Brantôme mémorialiste et conteur (review)

In his will dated 30 December 1613 Brantôme left precise instructions regarding the publication of his œuvre, which he was confident would meet with approbation once in the public view. He wanted the first copy to be presented to his beloved Marguerite de France, and he specified that his memoirs should appear in an impressive large folio edition. Unfortunately, Brantôme’s heirs failed to fulfil his instructions and it was not until 1665 that a great-nephew published them, in small Elzevir format, although extracts had appeared in Le Laboureur’s Additions aux Mémoires de Michel de Castelnau (1659), which Mme de Lafayette knew and drew on extensively for her Princesse de Clèves. Étienne Vaucheret’s study of Brantôme’s writings, the culmination of a long scholarly relationship (see his 1991 Pléiade edition of the Recueil des Dames, poésies et tombeaux, and numerous articles), attempts to place his work on the pedestal where its author thought it belonged. He describes Brantôme as a ‘peintre remarquable des mœurs de son temps’ (p. 16) who is all too often neglected by scholars of the period. For Vaucheret, the legend of Brantôme as an erotic writer and a womanizer, fuelled in recent times by the 1990 Jean-Charles Tacchella film Dames Galantes (this was not Brantôme’s title for the second volume of his Recueil des Dames), has further distorted the picture of the memorialist. Vaucheret seeks to rehabilitate Brantôme as a master storyteller, prone to digressive anecdote but sensitive to the reader’s entertainment, as well as a keen observer of the court society to which he belonged, at least until the fall from his horse that left him largely housebound during the final decades of his life. As Vaucheret acknowledges, Brantôme’s life and works have already been the object of valuable studies by Ludovic Lalanne (1886), Robert Cottrell (1970), Anne-Marie Cocula-Vaillières (1986), and Madeleine Lazard (1995). Vaucheret’s is generally an archaeological study that endeavours to use scattered fragments from throughout the Grands capitaines and the Dames illustres, as well as the Dames galantes, to reconstruct Brantôme’s views on a number of intriguing topics, including women (with special attention to Marguerite de Navarre and Marguerite de Valois), diplomacy, court ceremonial, travel, war and duels, various regions of France (for example, Lorraine, Paris, Gascogne, Languedoc, and the south-west), Spain, Franco-Ottoman relations, and the St Bartholomew’s Day massacres. Vaucheret pays relatively little attention to stylistic matters, except in Chapter 6, where he examines Brantôme’s use of metaphors of light and dark. Overall, Vaucheret’s is a useful study of an important author despite its occasional lapse into the encomiastic mode. One might also have wished for more discussion of Brantôme’s writings within their contemporary context, although Vaucheret does make a brief stab at this in Chapter 14, which contrasts Brantôme with Montaigne.