Clement Marot and the Inflections of Poetic Voice

By Robert Griffin

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press’s mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices Revived makes high-quality, peer-reviewed scholarship accessible once again using print-on-demand technology. This title was originally published in 1974.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of California Press
• Release date: Nov 15, 2023
• ISBN: 9780520322097

Robert Griffin

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Clement Marot

and the Inflections of

Poetic Voice

Clément Marot

and the Inflections of

Poetic Voice

ROBERT GRIFFIN

University of California Press

BERKELEY LOS ANGELES LONDON

¹974

University of California Press

Berkeley and Los Angeles, California

University of California Press, Ltd.

London, England

ISBN: 0-520-02586-5

Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 73-84394

Copyright © 1974 by The Regents of the University of California

Printed in the United States of America through evening colors

Laura walks in mists whose arms reach to touch her smile

Contents

Contents

Introduction

I:REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST

II:EXTERNAL FORM

III:INTERNAL STRUCTURE

IV:RHYME AND REASON

V:LIVING FAITH

VI:THE PAST RECAPTURED

VII:LANGUAGE: BETWEEN PAST AND FUTURE

VIII: DIALOGUE, CONVERSATION, AND NARRATIVE TECHNIQUE

IX: POINT OF VIEW

X: THE ART OF WIT

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Introduction

THE EVENTS that compose the life of Clément Marot have not wanted for energetic historians in this century. From Georges Guiffrey’s dramatic tableau vivant, through the irenic discoveries of Philipp A. Becker, to the current painstaking studies of C. A. Mayer, myriad facts have been assembled and myths such as Marot’s rumored liaison with Diane de Poitiers and his supposed participation in the Battle of Pavia have been permanently laid to rest.¹ The chronicle of Marot’s movements and actions is (more than) adequate, yet the life of the mind—the life that ought to interest us most—has not been fully charted.

At times it defies final statement. As evidence that there are ways in which the many centers of Marot’s mind forbid definitive judgment, one could cite three rigorously detailed and informed studies that have appeared in recent years on Marot’s religious beliefs, and describe respectively a passively orthodox, a freethinking, and a bravely evangelical Marot.² Such wide divergence in considered critical evaluation of a fundamental issue is at first sight curious, but it is symptomatic of a complex and enigmatic problem whose importance derives from Marot’s position at the chapter headings of literary histories. The one fact that biographical investigation has placed beyond question is Marot’s stature as the foremost French poet of his time. Almost every move, for instance, of his quarrel with the troublesome and talentless François Sagon has now been reported, from the many principals involved to the meaning of the invectives exchanged;⁸ when the air cleared after that pointless and drawn-out battle, Marot’s primacy among peers was obvious to all. Still, our considerable knowledge about his life and about the esteem he enjoyed among his contemporaries is matched by our uncertainty about the man he really was and what his attitudes were toward the contentious issues of his time.

The relationship between the true character of Marot the man (1496—1544) the assumed poses of Marot the poet—whose work does not neatly coincide in date of publication with the chronology of its composition, and whose authentic poems do not greatly surpass in quantity or quality the apocryphal works attributed to him—must be approached with circumspection. Purely biographical information amassed by some critics in support of the person he made his poems seem to reveal would not concern this book, were it not that modern readers have tended to derive such vague traits as doux, profond, and triste sans larmes from his poetry and attribute them resolutely to his own personality. Personal habits have been imputed to him and judgment then passed on his moral character by reading psychological attitudes into physiological features as they appear in his several portraits, and relating these attitudes to certain verse fragments.⁴ Readers by and large have cared as much about the writer’s life as about the poetry he wrote. Of equal importance is the fact that internally consistent biographies have been extrapolated from the tangle of his publications. Like a shield of Perseus, the biographical reflection has been turned back on the work as an instrument for evaluating its sincerity or authenticity and for casting it into preformed critical conceptions. The vicious circularity of such arguments is evident.

Whether we view him as the articulate creator who self-consciously fashions his own image or as the mute witness withdrawn behind his characters, it is therefore important to isolate the role of the poet in his poetry, and to know how creator and creation become enmeshed. The problem is both more intriguing and compounded because critical opinion has made Marot’s case anomalous in its time and, not without justification, has deprived us of analogies against which his own case might be more easily measured. The legend of Villon the poète maudit grew and thrived quite apart from any careful scrutiny of the Testament. In the poetry of the Grands Rhétoriqueurs the narrator’s voice is generally as uncaptivating to the modern sensibility as their poetry, or in the case of Pierre Gringore, ce brave Gringoire, has been mythologized by Victor Hugo vastly out of proportion to his poetic merit. Among the Pléiade poets, Ronsard’s most significant autobiographical statements in the Hymnes des saisons are obfuscated by allegorical personae, while Du Bellay casually dismisses any biographical import to L’Olive, soit ce nom / D’Olive veritable ou non. ⁶ More than any poet of the preceding or following generation, the bond between life and literature in Marot has been made to appear smooth and seamless or else the two have been hopelessly confused.

This book will examine the artistic ways in which Marot’s presence is felt in varying degrees in all the poetic genres he undertook. In particular, it will be concerned from the outset with the critical areas that have led otherwise competent critics to perceive several Clément Marots inhabiting the same poem: the particular use he made of poetic conventions available to him, his attitudes toward the techniques of poetry which he inherited from the Rhétoriqueurs, and the ways in which he shaped both to his own needs and affixed his own signature. In view of the critical dédoublement that alternately speaks of his late medieval outlook and accords him a place of honor on the threshold of the French Renaissance, extensive consideration will be given to the meaning and implications of his traditionalism, not just to what he says about the new freedom but (and this qualification often sets apart two different phenomena) to how the new learning gives coherence to his life’s work. As a complement to the imprint of the past, then, this book must also take note of the two intellectual milieus of his time, Des gens de court & gens d’eglise, which both limit and expand his poetic voice and invariably condition his use of language. Much attention will be paid throughout to the various uses and understandings of poetic form and to the variety of stylistic devices Marot used to clarify and obscure his participation in these milieus. It is a commonplace of literary studies that the apprehension of form and style is one way of coming to an appreciation of thought; that the turns and rhymes of a ballade or sonnet are an indication of the thought and experience of the poem, and that indeed it is possible that form and style are the only vehicles of meaning in some (or all) cases. The fluidity with which Marot moved among the various genres he undertook prevents us from considering different poetic forms as individually separate stages in the creative evolution. Hence the three-part division of this book, dealing with Marot’s transformation of medieval themes and forms and his manipulation of language; his reaction to and action upon the main currents of Renaissance ideas; and his uniquely personal contribution to literary speech—a contribution that issues from the confluence of past and present and guarantees a permanent resonance to the qualities of his poetic voice.

Before broaching the special problems created by tensions between illusion and reality in Marot’s text, a few words need to be said about the peculiar difficulties that arise not only from his participation in court circles but also from the published text itself, difficulties that beset—yet invite—serious study of Marot. The most immediate problem confronting the reader of Marot is the authenticity and correctness of the text, a problem that varies from poem to poem and is a result both of his casual attitude toward proofreading and of publishing practices of his time. Pierre Villey and especially Mayer have set forth the enormous complexity of this question and, except briefly to say caveat lector in the next few pages, it need not preoccupy us at this juncture.⁶ Although the Gutenberg revolution was to alter the nature of European thought and literature, it did not immediately displace the prevailing tradition of circulating manuscripts whose scribes multiplied errors to the extent that their copies and copies of copies departed from the author’s original manuscript. Since incunabular printers were often no more scrupulous about the validity of the manuscript they worked from, and since dating practices varied even between Lyons and Paris, the curious situation prevails where manuscripts are at times more reliable than printed texts. The resulting confusion did little to enable an author to establish an even reputation, let alone assure him his livelihood, nor did such shabby procedures in those days before inviolable copyrights protect him from overly ambitious printers. In the absence of enforced copyright, the man of letters was rewarded in far less measure than he is today. Although a writer normally received a small amount in advance from the printer to whom he submitted his manuscript, further royalties, if any, often depended on the personal relations between the two men. The most tangible rewards for writing came from reputation and a willingness to prostrate oneself, because from fame and fulsome praise came pensions, gifts, and benefices. Yet reputation was itself subject to the polemic temper of the times and to the carpings of literary mercenaries. Thomas Murner was offered more than twice as much for writing against Luther as Luther was offered by a Wittenberg printer for the per annum rights to his manuscripts. Much later Montaigne vainly labored to rectify La Boétie’s reputation as the author of the Discours de la servitude volontaire long after its clandestine publication in Le Reveil-Matin des François. The more widespread an author’s reputation, the more anonymous poems might be attributed to him and the more likely his work was to appear in unauthorized and incorrect versions. In 1540, for instance, when Marot’s name alone assured a handsome profit for any first printing, the fresh translation of the Histoire de Leander et de Hero which he had passed to some friends ended in the hands of Gilles Corrozet, who published it the following January. Corrozet, who four years earlier had incorporated fragments of the Temple de Cupido into his own poetry, equated Marot’s style with Vergil’s and praised him as a paragon of morality— but he also secured a legal injunction against any others who might publish the same work within two years, including Marot himself (who nevertheless authorized a more correct version that same year).

The question of most basic importance concerning any text of Marot, then, is whether he actually oversaw and corrected its publication and determined the format of his various collections. Proper understanding of his intent and achievement depends upon determining the classification and order of authentic poems, but all too often unwarranted editorial prerogative has been taken for the author’s design. In a case of central importance like that of L’Enfer, we are on safe ground. Composed in 1526 and surreptitiously published in 1539 by J. Steels, it was again issued by Etienne Dolet in 1542 where it bears the trustworthy notice Reveue et recongnue par l’autheur mesme. But editions that appeared in or after 1544 had an especially deforming influence, since Marot could no longer alter or disavow them. Except in cases where his personal friends apparently conveyed his real intentions, these spurious editions enlarged the corpus of attributed poems and imposed an arbitrary classification on the works. This deformation was initiated by the 1544 Constantin edition, whose editor interjected grammatical corrections in conformity with his understanding of propriety within the evolving nature of the French language. Editorial corrections are meaningless on a poem like Le Balladin since its abrupt ending and the words ycy mourut imply that it was Marot’s last work and that the author’s manuscript is unique; rich in aesthetic pronouncements and religious statement, its 1545 version would be of inestimable value in concluding on Marot’s thought if it could be authenticated. In other instances, however, we possess both approved original and final versions of poems published during his lifetime which allow us to understand and measure the importance of his stylistic evolution. Aside from numerous poems published individually, the texts having the most useful and most authoritative value are the manuscript Marot gave to the Grand Master Anne de Montmorency and the 1538 edition published by Dolet and Gryphius in Lyons.

When his text was not being plundered and falsified by unauthorized editorial patchwork or spurious accretions, it was modified late in his life by the poet himself for reasons dictated more by court protocol than aesthetic canons or the imperatives of religious faith. When in 1538 the militantly orthodox Anne de Montmorency was appointed Connétable de France, Marot presented to him a seventy-four page manuscript bound in red velvet. In the middle of the manuscript is a poem that had been sent to Renée de France at Ferrara two years earlier, from Marots’ exile in Venice. In its original form the poem corresponds to the evangelical interests of the duchess of Ferrara and of Marot, whose exile, precisely, was occasioned by the aftermath of the Affaire des Placards. In that version Marot attacked Roman Catholic idolatry, but in the concluding verse of the shortened Montmorency version he implied that his flight stemmed Des ennemys d’Apollo et des Muses and not Des ennemys de la belle Christine. The emendation would have told the powerful Grand Master that Marot’s troubles involved an attack on his poetry instead of his defense of the evangelical reformation. Both versions show Marot’s hand; their differences on matters of detail are fundamentally important and revolve around the court figure to whom they are addressed.

From the time he initially encountered the court ambiance, Marot’s choice of poetic form was imposed, or at least conditioned, by genres in vogue. Before his twentieth year he entered the service of his first protector, Nicolas de Neufville de Villeroy, and shortly afterward presented Le Temple de Cupido to the newly crowned François ier. His muse may have been more meretricious than inspired, since his new benefactor’s father was the royal treasurer; and the de luxe copy he offered the new king evidently delighted the latter, who promised that Clement would succeed Jean Marot as Valet de Chambre du Roi. He only gradually outgrew this influence and never fully escaped it. Thus the Eglogue sur la naissance du filz de Monseigneur le Daulphin composed in the last year of his life takes us back a full generation to his first literary venture, his translation of Vergil’s first eclogue. The Pléiade passed excessively harsh judgments on such acquiescence to tradition and belittled Marot’s true originality. My task in later chapters will therefore be to define and characterize Marot’s personal contribution from out of the stock poetic materials that restrict a poet at court.

Despite the impossibility of establishing an absolute chronology of artistic development, and although he never fully escaped from supplying pièces de circonstance, nothing is surer than his increasing awareness that poetic forms do not remain static and his evolving grasp of the resources of even socially stratified language—a grasp that allowed him to assert his literary personality. This is in no way an attempt to advance Marot as a Burkhardtian individual who stepped from the medieval shadows into the light of the Renaissance. Nor is it to support the cliché (although it is largely true) that without Marot’s example the Pléiade would not have shown so brightly; their slow acceptance of Marot’s talent notwithstanding, Ronsard did clear his own way as he passed from a reliance on literary models to his own personal vision, while Du Bellay himself outgrew the rigid confines of polemical generalizations as he surveyed the shattered ruins and experienced the degeneracy of ancient and modern Rome. A generation in advance of the Deffence et Illustration Marot’s unique contribution was nevertheless essentially an experience with the nature and use of language. The fluidity of the man behind the pen, the confusion between what he said and what he meant, is, along with the problems outlined above, a linguistic phenomenon: this is the main theme of the present book. The evolution we are dealing with here is an expanding awareness of his ability to control poetic form, structure, theme, and their implications, to refine the resources of language, and to master the degree of his own appearance between the lines of verse.

I wish to acknowledge and thank the Humanities Institute of the University of California and the American Philosophical Society for grants that enabled me to spend long hours in damp Italian and French libraries in order to ferret out the background material for this book. My special thanks go to my friend and colleague Henry W. Decker, who offered numerous helpful suggestions in the preparation of my manuscript and did all he could to save me from the inadequacies that remain.

PART I: FORM

I:REMEMBRANCE OF

THINGS PAST

Osservate con diligenza le cose de* tempi passati: per che fanno lume a le future. FRANCESCO GUICCIARDINI

Più consigli ed avvertimenti, CXXIII

To UNDERSTAND the personal freedom with which Marot is supposed to have infused Renaissance poetry, it is first necessary to suggest the constraints of prescribed models and themes from which his contribution grew. It is equally important to realize that his career did not postdate the Middle Ages but rather paralleled the waning of its influence. In his formative years he willingly and indiscriminately embraced both the faults and virtues of medieval tradition, ranging from its representation in figures who dominated the contemporary scene back through its deeper roots.

Jean Meschinot’s Lunettes des princes (1493), to choose one example from many others showing a manic concern for convoluted form, metrical complexity, and bombastic style, treats old ideas as if it thought they were new. A belaboring of the time-worn moral theme of the prince who views the book of the world through the twin optics of Justice and Prudence, it was reprinted at frequent intervals throughout Marot’s life. Although they are memorable more as caricatures than exemplars of verbal mastery, the publication dates and fruitful years of writers like Meschinot and Guillaume Cretin placed them in the generation that dominated to the point of overwhelming the literary scene from Marot’s birthdate into his formative years. Marot’s first epigramme, whose generic name alone suggested an increased appreciation for the economy of classical form, was originally dedicated as a medieval huitain to Cretin, the perpetrator of some of the most complicated poetic language, form and rhyme configurations of the early sixteenth century. No bookish legacy, he had a firsthand acquaintance with Cretin who had judged the 1521 poetry competition at the Puy de la Conception and had awarded first prize to Jean Marot. Impressed by the younger poet, however, Cretin requested a copy of the chant-royal Clément had entered. If the episode tells us anything, it is that Marot’s close connection with this and other quasi-literary societies like the Basoche and the Enfants-sans-souci remained a lasting presence in his verse. From the medieval genres that he continued, through the forms he modernized or initiated, his verse is sprinkled with terminology of the mime, peopled with the names of his confrères and moved by petition in their behalf.¹ For Marot, literary history was not only what he remembered having read but was also the continuation of the past in a present that altered its traditions and, in some cases, strengthened them. His early acquaintance with satirical drama of the late Middle Ages transcended specific reference to technical jargon and fostered the dramatic dimension we will find later in his most accomplished works. By regressing through the stages of literary history which were most significant for him—from Jean Marot through Lemaire and Villon to the Roman de la Rose—we can appreciate the ways in which the present in Marot’s case is but the survival of a transformed past.

Marot’s own history, and the vocation of his father which was to be his own, placed him early in an environment where lavish and studied praise was heaped on powerful figures at court. Jean Marot’s vacuous works could hardly have exerted a profound influence on his son in the sense of giving lasting intellectual depth to his celebrations of court figures or lyrical inflection to his sorrow at their passing. But it was pervasive in the sense of furnishing countless examples of stock treatment of themes. Clement’s indirect address to Francis I in the Déploration de Florimond Robertet (Françoys, franc roy de France et des François,/Tu le fuz … w. 189-190) resembles more than it differs from Jean’s O François franc! monstre cy ton franc cueur / Voulant pitié preferer à rigueur. No fanciful word game, by enumerating in this order the name, character, nationality, and deeds of their subject, father and son alike adhere, knowingly or not, to the convention for personal encomium as laid down by the earliest poetic manuals that were to guide the Grands Rhétoriqueurs.² Formal adherence to protocol in the Déploration is consistent with the encomium’s pronouncement by Republique françoise to personified Death. The Latinate proper name and the archaic nouns that open a 1517 ballade (VII) claim a certain authenticity, Quand Neptunus puissant Dieu de la Mer, / Cessa d’armer Carraques & Gallées, but here the young Cléments poetic description bespeaks a limited acquaintance with the pantheon of antiquity and derives from a more recent source. Published ten years earlier in order to flatter the Italian expedition of Louis XII in allegorical form, Jean Marot’s Voyage de Genes is in essence a censure of worldly ambitions. In it, Neptune leads a tired parade of gods and accomplishes precisely the same plodding feats as he does in Cléments ballade.³ Such chronological details show how much Clément was of his time and reveal important limitations on his early sources, limitations from which he did not break even in more mature years. At the outset of Le Temple de Cupido, to cite the earliest example, he conjures up Eros,

Ce jeune enfant Cupido, Dieu d’aymer, Ses yeulx bandez commanda deffermer, Pour contempler de son Throsne celeste Tous les Amans qu’il attaint et moleste.

(vv. 5-8)

much as Jean Marot does in a rondeau,

Car si Amour qui les cueurs faict pasmer, Vouloit ses yeulx aveuglez deffermer, Pour contempler sa trè-belle figure, …

A few lines later he invokes the vision of the God of Love drawn from the Roman de la Rose, armed with the golden and leaden arrows that cause or extinguish love, but the image of blindfolded Cupid, so pronounced in the two passages cited, is a distinctly post-fourteenth-century accretion and does not occur in earlier medieval or classical sources.⁴ When some fifteen years later Marot reverts in his third elegy to the same stereotyped attributes and fears that Amour ne prenne soing / De desbander ses deux aveuglez yeulx / Pour contempler les vostres gracieux (w. 56-58), he does so perhaps by recalling his father’s similar imagery, just as he does near the beginning of the elegy (w. 13-14) where he integrates lines drawn from Jean’s first rondeau. The elegies, which to the Renaissance eye came to represent a more modern, adaptable, and unified poem sequence (Deffence et Illustration, II, 4), regularly continue themes developed by Jean Marot’s rondeaux, an antiquated verse form Clément was beginning to abandon during the period of his elegiac muse which extended roughly from 1525 to 1534. Regies III, V, X, XIII, and XVII refine the courtly question of a gentleman’s proper conduct and his worthiness to receive his lover’s graces, which Jean Marot had treated with the wordiness and gross metaphors characteristic of late medieval moralités.

This is not to imply that the progress of Clément’s refinement was smooth, or that he clearly foresaw the inevitable course of French letters. More than once his mature muse bogged down in the linguistic accidents that fascinated earlier Rhétoriqueurs. In the first eclogue, unable to resist parading the cities that mourned the death of Louise de Savoie, regent of France—Anjou faict jou, Angolesme est de mesme, / Amboyse en boyt une amertume extreme (vv. 160-161)'—he surpassed in triviality the traditional but more sensible motif with which his father closes the Epistre des dames de Paris aux courtisans de France: Paris pleure, & Tours a destresse, / Bloys languist, Amboise ne cesse…⁵ Yet when the apprentice poet does venture beyond the bounds of his model, the rationale for his expansiveness is often more instructive than the extent of his innovation. In the Voyage de Venise, whose spiritual dimension does not surpass an occasionally proffered homily, Jean Marot described the auroral descent of Peace after the smoke and fulminations of Mars. In the 1521 Epître en prose dedicated to Marguerite d’Angouleme, using identical vocabulary for the most part, Clement significantly altered Mars into ceste impitoiable Serpente, la Guerre and stipulated that by prayer la tressacrée fille de Jesuchrist, nommée Paix, descendra trop plus luisante que le Soleil pour illuminer les regions Gallicques. Et lors sera vostre noble sang hors du dangier d’estre espandu sur les mortelles plaines, a reference to the Agnus Dei prayer said before Communion in the Roman Catholic Mass.⁶ Even details in a confident line like L’heur d’Hannibal par la fatalle main … Feut destourné from his comparison of the victory of Scipio Africanus to that of François de Bourbon over the forces of Charles V, indicate Clement’s increasing concern up to 1544 with balance and brevity. These same qualities are lacking in Jean’s laborious

Quant Scipion le jeune enfant Rommain Eut fouldroyé par belliqueuse main Cartaginoys & Hannibal leur chef, Reduyt Cartaige à estresme meschef,

of the Epistre des dames de Paris, au roy françois and in his clumsy compulsion to explain to the naïve reader that Hannibal, incidentally, is the Carthagenian leader.⁷

Clément’s familiarity with his father’s verse, then, seems to have exerted a fruitful influence on his development of poetic themes precisely in proportion as he diverged from it. Earlier sources, however, furnished him with more polished models of brevity and discretion and taught him to prune the tedious limbs of outward flourishes. As we will see presently, the example of the escape of Jean Lemaire de Beiges from the florid language and prolixity of the Rhétoriqueurs served Marot well throughout his career in his mastery of poetic diction and structure, as Lemaire was later to serve Ronsard as an enthusiastic exemplar of humanistic learning. In his early years and beyond, Marot’s catchword allusions to Lemaire de Beiges long after his death indicate far more than a passing acquaintance with his work; they suggest that in all forms of poetry he held him as an unimpeachable standard of excellence. Following a Lemaire-inspired description of Venus’s chariot at the beginning of Le Second chant d’amour fugitif, Marot’s succinct rhetorical question of why he should seek pleasure invested in Venus, la Déesse, / Veu que en Pallas gist toute ma liesse? (vv. 37-38) cap- sulizes the general movement of La Concorde des deux langues from its Temple de Venus to its Temple de Minerve. The progression of Rondeau XVI dedicated to Estienne du Temple is contrived so as to become a play on his name and is obviously directed to the clarification Je dy au Temple excellent de Minerve, at once a brief bow to Lemaire’s famous temple and a full evaluative comment. In fact, a mere mention of his name in Epître XXVIII suffices as a measure of the addressee’s talent. The passing and otherwise extraneous reference to Lemaire in the Epître au Lieutenant Goutier (XXVIII) serves no other purpose than to lay the basis for this standard: Quand tout est dit, les louanges données / De toy à moy doibvent estre ordonnées / … A Jan le Maire, ou au mesme Donneur [Gontier himself]. Such acknowledgment could in no way be self-interested, since Lemaire was long since dead by the poem’s 1531-1532 composition. The point is not that the juxtaposition of names constitutes patent flattery, but rather that Marot selected the late poet as an instinctive reference point.

The Rhétoriqueurs commonly heaped extravagant praise on their contemporaries as a means of receiving outlandish compliments in return. But in the respect Marot shows for the memory of Lemaire, it is less the freedom from self-interest than the way in which he activates that memory that separates him from the older poets. The influential Illustrations de Gaule et Singularitez de Troy e on which Lemaire’s reputation largely rested furnished themes and descriptions that could be transferred from poem to poem with appropriate modulations. This is true even of episodes where the Homère françoys seems to have nodded. The important marriage of King Peleus with the sea nymph Thetis, where the goddess Eris introduced the contentious golden apple, marks the fall of primordial harmony before discord in Homeric legend. In Lemaire’s bounteous description of the wedding feast, in which dozens of floral genera and species are indiscriminately enumerated for the reader, chaos seems already to have set in. In the Temple de Cupido Marot prunes Lemaire’s garden, reducing the wandering list by two-thirds, and between its first publication around 1515 to the 1538 edition he shuffled flowers from verse to verse. The changes are not effected to enrich or complicate the rhyme, since the rhyme scheme remains the same in each instance, but rather respond to the necessity, given the subject, of describing the Temple’s edenie setting. Nor was Marot’s acquaintance with the passage a one-time affair of an inexperienced poet copying from an open text. The first eclogue’s theme of arcadian innocence coincides with a rearrangement of the floral series in which the alliterative effect shuns the artificial single-mindedness of the Rhétoriqueurs; it is counterbalanced by color variety, and tempered by intervening lines:

Rommarin vert, Roses en abondance, Jaulne Soulcie & Bassinetz dorez, Passeveloux de Pourpre colorez,

Lavande franche, Oeilletz de couleur vive, Aubepins blancs, Aubefains azurez, Et toutes fleurs de grand beaulté nayve!

The classic example of assimilation, however—and of the fallacy of biographical criticism—is undoubtedly the third eclogue, which earlier critics presumed to be an intimate remembrance of Marot’s childhood long past. It has become fashionable to diminish his originality here by citing the numerous passages from the Illustrations de Gaule on which the accounts of his upbringing by Mother Nature and father Jean are actually based. But the (anachronistic) charge of insincerity might have some validity only if we gratuitously assume that the passages he selected did not reflect the reality of his youth, or if we overlook a more interesting possibility, that of a heightening of reality through judicious borrowing of poetic images. In any case, that Marot went to Lemaire de Beiges to project scenes from childhood years under his father’s tutelage is a commentary on the formative nature of that influence.

To recede farther into the medieval past, the equally formative example of François Villon left a different sort of imprint. In the case of Lemaire de Beiges, Marot’s filtering of a possibly lived experience through the stylized, classical articulation of his literary model was vivid enough to beguile some of his most astute readers into accepting the image for the event. In poems of traditional fixed forms Marot’s efforts to imbed Villonesque fragments reproduce only a pale shadow of the original poignancy or else restate contrived complexities that were originally intended only as social amusements. The allegorical dialogue between Honte and la jeune Dame qui a vieil Mary of Rondeau VIII, while it corresponds aesthetically to some of the lesser fabliaux, lacks the knowing glance to the reader of the lively and subtle Testament XCVII whose theme it reworks. Three rondeaux later, Marot’s hypothetical legacy of soul, body, and heart abbreviates the sights and sounds of Villon: Je donne aux vers mon Corps plein de faiblesse (Item, mon corps j’ordonne et laisse/A nostre grant mere la terre; / Les vers n’y trouveront grant gresse—vv. 841-843). And the line beginning that stanza, Auprès de l’eau me fault de soif perir revives only the poetry contest at Blois where Villon dutifully fulfilled Charles d’Orléans’s request to finish a poem on the theme Je meurs de seuf auprès de la fontaine. Still, the concern in a refrain like Autant en emporte ly vens for the decay that claims all life and the nostalgia of man’s proudly human yet uniquely mortal condition is the same concern we see in Marot’s embroidered Aultant ou plus en emporte le vent. ⁸ As we shall observe in later chapters, he found in Villon a conversational use of language which conveyed to the reader a natural acceptance of human frailty, and a sense of irony that made that acceptance possible. Whether by design or by chance, his observation que les Roys / De nouveau mis en leurs nobles arroys, / Mettent dehors, en pleine délivrance, / Les Prisonniers vivans en esperance and his appeal to the Cardinal du Prat shortly after his 1526 emprisonment to deliver him Hors des Prisons de faulte de pecune (Epître XIII) is a momentary resonance of Villon’s half-serious, half-mocking miserere composed before his deliverance from the infamous prison at Meung by the newly crowned Louis XI (Epistre à ses amis).

Villon’s example would easily have come to Marot’s mind because the medieval poet’s delinquent adventures had become a prototype for the life that, in their turn, the less fortunate Rhétoriqueurs actually led, or in more inventive moments imagined they led. Such contemporaries of Marot as the debt-ridden Henri Baude, the mercurial Songecreux , and the legendary Pierre Faifeu, shared the satirical bent of the basochiens and adopted Villon as patron saint of their nocturnal escapades. Like Villon’s, their extant work consists in large part of doubtful allegations of innocence and rhymed pleas for clemency addressed to people in high places. As Marot neatly put it in a succinct epigram (CCLXXIV), there were Peu de Villons en bon savoir,/Trop de Villons pour decevoir. Marot’s proximity more to the court than to the street did not allow him to owe nearly the same allegiance as they to Villon. The preface to his uncautious edition of the Petit Testament demonstrates a far greater concern with the manipulator of language than with the romantic outlaw. His grudging allowance that ne fay doubte qu’il n’eust emporté le chappeau de laurier devant touts les poètes de son temps, s’il eust esté nourry en la court des roys & des princes, là où les iugements se amendent & les langages se polissent, not to speak of the aultres incongruitez dont estoit plein le langage mal limé d’iceluy temps, reads Villon as the unfortunate product of an unfortunate time.⁹ But it is blind to the Villon whose art exists because of Villon and whose voice outlasts all generations by speaking below the loftiness of their aesthetic and social conventions and above the narrowness of their mundane concerns. In line with his contention that Villon lacked polish, he gratuitously refashioned entire verses, lengthening some verses and shortening others au plus près de 1’inten- tion de l’auteur. This is Marot the editor and theoretician of around 1533, rejecting dated language, if not dated substance. If Marot may be seen here as a purist at the threshold of an awakening Renaissance consciousness, his revolution—like all revolutions—is surely made with the tools of the past. Like other men during periods of notable cultural change, he first conceives an intellectual notion of the world whose amorphous ideal stands at odds with prevailing categories of thought and forms of expression; through the creative imagination that imbues them, his fluctuating ideas anticipate concrete forms that future generations will live more fully. In the next chapter we will see that this phenomenon applies to poetic forms as well as sources. Although Marot was a product of his past while no longer sharing its spirit, he did possess a sense of discrimination lacking to his contemporaries which transcended his abstract pronouncements. We know that in 1527, toward the end of La Complaincte du riche infortuné, Marot’s insertion of a long passage from the Ballade des pendus rescues the pathetic death of Jacques de Beaune from sinking into empty symbolic melodrama. In this otherwise historically accurate monologue, Marot extended the time during which the body was displayed in order to legitimize Villon’s image of the corpse abused by creatures and the elements. The significance of Villon’s appearance, whose gaze cannot be deflected by the actual fact of death before him, derives from the way it counteracts the allegorical personae of which the Rhétoriqueurs were so fond, and represents an attempt to update Villon’s finest qualities.

The most lasting of medieval source books was, of course, the Roman de la Rose. Through the fifteenth century and beyond, it was the progenitor of endless allegorical fascinations, a purveyor of institutional satire, an encyclopedia of mythical tales and scientific fact, a code of courtly protocol more pervasive than Ovid, Andreas, or Chrétien. At its full development in Guillaume de Lorris, allegory is a highly specialized form of symbolic expression rich in psychological revelation. But since its first purpose is moral instruction, it arises even at its best from a mixed poetic intention; at the hands of the Rhétoriqueurs it very easily became the vehicle for deliberate didacticism empty of the psychological content that had supported