Les quatrains, Les plaisirs de la vie rustique, autres poésies, and: Les larmes funebres (1577) (review)

Two competent and important critical editions of sixteenth-century poetry have recently been made available to scholars by the Comité de publications de "textes littéraires français." While du Pré and Pibrac were contemporaries, not many similarities between the two men and their respective bodies of work would customarily come to mind. However, in the course of composing this review essay, I discerned several salient commonalities. Among them are the emphasis on a certain neo-Stoic moderation and juste milieu. While du Pré was Protestant, he shares startling similarities with Pibrac, a Catholic, because the latter was a Politique: one who strove to unite rather than divide the civil-war torn country further. Both poets focus on a certain ascesis of the inner man: Pibrac, a magistrate, hoped to inculcate virtue and respect for the law in the individual, while du Pré significantly revised his model Ronsard, stressing the emotional, inner experience of suffering (the death of his beloved wife Henriette). Thus, although du Pré's work is more obviously autobiographical, there are interesting occasions on which Pibrac's "je" surfaces, making both poets contributors to the fledgling notion of self in the sixteenth century.

Pibrac's work had an extensive influence, especially on his contemporaries, as well as on the seventeenth and the eighteenth centuries, in terms of a kind of pedagogy of ethics and virtue inculcated by the brief, pithy sapiential poetry (in large part modeled on the Wisdom of Solomon from the Hebrew Bible) drafted by this magistrate concerned to uphold law and order in their most idealized, Neoplatonic form. However, for the modern reader, his poetry may be off-putting and less than inspiring: deliberately penned in relentless style moyen (rather amazingly close to the Protestant stylus rudus or "plain style" practiced by poets such as d'Aubigné and de Bèze, and in direct, explicit opposition to the Petrachan vogue currently epitomized by the court poet Desportes), its idiom can sound a bit pedantic. Consequently, this edition undertakes to make a case for a new sort of readership in which the praxis is more important than the formulation. Interestingly, the editor also suggests a very close affiliation with, if not downright influence on, the playwright Robert Garnier, also a Politique, through the aphoristic construction of many of Garnier's theatrical verses and the focus on avoiding extremism in political decisions (such as the veuve Amital's plea in Les juives). The edition, beyond making these stimulating connections, is valuable in that it is exceptionally thorough: it includes a lengthy and thoughtful introduction, a glossary, a well-developed note apparatus, ample bibliography, a time-line entitled "Pibrac and His Contemporaries," and a list of editions of the Quatrains and Les Plaisirs de la vie rustique that have appeared subsequent to the first edition.

While du Pré's work has been summarily dismissed as rather insignificant, the editor himself somewhat surprisingly acquiescing in this initial assessment ("le quatrain . . . est à peu près dépourvu de valeur littéraire" — Introduction, Larmes, 38), du Pré in fact contributed to the Querelle des amyes, coming down squarely in defense of marriage and of men and women with a passion nothing short of religious ("il n'est pas pour autant dépourvu d'intérêt" — Introduction, Larmes, 38). The extensive introduction to the Larmes funebres succeeds in situating du Pré within his century, as part of a coterie of court poets of evangelical bent, a familiar of both Agrippa d'Aubigné and Marguerite de Navarre, and — here's a difference from Pibrac — a...