CHAPTER X

_Mathurin Regnier and the Renaissance at Chartres_

‘J’ai vécu sans nul pensement Me laissant aller doucement A la bonne loi naturelle; Et si m’étonne fort pourquoi La Mort daigna penser à moi Qui ne pensai jamais à elle.’ _Epitaph of Régnier._

Unlike the English, who, in public, prefer to ignore genius, the French provincials, when they have any great men born within the borders of their town, are not ashamed to honour them. They erect monuments easily, and it even occurs to them to call their streets after the names of great writers. In Chartres you have the Rue Félibien[92] and the Rue Régnier,[93] with the house in which Mathurin Régnier was born.

God has made the men of La Beauce in the image of the soil whence they have sprung. They have the regularity, the monotony and the hardness of their native land. They are without passion or imagination, cold and avaricious, and their women are like them. Their wit, when they have any, is of the kind that delights in carping, ironical raillery. Their minds, when they are developed, are cast in a logical and scientific mould. Therefore it is that the representative writers of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries at Chartres are Pierre Nicole, the moralist and theologian of the Port Royal School (_Essais de Morale_); Michel Félibien, the critical and scientific historian of Paris (_Histoire de la Ville de Paris_); the cold, but elegant, courtier poet, Philippe Desportes, and his nephew, Mathurin Régnier, the creator of French satire (1573-1613).

The School of Chartres had, we know, long been famous. When, at the end of the fifteenth century, the new movement in literature, philosophy and art began to be felt through France, the successors of Fulbert were not unaffected by it. They welcomed the new learning. The discussions of the schoolmen yielded place to the new appreciation of Greek and Latin, art and literature. Nor were the Chartrains slow to apply the new discovery of the art of printing. Twelve years after the introduction of Gutenberg’s invention into France, Pierre Plume, a learned canon of Notre-Dame, caused to be printed, at his own expense, in his house in the cloister, and by the printer Jean Dupré, a magnificent folio missal for the use of the diocese (1482). A fine copy of this missal (_Missale Secundum usum ecclesiæ Carnotensis_) is in the town library.

In the architecture of this period the same tendency towards the adoption or imitation of classical models, as interpreted by the Italian artists, is evident. Jean de Beauce abandoned the Flamboyant style in which he had hitherto so triumphantly wrought, and built the Renaissance clock tower of the Cathedral; and a certain doctor, Claude Huvé by name (1501-1559), in his enthusiasm for the revival of the old classical style, erected the house in the Rue du Grand Cerf (number

8), which still goes by the name of the _Maison du Médecin_. The Renaissance façade and court of this house contrast strikingly with the narrow, mediæval streets and Gothic style of the old town. They speak with strange distinctness of the intellectual and artistic awakening of the world after the slumber of the Dark Ages. And, as you read the inscription on the front of the house--

SIC CONSTRUXIT CLAUDI HW’ IAT ΡΟΣ DECORI URBIS AC POSTERITATI CONSULENS,[94]

--you sympathise at once in the pride and delight which this child of the new era must have taken in the new birth of old things revealed to him by the Italian artists of the Renaissance. The front of this house may be compared with the entrance of the Château d’Anet, built by Philip Delorme at the same period (1548), and now preserved in L’École des Beaux Arts at Paris.

About the same time, in the domain of literature, the satiric turn of mind which we have noted as typical of his countrymen, was illustrated by a young poet of good Chartrain family, named Laurent des Moulins. He wrote a long poetical satire, which is, however, really only a sermon in verse, entitled _Le Catholicon des mal advisés_. It is an allegorical vision, written after the manner of the _Roman de la Rose_. For Master Laurent, like all the poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth century, cast his verses in the mould of Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meung. He turns a good verse out of that mould now and again, and he writes with a genuine moral intention, so that, in spite of his oddities, his tediousness and his prosaic view of life, he goes some way towards filling up, for the curious student of French letters, the dreary gap which separates Villon from Marot. He shows us the usual dreamer falling asleep, like William Langland, ‘on a May morning on Malvern Hills,’ and seeing troops of types in whom there is no good. And of them (‘All I saw sleeping, as I shall you tell’) he writes in several thousand lines, good, bad and indifferent,--

‘Mêlant le vin rouge avec le vin blanc.’

Very different in style and in spirit from this sombre and unpolished poet was Philippe Desportes, Abbot of Tiron and Josaphat (1546-1606), the favourite poet, first, of Charles IX., who gave him ten thousand crowns for his _La Mort de Rodomont_, and afterwards of Henry III. and his _mignons_.

To them this most unclerical cleric, this courtier poet and successful diplomatist, wrote in his earlier days songs and sonnets of remarkable sweetness and grace, and was rewarded with poetic crowns and many abbacies. Devoid of the poetic passion and picturesque invention of his master, Ronsard, he was often content to translate or imitate an Italian celebration of an imaginary mistress, and to compensate by his gift of happy expression for his utter lack of sentiment or enthusiasm. Though the most prominent of Ronsard’s own particular disciples, his style is so simple and correct that he seems to be rather a forerunner of Malherbe than a follower of the school which had endeavoured to introduce into French poetry curious words and a peculiar phraseology, and to substitute, for simplicity and directness of speech, ingenious periphrases.

The following _villanelle_, charming in its neatness of expression and polished elegance of style and form, is, I think, a good example of Desportes at his best in his lighter and more mundane manner. It was repeated, one may note, by Henri de Guise at Blois a few minutes before he fell by the dagger of an assassin.

‘Rozette, pour un peu d’absence Votre cœur vous avez changé Et moi, sachant cette inconstance, Le mien, autre part j’ai rangé. Jamais plus beauté si légère Sur moi tant de pouvoir n’aura. Nous verrons, volage bergère, Qui premier s’en repentira.

Tandis qu’en pleurs je me consume Maudissant cet éloignement, Vous, n’aimiez que par coutume Caressiez un nouvel amant. Jamais légère girouette Au vent si tôt ne se vira. Nous verrons, bergère Rozette, Qui premier s’en repentira.

Où sont tant de promesses saintes, Tant de pleurs versés en partant? Est-il vrai que ces tristes plaintes Sortissent d’un cœur inconstant? Dieux, que vous êtes mensongère! Maudit soit qui plus vous croira! Nous verrons, volage bergère, Qui premier s’en repentira.

Celui qui a gagné ma place Ne vous peut aimer tant que moi; Et celle que j’aime vous passe De beauté, d’amour et de foi. Gardé bien votre amitié neuve; La mienne plus ne variera; Et puis nous verrons à l’épreuve Qui premier s’en repentira!’

Later, Desportes had other moods, more befitting his cloth, and under their influence he wrote devotional poems of considerable merit and somewhat feeble versions of the Psalms. Malherbe was quite justified in his criticism;--‘Your soup is better than your Psalms.’ For the table of the rich and sensual Abbot of Tiron, Bonport, Aurillac and other places was excellent, whilst the more edifying verses of his old age failed to acquire the bouquet of his wines.

Mathurin Régnier was born at Chartres in 1573. His mother was the sister of Desportes, and Mathurin, in spite of his father’s protests, determined to follow in the footsteps of his uncle and to be a poet. So great was his natural talent that, notwithstanding his idleness and such indulgence in debauchery that his life was shortened by his excesses, he certainly succeeded. He holds a place unique in French literature. For he is, perhaps, the only French poet before the so-called classical period who has had the good fortune continuously to maintain his position. He attacked Malherbe, yet was praised by him. He was an ardent supporter of the Pléiade, that group of men who, with Ronsard, ‘the prince of poets,’ at their head, aimed at the reformation of the French language and literature by means of the study and imitation of ancient, classical models. His defence of the Ronsardising tradition secured him, later, the approval of the first Romantics. But he earned also the admiration of Boileau. And the praise of Boileau, who said that he was the French writer, before Molière, who best knew human nature, made his reputation safe during the eighteenth century.

Of his life we do not know much: what we do know is chiefly discreditable. His father was a citizen of position, and he wisely desired for his son the ecclesiastical but not the poetical eminence of his brother-in-law, Desportes. Mathurin, therefore, was tonsured at the age of eleven. For himself he had no hesitation. His uncle’s example was too alluring. He began to write early, and he never wholly shook off the tradition of the school which his uncle represented and Malherbe with excessive bitterness and pedantry attacked. As he says himself in his Ninth Satire, wherein he so vigorously criticises the critics of the Pléiade:--

‘Je vais le grand chemin que mon oncle m’apprit Laissant là ces Docteurs que les Muses instruisent En des arts tout nouveaux; et s’ils font, comme ils disent, De ses fautes un livre aussi gros que le sien, Telles je les croirai quand ils auront du bien, Et que leur belle muse, à mordre si cuisante, Leur donra, comme à lui, dix mil écus de rente.’

His father, so he tells us, had endeavoured to keep him from following the paths of poetry by instancing the present troubles of the country and the troubles that threatened. Poetry, he said, like many another father since, with as good reason and with as little effect, would not pay. His uncle’s good fortune was exceptional and misleading.

‘La muse est inutile, et si ton oncle a su S’avancer par cet art, tu t’y verras deçu. Un même astre toujours n’éclaire en cette terre; Mars tout ardent de feu nous menace de guerre, Tout le monde fremit et ces grande mouvements Couvent en leurs fureurs de piteux changements; Penses-tu que le luth et la lyre des poëtes S’accordent d’harmonie avec les trompettes, Les fifres, les tambours, le canon et le fer Concert extravagant des musiques d’enfer.’ _Sat. IV._

The clatter of drums and cannons, however, was destined soon to cease, and the voice of Régnier’s muse was before long to be heard in the land. Régnier was a true child of the Renaissance in that he not only imitated, like his uncle, the Italian poets of his day, but he also based his satire on a close study of the classical writers. For he knew his Ovid thoroughly; like Ronsard, he modelled himself on Juvenal, and, like Joachim du Bellay, he recalls the manner of Horace. But apart from the knowledge and appreciation of great models, Régnier enjoyed also the genuine inspiration of a poet. He tells us how, in his youth, he would wander in the woods dreaming of fame and fortune, and learning the mysteries of the Muse:--

‘Rêveur je m’égarai tout seul par les détours Des antres et des bois affreux et solitaires, Où la Muse, en dormant, m’enseignait ses mystères, M’apprenait des secrets, et m’échauffant le sein De gloire et de renom relevait mon dessein.’ _Sat. IV._

This and other passages are enough to show that Régnier had the imagination as well as the temperament of the true poet. Therefore, in spite of his free imitation of the ancients, he remains original--a great poet of the order of Clément Marot. What he borrows he makes his own, and in adapting passages from the Roman writers to the Gallic manners of his own day he not infrequently improves them. And apart from his satires, he reveals in his lyrics, to a high degree, the same poetical sensibility, and he describes with a melodious melancholy the poet’s regret for the days that are no more:--

‘Un regret pensif et confus D’avoir été et n’être plus Rend mon âme aux douleurs ouverte; A mes dépens, las! je vois bien Qu’un bonheur comme était le mien Ne se cognait que par la perte.’

Mathurin was relieved from the restraints of paternal authority in 1591. For in that year his father was thrown into prison, under circumstances typical of the time. Philippe Desportes had chosen Jacques Régnier to farm one of his benefices, the Abbey of Josaphat, but he, instead of devoting himself wholly to the peaceful cultivation of the land, exerted himself politically on the side of the Chartrain _Ligueurs_. The good King Henry, whose habit it was to draw less blood than money from rebellious citizens, fined him sixteen hundred crowns, and, when he failed to pay, threw him into prison at Chartres. There he remained some months. His son, meanwhile, who had already got himself into trouble by writing lampoons on the inhabitants of his native town, and repeating them to the frequenters of a tennis-court which his father had built, took this opportunity of slipping away to Paris. There his uncle, Desportes, recommended him to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toulouse, François de Joyeuse, and he took part in that prelate’s embassy to Rome. At the same time he was presented with the small priory of Bouzancourt. Thus one fine morning he,

‘Vif de courage abandonna la France.’

He seemed to be on the high road to fortune. But though a better poet he was a worse courtier than his uncle. In ten years spent with Joyeuse and his successor, the young secretary earned nothing except experience. Of that and its fruits he earned more than enough. He indulged without restraint in the careless joy of living, and he suffered, like so many of his contemporaries, from the intense delight in life and the feverish gratification of the pleasures of the flesh which marked the Renaissance movement. For men were encouraged to give free reign to the _bonne loi naturelle_ by the whole spirit of an age which was a revolt from the gloomy monasticism of the Middle Ages. Of the results, in his own case, of such indulgence and of his sufferings, which had nothing in common with those of the saints, Mathurin Régnier tells us in some of his passages more than we care to know.

They taught him at any rate a certain philosophy of a not very exalted sort, which he expounds to us in one of his satires. It is a kind of epicurean pococurantism, summed up in the words of Swinburne, ‘Hope thou not much and fear thou not at all,’ and expressed by the poet himself:--

‘N’avoir crainte de rien et ne rien espérer Ami, c’est ce qui peut les hommes bien-heurer.’

The best comment on it, perhaps, is that implied in the epitaph on himself which heads this chapter.

Régnier returned from Italy, then, with an ample provision of memories, and perhaps with those poems which are based on the works of the Italian satirists. He took up his abode in his uncle’s house at Paris, and there, as in Rome, he noted in the intervals of dissipations the manners and the characters of men. He saw and knew the high personages who frequented the house of Desportes, and whose names occur in his poems. And not being a time-server himself,

‘Instruit par le temps à la fin j’ai connu Que la fidélité n’est pas grand revenu,’

he was content to draw with biting irony the portrait of a courtier bard, who,

‘Ambitieux, pour les vers qu’il compose, Quelque bon benefice en l’esprit se propose, Et dessus un cheval comme un singe attaché Meditant un sonnet, medite un evesché.’ _Sat. II._

Or of the vain beggar poets who

‘L’œil farouche et troublé, l’esprit à l’abandon Vous viennent accoster comme personnes yvres,

Et disent pour bon-jour “Monsieur, je fais des livres, On les vend au Palais, et les doctes du temps, A les lire amusez, n’ont autre passe-temps.”’ _Sat. II._

Or, again, he marks down a courtier with a vigour and point which Molière could not surpass:--

‘Laissons-le discourir, Dire cent et cent fois: Il en faudrait mourir; Sa barbe pinçoter, cageoller la science, Relever ses cheveux, dire; En ma conscience; Faire la belle main, mordre un bout de ses gants, Rire hors de propos, monstrer ses belles dents, Se carrer sur un pied, faire arser son épée, Et s’adoucir les yeux ainsi qu’une poupée.’ _Sat. VIII._

A dozen other examples might be quoted to show with what satiric acid he can etch a portrait. Régnier can paint a scene, too, with same unerring detail and bitter accuracy, as, for instance, ‘Le Souper Ridicule’ and the less savoury ‘Mauvais Gîte.’ The latter poem is indeed the only one which deserves the imputation conveyed by Boileau’s phrase about the author’s _rimes cyniques_. Régnier is essentially a moral writer, for he makes vice, even when he describes it openly, the reverse of attractive. The worst that can and may be said of him is that, like Juvenal, he attacks vice with arms that make virtue blush. He says himself:--

‘Je croirai qu’il n’est rien au monde qui guarisse Un homme vicieux comme son propre vice,’

and certainly the sincere and vigorous pictures he draws will prove a temptation to no one, though they may inspire, like his habit of calling a spade a spade, feelings of repugnance and disgust. But this is the aim, as these are the means of all genuine satirists. Régnier’s comment on his own failings is pathetic, but does not condone them. It reminds one of Ovid’s words, ‘_Video meliora proboque. Deteriora sequor._’

‘Étant homme, on ne peut Ni vivre comme on doit, ni vivre comme on veut.’

For, happily, the consequences of his loose living had wrought in him a tardy repentance. His conversion was as late and as sincere as that of La Fontaine--and not less needed. As he left politics alone, and attacked not individuals but social types, he made no enemies. For most men group others in classes but not themselves, or at any rate suppose themselves to be free from the vices of the class to which they belong. So they called our satirist Bon Régnier, as later they spoke of Bon la Fontaine, and the _bonhomie_ implied by their nickname had the same seasoning of malice. But it was not rewarded with any great share in the goods of this world. His uncle, dying in 1606, left him only a legacy of 2000 _livres_ on the Abbey _des Vaus de Cernay_. Henry IV., by conferring this request, gained the friendship of the poet, who expressed his gratitude in the admirable verses of his first satire. In 1608, the year in which his works were first published, he was presented with a stall in the Cathedral of Chartres. But only five years later he left Royaumont, the abbey of the Bishop of Chartres, who always made him welcome, and found his way to Rouen. There he consulted a quack doctor, a famous empiric, Le Sonneur by name, who promised to heal him of all his diseases. But he died after dining with this too encouraging physician.

I have spoken of Régnier as the creator of French satire, and so, in a sense, he was. But the phrase requires qualification. His satires are not indeed absolutely the first of their kind in France. They had been preceded by the terrific invectives of D’Aubigné, the vigorous outbursts of Jean de la Taille, and the less vehement but more polished satirical portraits of Vauquelin de Fresnaye. But in breadth and technical merit he far surpassed all his predecessors, and, in force, all except D’Aubigné. The longest, the best known, and undoubtedly the best of his sixteen satires, is the thirteenth. There, under the title of Macette, he describes an old woman who hides vice under a mask of hypocrisy, and corrupts youth with her evil philosophy of the world and its ways. The type is not new, but Régnier’s description of it is original and vigorous in the extreme. His Macette, in fact, is the grandmother of Molière’s Tartuffe.

‘Loin du monde elle fait sa demeure et son giste Son œil tout penitent ne pleure qu’eau beniste. Enfin c’est un exemple, en ce siècle tortu D’amour, de charité, d’honneur et de vertu. Pour beate partout le peuple la renomme, Et la gazette même a déja dit à Rome, La voyant aimer Dieu et la chair maîtriser Qu’on n’attend que sa mort pour la canoniser.’

Clearly the style of comedy had been found when a man could write like that, and Molière, fifty years later, had only to choose among the lines of Régnier when he wished to draw the character of Tartuffe.

‘Le péché que l’on cache est demi-pardonné,’

becomes in Tartuffe

‘Et ce n’est point pécher que pécher en silence.’

And in many other instances our Chartrain poet has supplied the great comedian with lines and hints, which Molière, true to his principle, _Je prends mon bien où je le trouve_, has appropriated as unblushingly and as successfully as a Vergil. This, apart from his other merits, and in spite of his faults, is in itself enough to justify the existence of the _rimes cyniques_ of Mathurin Régnier.