'Entre deux airs': style simple et ethos poétique chez Clément Marot et Joachim Du Bellay (1515-1560) by Corinne Noirot-Maguire (review)

The apparently fortuitous meeting of simple poetic style and content of a high intellectual order is a common topos in French Renaissance poetry. In that context, 'clash' would be the wrong word, and that is the principal message of this long, detailed, and demanding work, which has at its heart precisely the alliance of style and content in the works of two major poets. The harmonious marriage of challenging subject matter allied to a high degree of technical expertise is familiar to all readers of Du Bellay's sonnets from Rome, vividly expressed in his famous early sonnet to the historiographer Pierre Paschal ('Et peult estre que tel se pense bien habile, | Qui trouvant de mes vers la ryme si facile, | En vain travaillera, me voulant imiter'), although that art which is produced through an apparent artlessness is perhaps less characteristic of Clément Marot. Corinne Noirot-Maguire's study is structured in three large sections. The first is devoted to theoretical and rhetorical underpinning and traces a tradition of teaching (docere) and entertaining (delectare) from Cicero, through Augustine, to Erasmus. The Ciceronian tradition is correctly described as being founded on the tripartite principle of clarté, vraisemblance, and brièveté. However, for Augustine, because of the divine nature of the subject matter under discussion, pleasing a readership takes second place to correct understanding of content. Erasmus's approach is described in a shorter subsection, which might have been longer in order to do justice not only to his scholarship, but also to his judgement that amusing texts very often convey their message most effectively. This first section is highly detailed and involved, erudite but densely referential, and demands full attention.

Thereafter, on perhaps more familiar ground, Marot's 'élégant badinage' is redefined as an 'humilité gracieuse' in which his verse can be considered as 'rime en prose'; under this heading many of Marot's poems are considered, including the less and the more familiar ones; for example, his Épître au Roy, du temps de son exil à Ferrare is considered as a pragmatic piece asking for return from exile, but the cascade of biblical references that Marot uses ironically to hide his Lutheranism deserves perhaps more careful exploration. Nonetheless, the whole section on Marot is a detailed and welcome exploration of a poet who has recently become more fashionable. It is certainly useful to follow the discussion of the development of his verse from rondeau and pastoureau to the more profound Épîtres and Psaumes, and to trace the arguments that weigh instruction against reading pleasure. Similarly with Du Bellay: his 'grandeur sans hybris' defines a poet whose 'humiliation vertueuse' is a deliberate rhetorical ploy designed to convey the ambivalence of, for example, the Regretz as poetry that could either be the antithesis or indeed the apotheosis of poetic 'fureur'. The attempt to define a poetics that places both poets in the same rhetorical tradition is a brave one, and, in the end, does not try to shoehorn either but grants them a degree of independence from this tradition, and from each other.