Charles Fontaine: un humaniste parisien à Lyon ed. by Guillaume de Sauza and Élise Rajchenbach-Teller (review)

Appearing on the heels of Marine Molins’s monograph, Charles Fontaine traducteur: le poète et ses mécènes à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 2011), this edited volume contributes to a minor revival — or perhaps resuscitation — of the French Renaissance lyric poet once known dimly to postgraduate students for his role in the Querelle des amies. The eleven studies collected here cover the various facets of Fontaine’s versatile career as translator, poet, courtier, and artistic director of Charles IX’s royal entry into Lyon in 1564, after which Fontaine discreetly withdraws from the stage of history. Fontaine’s most important achievement as a translator was his version of Ovid’s Heroides, discussed more than adequately by Paul White in Renaissance Postscripts: Responding to Ovid’s ‘Heroides’ in Sixteenth-Century France (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 2009). In this volume, Jean-Marie Flamand studies Fontaine’s version of Artemidorus’s treatise on dreams, and he sketches the Renaissance vogue of oneirocriticism, an interesting and important topic, although he might have taken a glance at Rabelais’s Tiers livre, also from 1546. Molins turns her attention to Fontaine’s vulgarization of the Distichs of Cato and other collections of moral aphorisms intended for the schoolroom or the education of the prince. Turning to lyric poetry, Dariusz Krawczyk studies Fontaine’s earliest phase as a religious poet inspired by Clément Marot and working primarily within the fixed forms of late medieval tradition. Guillaume de Sauza opens the dossier of Fontaine’s relation to the Pléiade via the figure of Guillaume Des Autels, whose octet ‘A M. Charles Fonteine, contre un envieux’ attempts to parry the line in the Deffence et illustration where Du Bellay exclaims ‘O combien je desire voir tarir ces Fontaines’, which may be, alas, Fontaine’s most visible trace in literary history. Anne-Pascale Pouey-Mounou undertakes to drain the metaphor of the fountain regarding figurative language and the literary inspiration of Fontaine’s ‘conjugal lyricism’ in his Ruisseaux de Fontaine. Élise Rajchenbach-Teller looks at Fontaine’s first published collection La Fontaine d’Amour as reissued posthumously under the title Jardin d’Amour, which, like much of Fontaine, easily supports the reputation of being ‘très mal connu’ (p. 123). The most substantial contribution is Marie Madeleine Fontaine’s well-documented essay on Fontaine’s relation to Barthélemy Aneau, author of a scathing commentary on Du Bellay’s Deffence published under the pseudonym Quintil Horatian. She offers a very circumstantial account of the reaction Du Bellay provoked among writers from Lyon while revising the standard chronology of his early works, pushing the date of the combined publication of the Deffence and Olive up from spring 1549 to early 1550. Jean-Charles Monferran provides something of a sequel to this saga by studying the enduring misattribution of the Quintil to Fontaine himself. Claire Sicard focuses on ambivalence to money in Fontaine’s poetry, referring to his ‘muse marchande’ just as Terence Cave spoke of Ronsard’s ‘muse publicitaire’. The last essay, by Elsa Kammerer, plunges into the ‘dernier Fontaine’, the poem for Charles IX’s royal entry, yet another ‘texte méconnu’ (p. 219) of our famously unknown author. An index and a very thorough bibliography round off this handsomely printed volume.