Chapter 6

He was Norman. Right of that north whence the vigour, though not the inspiration, of the Renaissance had proceeded, and into which it returned. Caen gave him birth, and still remembers him. Normans still edit his works--and dedicate these books to the town which also bred Corneille. Norman, learned with that restrained but vigorous learning of the province, he was also of the province in his blood, for he came of one of those fixed families whose heads held great estates all round Falaise, and whose cadets branched off into chances abroad: one of the Boughtons, in Kent, is still "Boughton Malherbe[1]."

[Footnote 1: Not from the Conquest. It is near Charing, originally de Braose land, but an heiress married a Malherbe in the early twelfth century.]

He was poor. His father, who held one of those magistracies which the smaller nobility bought or inherited, had not known where to turn in the turmoil of the central century. In a moment of distress he called himself Huguenot when that party seemed to triumph, and Malherbe in anger against the apostasy went down south, a boy of nineteen, and fought as a soldier--but chiefly duels; for he loved that sport. He lay under a kind of protection from the great Catholic houses, though still poor, till in 1601--he was a man of forty-six--Henri IV heard of him. In all these years he had worked at the rule of poetry like an artisan, thinking of nothing else, not even of fame. Those who surrounded him took it for granted that he was a master critic--a sort of judge without appeal, but it was a very little provincial circle surrounding a very unimportant house in Provence. Thus, careless it seems of everything except that "form of language" which was with him a passion, like the academic or theological passions, he was astonished on coming to Paris in 1605 to discover how suited such a pre-occupation was to such a time, and how rapidly he became the first name in contemporary letters. Of men who poured out verse the age was satiated; of men who could seize the language at this turn in its fortune, fix it and give it rules, the age had no knowledge till he came: the age fastened upon him, and insisted upon making him a master.

A full twenty years from 1607 he governed the transformation, not of thought, for that he little changed, but of method and of expression. He decided what should be called the typical metres, the alternative of feminine and masculine in verse, the order of emphasis, the proportion of inversion tolerable, the propriety, the modernity, the archaism of words. It is a function to our time meaningless and futile: to such a period as that, indispensable and even noble. He interpreted and published the national sentiment upon this major thing, the architecture of letters. The power of his mind, tortured and insufficient in actual production, was supreme in putting forth clearly and finally that criticism which ran as an unspoken and obscure current of opinion in the mind of his age. This was his glory, and it was true.

His dryness was extraordinary. In a life of seventy-two years, during which he wrote and erased incessantly, he, the poet, wrote just so much verse as will fill in large type a little pocket volume of 250 pages; to be accurate, forty-three lines a year. Of this scraping and pumice stone in the mind a better example than his verse is to be found in his letters. A number remain. They might seem to be written by two different men! Half a dozen are models of that language he adored--they cost him, to our knowledge, many days--the rest are slipshod notes that any man might write, for he thought they would not survive, and, indeed, the majority of his editors have had the piety to suppress them.

No one will understand Malherbe who only hears of how, like a dusty workman, he cut and polished, and so fixed the new jewel of letters. In our less happy age the academic spirit is necessarily associated with a lethargic stupidity. In his it was not so. His force, by which this work was carried through, lay in a character of penetration. His face expresses it. His very keen and ready eyes, his high lifted brow, his sharp nose, and the few active lines of his cheek and forehead, the poise of his head, the disdain of his firm mouth, all build him back alive for us. His talk, which stammered in its volubility, was incessant and varied; his temper ready; his bodily command of gesture and definition perfect in old age: he was of good metal all those years.

Of his intense Toryism, his vivacity, his love of arms, his tenacity of perception, Racan gives us in his biography an admirable picture. Just before he died his son was killed in a duel--he, at seventy-two, desired passionately to kill the adversary. "Gambling," he said, "my pence of life against the gold of his twenty-five years." He had wit, and he hated well--hating men after death:

Here richly with ridiculous display Killed by excess was Wormwood laid away, While all of his acquaintance sneered and slanged, I wept: for I had longed to see him hanged.

His zeal for his tongue was real. As he lay upon his death-bed making his confession after so vigorous a life, he heard his nurse say something to herself which sounded ungrammatical and, turning round from the priest, he put her right in a manner most violent and sudden. His confessor, startled, said: "The time is not relevant". "All times are relevant!" he answered, sinking back. "I will defend with my last breath the purity and grandeur of the French tongue."

To such a man the meaning of the solution at which his people had arrived after a century of civil war lay, above all, in their ancient religion. On that converged those deeper and more permanent things in his soul of which even his patriotism and his literary zeal were but the surface. In the expression of that final solution his verse, which was hardly that of a poet, rises high into poetry; under the heat and pressure of his faith, single lines here and there have crystallized into diamonds. By far the most vigorous of so many frigid odes is the battle cry addressed by him in old age to Louis XIII setting out against La Rochelle. He visited that siege, but had the misfortune to die a bare week before the fall of the city. The most powerful of his sonnets, or rather the only powerful one, is that in which he calls to Our Lord for vengeance against the men who killed his son. Catholicism in its every effect, political and personal, as it were literary too, possessed the man, so that in ending the types of the French Renaissance with him you see how the terms in which ultimately the French express themselves are and will remain religious. The last two lines of his most famous and most Catholic poem have about them just that sound which saves them, in spite of their too simple words, from falling into the vulgar commonplace of vague and creedless men. In writing them down one seems to be writing down the fate of the great century now tamed, alas! and ordered, as must be the violence of over-human things:--

Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule Science Qui nous met en repos.

EXTRACTS.

(_From the "Ode to Louis XIII setting out against La Rochelle," and the "Sonnet on his son's death."_)

It has been remarked that Malherbe in his most vigorous years deliberately employed the strength of his mind to the repression of emotion in his verse, and used it only to fashion, guide, control, and at last fix permanently the rules of the language. It is certainly true that as his bodily vigour declined, a certain unexpected anger and violence enters into his verse, to the great relief of us moderns: not to that of his contemporaries.

Of this feature in him, the two following extracts are sufficient proof. They were written, the first at the close of his seventy-second, the other at the entry of his seventy-third year. In each, something close to his heart was at issue, and in each he gives some vent--far more than had been his wont--to passion.

The first is a cry to Louis XIII to have done with the Huguenot. It was written to the camp before La Rochelle. I know of nothing in French literature which more expresses the intense current of national feeling against the nobility and rich townsmen who had attempted to warp the national tradition and who had re-introduced into French life the element which France works perpetually to throw out as un-European, ill-cultured and evil. Indeed, the reading of it is of more value to the comprehension of the national attitude than any set history you may read.

The second is in its way a thing equally religious and equally catholic. This call for vengeance to God was not only an expression of anger called forth by his son's death, it was also, and very largely, the effect of a reaction against the ethics of Geneva: an attack on the idolatry at once of meekness and of fatality which was to him so intolerable a corruption of the Christian religion.

There is some doubt as to whether it is his last work. I believe it to be so; but Blaise, in his excellent edition, prints the dull and unreadable ode to Lagade later, and ascribes it to the same year.

_ODE TO LOUIS XIII._

_Fais choir en sacrifice au démon de la France Les fronts trop élevés de ces ames d'enfer; Et n'épargne contre eux, pour notre délivrance, Ni le feu ni le fer.

Assez de leurs complots l'infidèle malice A nourri le désordre et la sédition: Quitte le nom de Juste, ou fais voir ta justice En leur punition.

Le centième décembre a les plaines ternies, Et le centième avril les a peintes de fleurs, Depuis que parmi nous leurs brutales manies Ne causent que des pleurs.

Dans toutes les fureurs des siècles de tes pères, Les monstres les plus noirs firent-ils jamais rien Que l'inhumanité de ces coeurs de vipères Ne renouvelle au tien?

Par qui sont aujourd'hui tant de villes désertes, Tant de grands bâtiments en masures changes, Et de tant de chardons les campagnes couvertes, Que par ces enrages?

Marche, va les détruire, éteins-en la semence, Et suis jusqu'à leur fin ton courroux généreux, Sans jamais écouter ni pitié ni clémence Qui te parle pour eux.

Toutes les autres morts n'ont mérite ni marque; Celle-ci porte seule un éclat radieux, Qui fait revivre l'homme, et le met de la barque A la table des dieux._

_SONNET ON HIS SON'S DEATH._

_Que mon fils ait perdu sa dépouille mortelle, Ce fils qui fut si brave, et que j'aimai si fort, Je ne l'impute point à l'injure du sort, Puis que finir à l'homme est chose naturelle.

Mais que de deux marauds la surprise infidèle Ait terminé ses jours d'une tragique mort, En cela ma douleur n'a point de réconfort, Et tous mes sentiments sont d'accord avec elle.

O mon Dieu, mon Sauveur, puisque, par la raison, Le trouble de mon ame étant sans guérison, Le voeu de la vengeance est un voeu légitime,

Fais que de ton appui je sois fortifié; Ta justice t'en prie, et les auteurs du crime Sont fils de ces bourreaux qui t'ont crucifié._

EXTRACTS FROM THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."

These stanzas, which are among the best-known as they are, in the opinion of many, the dullest, in French literature, serve well to close this book.

One verse at least (the fourth) is most legitimately famous, though it is hackneyed from the constant repetition of fools. For the rest a certain simplicity, a great precision, may or may not atone for their deliberate coldness.

What is certain is that, poetry or not, they admirably express the spirit of his pen and its prodigious effect. They express the classical end of the French Renaissance with as much weight and hardness as the great blank walls of stone that were beginning to show in the rebuilding of Paris. It is for this quality that I have printed them here, using them as the definite term of that long, glorious, and uncertain phase in European letters.

_THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."_

_Ta douleur, du Perrier, sera donc éternelle? Et les tristes discours Que te met en l'esprit l'amitié paternelle L'augmenteront toujours?_

_Le malheur de ta fille au tombeau descendue Par un commun trépas, Est-ce quelque dédale où ta raison perdue Ne se retrouve pas?_

_Je sais de quels appas son enfance étoit pleine, Et n'ai pas entrepris, Injurieux ami, de soulager ta peine Avecque son mépris._

_Mais elle étoit du monde, où les plus belles choses Ont le pire destin; Et rose elle a vécu ce que vivent les roses L'espace d'un matin._

_Puis quand ainsi seroit que, selon ta prière, Elle auroit obtenu D'avoir en cheveux blancs terminé sa carrière, Qu'en fût-il avenu?_

_Penses-tu que, plus vieille, en la maison céleste Elle eût eu plus d'accueil, Ou qu'elle eût moins senti la poussière funeste Et les vers du cercueil?_

_De moi, déja deux fois d'une pareille foudre Je me suis vu perclus; Et deux fois la raison m'a si bien fait résoudre, Qu'il ne m'en souvient plus._

_Non qu'il ne me soit mal que la tombe posséde Ce qui me fut si cher; Mais en un accident qui n'a point de reméde, Il n'en faut point chercher._

_La Mort a des rigueurs à nulle autre pareilles: On a beau la prier; La cruelle qu'elle est se bouche les oreilles, Et nous laisse crier._

_Le pauvre en sa cabane, où le chaume le couvre, Est sujet à ses lois; Et la garde qui veille aux barrières du Louvre N'en défend point nos rois._

_De murmurer contre elle et perdre patience, Il est mal à propos; Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science Qui nous met en repos._

"_Vouloir ce que Dieu veut est la seule science Qui nous met en repos._"

NOTES.

CHARLES OF ORLEANS.

THE COMPLAINT.

Line 5. _Prins._ An inaccurate pedantic past participle of _prendre_.

Line 14. _Faulse._ There is to be noted here and elsewhere throughout these extracts, until the modern spelling at the close of the period, the redundant "l" in many words. It was an effect of pure pedantry. The latin "l" had become _u_ in northern French. _Falsa_ made, naturally, "Fausse." The partial learning of the later middle ages reintroduced an "l" which was not known to be transformed, but was thought omitted.

Line 24. _Liesse._ One of the commonest words of this epoch, lost to modern French. It means joy=_laetitia_.

Line 25. Note the gender of "Amour," feminine even in the singular throughout the middle ages and renaissance--right up to the seventeenth century.

THE TWO ROUNDELS OF SPRING.

I

Line 1. _Fourriers._ The servants who go before to find lodging. The term survives in French military terminology. The _Fourriers_ are the non-commissioned officers and party who go forward and mark the Billeting of a regiment.

Line 9. _Pieça=il y a pièce_; "lately". _Cf._ _naguère_="_il n'y a guère...."_

Line 11. _Prenez pais_="take the fields," begone.

Line 19. Note "_Chant_," the regular form of the subjunctive=_Cantet_. The only latin vowel preserved after the tonic syllable is a=French e (mute). Thus _contat_="chante" which form has in modern French usurped the subjunctive.

Line 23. _Livrée_="Liberata," _i.e._, things given out. A term originally applied not only to clothing, but to the general allowance of the king's household. Hence our word "livery."

THE FAREWELL.

Line 2. _Chiere lie._ "Happy countenance." _Chiere_ here is the substantive, _lie_=_laeta_, is the adjective. _Bonne chère_ means "a good time" where _chère_ is an old word for "head" (Greek: kara).

Line 5. _Baillie_=Bailliwick, "For Age that has me now within her bounds."

Line 7. _Mye._ "Crumb". "I am not a whit (not a crumb) with her (_Joie_) to-day."

Line 15. "Well braced," literally "well girthed" (as a horse is).

VILLON.

THE DEAD LADIES.

Stanza 1, line 1. Note the redundant negative; it is characteristic of mediaeval French, as of all primitive work, that the general suggestion of doubt is sufficient to justify a redundant negative.

Line 2. _Flora_, etc. It is worth while knowing who these women were. _Flora_ is Juvenal's Flora (Sat. II. 9), a legend in the university. Of _Archipiada_ I know nothing. _Thaïs_ was certainly the Egyptian courtesan turned anchoress and canonized, famous in the middle ages and revived to-day in the repulsive masterpiece of M. Anatole France. _Elois_ is, of course, _Heloïse_, and _Esbaillart_ is Abelard. The queen, who in the legend had Buridan (and many others) drowned, was the Dowager of Burgundy that lived in the Tour de Nesle, where the Palais Mazarin is now, and had half the university for a lover: in sober history she founded that college of Burgundy from which the École de Médecine is descended; the legend about her is first heard of (save in this poem) in 1471, from the pen of a German in Leipzig. _Blanche_ may be Blanche of Castille, but more likely she was a vision of Villon's own, for what did St. Louis' mother ever sing? _Berte_ is the legendary mother of Charlemagne in the Epics; _Beatris_ is any Beatrice you choose, for they have all died. _Allis_ may just possibly be one of the Troubadour heroines, more likely she is here introduced for rhyme and metre; _Haremburgis_ is strictly historical: she was the Heiress of Maine who married Foulque of Anjou in 1110 and died in 1126: an ancestress, therefore, of the Plantagenets. _Jehanne_ is, of course, Joan of Arc.

Line 8. _D'Antan_ is _not_ "Yester-year." It is "Ante annum," all time past before _this_ year. Rossetti's "Yester-year" moreover, is an absurd and affected neologism; "Antan" is an excellent and living French word.

Stanza II, line 2. Note the pronunciation of "Moyne" to rhyme (more or less) with "eine": the oi, ai and ei sounds were very similar till the sixteenth century at earliest. They are interchangeable in many popular provincialisms and in some words, _e.g._, Fouet, pronounced "Foit" the same tendency survives. The transition began in the beginning of the seventeenth century as we learn from Vaugelas: and the influence towards the modern sound came from the Court.

Stanza III, line 2. _Seraine_="Syren."

Line 5. "_Jehanne_", "_Jehan_", in spite of the classical survival in their spelling, were monosyllables from the earliest times.

Line 7. The "_elles_" here would not scan but for the elided "e" in "_souv'raine_" at the end of the line. In some editions "_ils_" is found and _souveraine_ is spelt normally. _Ils_ and _els_ for a feminine plural existed in the middle ages.

_Envoi._ The envoi needs careful translation. The "que" of the third line="sans que" and the whole means, "Do not ask this week or this year where they are, _without_ letting this refrain haunt you". "Que" might possibly mean "de peur que", did not the whole sense of the poem forbid such an interpretation.

AN EXCERPT FROM THE GRANT TESTAMENT.

Stanza 75, line 4. A charming example of those "flashes" which reveal Villon.

Stanza 76, line 2. Note the spelling of _Grant_ in the feminine without an _e_. Adjectives of the third declension whose feminine was not distinguishable in Latin took no "e" in early French. A survival of this is found in grand' rue, grand' messe, etc.

Line 5. _Grant erre_, "quickly", and the whole line reads: "Let it (my body) be delivered to it (luy=la terre) quickly," the "erre" here is from the popular late Latin "_iterare_"="_iter facere_". It survives in the nautical idiom "reprendre son erre"="to get under weigh again."

Line 7. "_Erre_" here comes, on the contrary, from _errare_, to make a mistake, to err.

Stanza 77, line 4. _Maillon._ Swaddling clothes.

Line 5. _Boullon_, scrape. The two lines are obscure but seem to read: "He has got me out of many a scrape which gave him no joy" (_esioye_ from _esjouir_=_rejouir_).

Line 7 and 8. These are obscure but apparently="And beseech him on my knees not to forsake all joy on that account."

Stanza 78, line 2. "_Le Romman du Pet au Deable_." The Pet au Deable was a great stone at the door of a private house in the university. The students took it away and all Paris fought over the matter. The "Roman" was a set of verses, now lost, which Villon wrote on the quarrel.

Line 3. _Guy Tabarie_ who _grossa_ (wrote out), these verses was a friend of Villon's: soon hanged.

Line 5. _Soubz._ The "b" is pedantic, the _ou_ indicates of itself the loss of the _b_. The "z" (and the "s" in the modern _sous_) are due to the derivation not from _sub_ but _subtus_.

THE BALLAD OF OUR LADY.

Stanza 2, line 3. _Egypcienne._ St. Mary of Egypt.

Line 4. _Theophilus._ This was that clerk who sold his soul to the Devil and whom Our Lady redeemed. You may find the whole story sculptured on the Tympanum of the exquisite northern door of Notre Dame in Paris.

Line 8. _Vierge Portant_="Virgin that bore a son".

Stanza 3, line 4. _Luz_="luthus". "S" becomes "z."

The Envoi. Note the Acrostic "Villon" in the first letters of the first six lines. It is a trick he played more than once.

THE DEAD LORDS.

Stanza 1, line 1. _Calixte._ These names are of less interest. _Calixte_ was Pope Calixtus III, Alphonso Borgia, who died in 1458--in Villon's twenty-sixth year. _Alphonse_ is Alphonso V of Arragon, who died in that same year. The _Duc de Bourbon_ is Charles the First of Bourbon, who died at the end of the year 1456, "gracieux" because his son protected Villon. _Artus_ (Arthur) of Brittany is that same Richemont who recaptured Paris from Willoughby. Charles VII is Charles VII. The _Roy Scotiste_ is James II, who died in 1460: the _Amethyst_ half of his face was a birthmark. The _King of Cyprus_ is probably John III, who died in that same fatal year, 1458. Pedants will have it that the _King of Spain_ is John II of Castille, who died in 1454--but it is a better joke if it means nobody at all. _Lancelot_ is Vladislas of Bohemia, who died in 1457. _Cloquin_ is Bertrand de Guesclin who led the reconquest. _The Count Daulphin_ of Auvergne is doubtful; _Alençon_ is presumably the Alençon of Joan of Arc's campaign, who still survived, and is called "feu" half in ridicule, because in 1458 he had lost his title and lands for treason.

Stanza 2, line 3. _Amatiste_=amethyst.

Stanza 3, line 7. _Tayon_=Ancestor. "_Etallum._" Latin "_Stallio_."

THE DIRGE.

Line 1. _Cil_=celui-ci. The Latin "_ecce illum_."

Line 3. _Escuelle_=bowl. "With neither bowl nor platter."

Line 4. Note again the constant redundant negative of the populace in this scholar: "Had never, no--not a sprig of parsley."

Line 5. _Rez_=ras, cropped.

MAROT.

OF COURTING LONG AGO.

Line 5. _On se prenoit_, one attacked--"it was but the heart one sought."

Line 11. _Fainctz_=sham; "_changes_" is simply like the English "changes": the form survives in the idiom: "donner le change."

Line 13. _Refonde_=recast.

NOËL.

Verse 1, line 3. _L'Autre hyer_=alterum heri, "t'other day."

Line 10. _Noé._ The tendency to drop final letters, especially the _l_, is very marked in popular patois, and this is, of course, a song based on popular language. Most French peasants north of the Loire would still say "Noé" for "Noël." _Noël_ is, of course, _Natalem_ (diem).

Verse 2, line 2. _Cas de si hault faict_=so great a matter.

TWO EPIGRAMS. Epigram 1, line 2. _Vostre._ Marguerite of Navarre. As I have remarked, in the text, she had sent him a Dixaine (some say he wrote it himself). This one is written in answer.--_Ay._ Note, till the verb grew over simple in the classical French of the seventeenth century there was no more need for the pronoun than in Latin. Thus Montaigne will omit the pronoun, but Malherbe never.

Line 5. _Cuydans_=thinking (_Cogitare_=_Cogtare_=_Coyde_=_cuider_, the _oi_ became _ui_ by a common transition; _cf._ noctem, octem, noit, nuit, huit.) The word is now archaic.