Abbeville rising from the nudity of the Tuppin Imbas in Relations, pp. 133-34.

29. The full force of this becomes apparent when we remember that the European sensibility recoiled so intensely when it encountered these Brazilian primitives that Pope Paul III had to issue a bull in 1536 declaring that these savages should indeed be recognized as men truly descended from Adam. See Burton's introduction to The Captivity, pp. lxxv-lxxvi. Boileau, by the way, is not the only major writer to use the Topinamboux as an ironic reference point for satiric commentary on the state of “civilized” Europe. Swift introduced these savage Brazilians in both The Mechanical Operation of the Spirit and A Modest Proposal (see The Prose Works of Jonathan Swift, ed. Herbert Davis, 14 vols. [Oxford, 1939-68], 1:172, 12:116). I will deal with his use of the Topinamboux and other groups from the literature of discovery in a future article.

30. Oeuvres complètes, 7:117.

31. Ibid., 3:50. Boudhors dates this epigram 1688-89 (3:185). He feels that the lines indicate that the poem falls after the first (1688) and before the second (1690) volume of Parrault's Parallèle. Perrault replied to the charge of jealousy in the second volume. I do not find this convincing, since all the elements of the poem are already present in the earlier one and in Boileau's immediate reaction to Le Siècle de Louis le Grand. The poem also reads much more like the effort of a man still outraged at the tolerance of his fellow Academicians than the work of a man who had decided to suppress his epigrams because, after all, he felt one shouldn't viciously attack a group one belonged to.

32. Boileau, 8th ed. (Paris, n.d.), p. 33.

33. Many critics have discussed the preeminence of the literary instinct in Boileau. Hallays wrote of the quarrel: “Voyez Boileau: une incurable maladie du larynx, une cruelle affection de vessie et surtout la dévorante passion de la littérature—la seule qu'il ait connue, mais il l'a éprouvée jusqu'à la frénésie” (p. 178), a judgment I find essentially true.

34. Rigault, 1:148-49.

35. Lanson, pp. 26-27.

36. Oeuvres complètes, 7:101. Boudhors dates the letter 1677-83. Boileau made several similar comments. Hallays quoted a remark of his in which he lauded his new occupation specifically in terms of his leaving poetry. He was “engagé dans le glorieux emploi qui l'a retiré de la poésie” (p. 147).

37. This mythological association virtually began at Louis's birth in 1638 when a coin was struck to celebrate that event with the motto Orbis Solis Gallici (John B. Wolf, Louis XIV [New York, 1968], p. 269). The first medal of Louis's reign to use Apollo dates from 1653 (Wolf, p. 637, n. 1). The emblem of the sun which he officially adopted in 1662 in the famous Fête de Carrousel was, of course, merely another dimension of this mythology. So pervasive was the identification, in fact, so completely had he made the symbol his own, that in 1680, the city officials of Valenciennes publicly apologized to Louis for “failing to use figures of Apollo and the Sun as the central theme” of their works to celebrate his entry into the city (Wolf, p. 375). This rich association had hence been gaining force for at least a quarter of a century before the event we are considering here.

38. Oeuvres … donnez … par Bernard Picart le Romain, 2:229.