A Wave of Poetry
France was by now swept by a great tide of verse. Under Francis I and his sons more than two hundred poets appeared, and none of them was a dull mourner lost in obscurity; all were counted valiant fighters on the literary field. The contest they joined, between form and content, or between Ronsard and Rabelais, determined the essential character of French literature until the Great Revolution.
These poets were moved by a mixed enthusiasm. They hoped to rival the great poets of Greece and Rome in grace of style and perfection of form, and the Italian lyricists in eloquence and in the refinement of literary imagery. All were resolved no longer to write in Latin, in imitation of the masters and scholars who taught them and sometimes urged them on, but to make their mother tongue the vehicle of their thought. Since that language was still rough and inflexible, they set out to enrich and adorn it with words, phrases, expressions and themes drawn with taste and judgment from Latin. In their eyes the shapelessness and patchwork of Rabelais's prose looked like a raw clay vessel made by hasty hands, to which no color or glaze had added beauty or coherence.
The School of Lyon
The great campaign for classical literature began in Lyon, Rabelais's own court. Maurice Sceve spent a large part of his life, as he believed, searching for the tomb of Laura, Petrarch's beloved, then wrote 446 stanzas for his own beloved, Delie, and with the melancholy delicacy of his verse opened a road for Ronsard. His ablest rival in Lyon was a woman, Louise Labe, who entered the lists in full armor, like a new Joan of Arc at Perpignan; but she later married a rope-maker, and the marriage cooled the fire of her talent. She read books in Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish, played the lute charmingly, kept a salon that gathered literary rivals and admirers, and after her death left some of the earliest and most delicate sonnets in the French language. Her fame can be judged from the splendor of her funeral (1566), which a chronicler of the time described as having "the look of a true triumph": her body was carried through the city with the face uncovered and a wreath of flowers on the head. "Even death could not despoil her beauty, and the people of Lyon covered her tomb with flowers and tears." Through these Lyon poets the literary style and spirit of Petrarch passed to Paris and entered the circle of the Pleiade.
The Pleiade
The word itself echoed classical literature, for in third-century-B.C. Alexandria there had also been a group of seven poets called the Pleiad, a name taken from the seven mythical daughters of Atlas and Pleione who became the constellation of seven bright stars. Ronsard, the brightest star of the seven in the French sky, seldom used the term, and his true models were Anacreon and Horace rather than the Alexandrians such as Theocritus or Callimachus.
In 1548 Ronsard met Joachim du Bellay in a tavern in Tours, and the two joined forces to remold French poetry on the classical pattern. Soon they drew four more young poets to the aim: Antoine de Baif, Remy Belleau, Etienne Jodelle and Pontus de Tyard. Last came Jean Dorat, the scholar and historian whose lectures on Greek literature at the College de France and the College de Coqueret had kindled their enthusiasm for the lyric poets of ancient Greece. At first they called themselves the Brigade and swore to free the muse of French letters from the rough grip of Jean de Meung and Rabelais, and from the carelessness of Villon and Marot. They turned away from the verbal riots and whispered moralizing of Gargantua and Pantagruel, in whose disorder of verbs and adjectives and in whose love of buffoonery classical rules were not observed and no feeling existed for the pleasing forms hidden in woman, nature or art. A hostile critic counted seven of them and branded them "Pleiade"; their final victory turned the brand into a banner of honor.
The Manifesto
In 1549 Du Bellay announced the language program of the Brigade in a treatise entitled The Defense and Illustration of the French Language. By "defense" he meant that French could grow wide and strong enough to express whatever had been said in the classical tongues. By "illustration" he meant that by abandoning the rough prose and the fixed poetic forms then common (the ode, the ballade and the rondeau), French could be given new polish, beauty and fluency, and that by borrowing classical terms and following the literary forms of Anacreon, Theocritus, Virgil, Horace and Petrarch it could be made richer and more ornate. For the poets of the Pleiade counted Petrarch among the classics, and the sonnet as the most perfect poetic form.
Ronsard
Pierre de Ronsard fulfilled in verse the hopes that Du Bellay had stated in prose. He was born into a family only recently ennobled; his father served Francis I as a household steward, and Pierre spent some time at that splendid court. As a boy he was made page to the dauphin, then entered the service of Madeleine, who married James V of Scotland, and later became squire to the future Henry II. He dreamed of great service in arms, but from the age of sixteen he began to lose his hearing; so he sheathed his sword and set his pen in motion. By chance he came to know Virgil's works, fell in love with them, and found his poetry unmatched in perfection of form and mastery of expression. His teacher Dorat turned him from Latin to Greek and suggested he read Anacreon, Aeschylus, Pindar and Aristophanes, and the young pupil cried out for joy: "Master, why have you hidden this treasure from me until now?" At twenty-four he met Du Bellay, and from then on he devoted his life faithfully to three things: poetry, love and wine.
His Odes (1550) pushed the revolt against the older lyric poetry to its extreme. Although the composition of odes was an open imitation of Horace, it opened the way for the ode into French verse, and the collection was of great worth for sweetness of expression, elegance of phrasing and observance of formal rules, standing on its own feet in French literature. Two years later, in a book of 183 sonnets titled The Loves, he took Petrarch as model and raised the charm and beauty of the lyric to a height that French poetry never surpassed. He usually wrote verse that could easily be sung, and so during his lifetime music was set to many of his poems, some of which inspired great composers such as Janequin and Goudimel.
When he courted women, he too invited them, in the old customary theme, to enjoy love while their beauty still shone, yet he introduced something new into this theme and sang a fresh note. In one poem he reminds a modest and cautious young woman that one day she will bitterly regret having lost the chance to be wooed by so famous a poet. When she is quite old, spending evenings by candlelight and fireside in conversation and sewing, she will read his verses, which she remembers, and say in wonder: "When I was beautiful, Ronsard sang my name." Then not one of her maidservants, however drowsy from the day's labor, will fail to wake at the sound of Ronsard's name and bless hers with undying praise. He himself, beneath the earth, will be a boneless ghost resting under the myrtle shade, while she, an old woman crouched by the hearth, will grieve over a love gone to dust and her own proud indifference. His advice is to take joy and not wait for tomorrow, but to gather the rosebuds of life today.
Court Poet
The grandeur and loftiness of Ronsard's verse suited the court of Catherine de Medici, who on returning from Italy had brought with her a company of Italian men of letters carrying Petrarch's works among their books. The new poet, hard of hearing, grave in manner, with the build of a warrior, golden hair and beard and a face as beautiful as a statue of Hermes by Praxiteles, won the particular favor of Catherine, Henry II, Mary Stuart and even Elizabeth of England, who sent him a diamond ring. The half-Greek, half-Roman mythology of the Pleiade was welcomed everywhere, and when the poets spoke of the gods of Olympus the French court took on those titles and honors: Henry became Jupiter, Catherine Juno, and Diane Diana. Later the statues of Jean Goujon, sculptor and court architect, confirmed these equivalences.
After Henry's death Charles IX continued his friendship with Ronsard, but with less satisfying results, for the young king wanted from him an epic on the greatness of France that could rival the Aeneid. The simple-minded king wrote to Ronsard that he himself could kill but the poet could make men live forever. Ronsard began the Franciade, but found his muse too short of breath for so long a race, and soon abandoned it, returning to love and the sonnet. He reached old age in peace, for he stayed clear of the plague of worldly noise. In religion and politics he was conservative; young poets revered him; everyone held him dear except death, which came for him in 1585. He was buried at Tours, but Paris gave him a funeral worthy of the gods of Olympus, attended by all the notables of the capital, who listened to the bishop deliver the funeral oration.
The Great Divide
The poets who called Ronsard their leader published many volumes of verse that was delicate but lifeless. Most of them, like their master, were nominal Catholics who promoted the Catholic creed by choice and held the fanatical Huguenots in contempt. The emptier their pockets, the fuller they were of aristocratic pride in manner and bearing, and they wrote for a chosen few with leisure to enjoy poetry. Rabelais answered their hostility by mocking their pedantry, finding fault with their slavish imitation of Greek and Roman meters, words and phrases, and sneering at their borrowing of themes from ancient literature, mixed with Petrarchan vanity and lamentation.
In this contrast between the natural way and the classical way the destiny of French literature was to be decided. Poets and tragedians took the straight, narrow road of formal perfection and polished beauty of words, while prose writers set their aim on winning attention by the strength of their subject matter alone. For this reason French poetry cannot be translated before the Great Revolution, since an artistic form cannot be broken apart and then rebuilt from its pieces into another. In nineteenth-century France the two currents merged, all truths combined, form married content, and French prose reached its peak of perfection.