¹ The phrase “poudreuse cendre” is from Du Bellay's Les Antiquitez de Rome, Sonnet 1, in Les Regrets et autres œuvres poétiques, ed. J. Joliffe and M. A. Screech (Geneva: Droz, 1966), p. 272. Ail citations from Antiquitez and Regrets refer to this edition. For an excellent analysis of the humanist effort to establish a conversation with the living but alien voices of the past, see Thomas M. Greene's “Petrarch and the Humanist Hermeneutic,” Italian Literature: Roots and Branches, ed. Giose Rimanelli and Kenneth Atchity (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1976), pp. 201–24.

² Pater's comments on Deffence are in “Joachim du Bellay,” The Renaissance, 6th ed. (London: Macmillan, 1922), pp. 159–64. See also Sainte-Beuve's praise of the “élévation” and the “éloquence” of Du Bellay's critical prose, in Tableau historique et critique de la poésie française ... au XVI^e siècle, 2nd ed. (Paris: Charpentier, 1869), pp. 336–38.

³ Quoted from La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse, ed. Henri Chamard (1948; rpt. Paris: Didier, 1966), p. vi. Ail citations from Deffence refer to this edition. In his introduction Chamard repeats a judgment presented in the preface to his 1904 ed. For Chamard's views on Deffence as a confused formulation of the Pléiade's opinions and as a reply to Sebillet's L'Art poétique françoys, see L'Histoire de la Pléiade (Paris: Didier, 1939–40), ii, 244–46. Du Bellay's borrowings from Italian critical treatises, including Pietro Bembo's Prose della lingua volgare, Giovanni Battista Gelli's Ragionamenti, and, most important, Sperone Speroni's Diaiogo délie lingue, are discussed by Pierre Villey, Les Sources italiennes de la “Deffence et illustration de la langue françoise” (Paris: Champion, 1908).

⁴ Aneau's pamphlet is reprinted in Chamard's notes to his edition of Deffence; my citations are to that text. Dassonville's article is “De l'unité de La Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse,” in Bibliothèque d'Humanisme et de Renaissance, 27, No. 1 (1965), 96–107.

⁵ Another critic who has commented astutely on the “tactique” of Deffence is Michel Deguy, Tombeau de Du Bellay (Paris: Gallimard, 1973), pp. 105–14. Deguy's book is the most provocative treatment I have read of Du Bellay's prose and poetry, even though (or maybe because) its blending of interpretive and creative meditation prevents it from being a systematic “étude.”

⁶ Quintil's comments on Du Bellay's title are in Deffence, p. xi; his view of the treatise as an “offense” is on p. 28, n. 1. For the remarkable violence of Du Bellay's attacks on native writers, see the passage in Bk. ii, Ch. xi, where he expresses the desire to make French “healthy” by cutting out “cet ulcere & chair corrompue de mauvaises poësies” (p. 179). Despite Dassonville's attempt to show that Du Bellay finds native poetry and popular genres to be “ni sans valeur ni méprisables” but merely insufficient for the glorifying of French (p. 101), there is something in the image of the native literary body as “chair corrumpue” that Rabelais—as physician and as démystifier of aristocratic ideologies—might have enjoyed analyzing.

⁷ Deffense, p. 28, n. 1.

⁸ Dassonville, pp. 104–05; he argues that Du Bellay and the other members of the Pléiade regarded imitation of the ancients from a pragmatic, even cynical, perspective. Du Bellay's real aim was to formulate a “nouvelle esthétique” based on “une conception Platonicienne des rapports de la Nature et de l'Art.”

⁹ Réplique aux furieuses defenses de Louis Meigret, quoted in Grahame Castor, Pléiade Poetics: A Study in 16th Century Thought and Terminology (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1964), p. 115. Du Bellay defended himself against Autelz and other detractors in the preface to L'Olive, 2nd ed. (1550). Here, as in Deffence, he shows a deep ambivalence about the relation between invention and imitation. He asserts that in his writing he has not tried to resemble “autre que moymesmes,” and he insists that his poems have “beaucoup plus de naturelle invention que d'artificielle ou superstitieuse immitation” (Œuvres poétiques de Joachim du Bellay, ed. Henri Chamard [Paris: Société des Textes Modernes, 1908–31], i, 20). And yet, he is pessimistic about the possibility of originality, for he believes that there is a finite amount of “representable” matter and that artists therefore cannot help repeating or resembling others:

¹⁰ In Antiquitez Du Bellay combines his attitude of reverent humility toward the “Divins Esprits” with a critical examination of Roman history. He frequently blames Roman hubris for causing the city's downfall and often alludes to the myth of genealogical warfare between the giants and the Olympian gods to portray Roman history as a series of violent struggles for supremacy, from the murder of Remus by Romulus through the civil war between Pompey and Caesar to the final overthrow of Rome by a bastard younger generation, the barbarians. (For poems concerned with genealogical strife, see Sonnets 11, 12, 14, 17, 23, 24, 28, 30, 31.) Regrets dramatize an ambivalence toward the “demon du lieu” (Sonnet 87) by portraying Rome as a lovely Siren or Circe capable of robbing the French poet not only of his hair but of his voice (see, e.g., Sonnets 72, 87, 88).

¹¹ For examples of Du Bellay's concern with multiple forms of exile, see Sonnet 113 of Olive (Œuvres, I, 122); the “Complainte du Désespéré” (Œuvres, iv, 87–110); and the poem to Ronsard (Œuvres, v, 360–65), in which Du Bellay contrasts his own miserable wandering to Ronsard's life among the nymphs of France.

¹² L'Espace littéraire (Paris: Gallimard, 1955), p. 86.

¹³ Tombeau, p. 33. Deguy uses the notion of “double emploi” to explain a contradiction that occurs as an oscillation between “limites successivement approchées ... mais par des voltes dont aucune n'annule l'autre....”

¹⁴ See the ironie contrast between the famous exile poem “Heureux qui, comme Ulysse” (Regrets, Sonnet 31) and the sonnet that describes the disillusionment of finding in France the same “Mille souciz mordants” left behind in Rome: “Et je pensois aussi ce que pensoit Ulysse” (Sonnet 130).

¹⁵ For an interesting discussion of the humanist metaphor of rebirth and its relation to the necromantic image of disinterment, see Greene, pp. 206–07.

¹⁶ See, e.g., Du Bellay's claim to have been “le premier des Françoys” to introduce, “quasi comme une nouvelle poësie,” the Petrarchan love sonnet, in his Olive (Deffence, p. 90); see also Antiquitez, Sonnet 32, where he boasts of being “le premier des François” to sing “L'antique honneur du peuple à longue robbe.” There is of course a lovely irony in this sonnet, which echoes Horace's claim to have been the first (“princeps”) to bring Aeolian song to Italy (Carmina, Bk. iii, Ode 30).

¹⁷ Mythe et langage au seizième siècle (Paris: Ducros, 1970), p. 24.

¹⁸ See Quintilian's lnstitutio Oratorio, Bk. x., Ch. ii, Sec. 3: “We must, in fact, either be like or unlike those who have proved their excellence.” Quoted from the Loeb Classical Library bilingual ed., trans, and ed. H. E. Butler (Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1964), iv, 75. All other citations of Quintilian refer to this ed.

¹⁹ See Ch. xix of Le Tiers Livre and François Rigolot, “Cratylisme et Pantagruélisme: Rabelais et le statut du signe,” Etudes Rabelaisiennes, 13 (1976), 115–32.

²⁰ Deffence, pp. 11–12, n. 1; Quintil finds the whole chapter a disappointing anticlimax to the promise of its title; he notes that Du Bellay might just as easily have said that languages derive from “Nature & de Dieu” as that they derive from human “arbitres.”

²¹ Du Bellay reveals his Pelagian perspective in this chapter by blaming Nature rather than man for causing the fall into inconstancy of will. He also gives the Tower of Babel a descriptive rather than a moral weight. The traditional view, exemplified in Dante's De vulgari eloquentia, saw Babel as a symbol of a prideful fall into linguistic diversity.

²² For the importance of Du Bellay's argument that “barbarian” is a relative term wrongfully applied to the French, see Deguy, p. 107. Chamard, who supports Quintil's objections to Du Bellay's argument (“il est clair qu'on ne saurait conclure de la non-barbarie des lois et des mœurs à la non-barbarie du langage” [p. 21, n. 4], misses the point of Du Bellay's defense here—against the Greeks, who “n'avoit loy ny privilege de legitimer ainsi sa nation & abatardir les autres” (p. 17), and against the Romans, “qui comme par une certaine conjuration conspirant contre nous, ont exténué en tout ce qu'ilz ont peu notz louanges belliques” (p. 20). The ancients here are felt to be not only alive but actively threatening to the modern poet.

²³ “Invention” takes the form of energy when Du Bellay talks about poetic creation (see p. 40 on “ceste divinité d'invention”). It takes the form of matter when he discusses philosophical discourse; the “intelligence parfaite des Sciences” is necessary for “cete copie & richessse d'invention” all orators must possess (p. 33). Invention is always associated with richness or fullness, and Du Bellay's repeated descriptions of the poverty and nudity of the French language might be read in the light of Ortega y Gasset's remark that every age feels itself to be “empty” in comparison to the past (cited in Walter Jackson Bate, The Burden of the Past and the English Poet [Cambridge: Harvard Univ. Press, 1970], p. 71).

²⁴ For Du Bellay's use of the “translatio studii” notion elsewhere in his works, see Françoise Joukovsky, La Gloire dans la poésie française et néolatine du xvi^e siècle (Geneva: Droz, 1969), pp. 215–16. Joukovsky shows the relation between the “translatio” of literature and the theory of “translatio imperii,” which underlies Du Bellay's nationalistic hopes: “Le tens viendra (peut estre) ... que ce noble et puyssant Royaume obtiendra à son tour les resnes de la monarchie” (p. 27). For an interesting discussion of the westering theory see Geoffrey Hartman, “Blake and the Progress of Poesy,” Beyond Formalism (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1970), pp. 193–205.

²⁵ P. 24. Contrast Du Bellay's stance with, e.g., Milton's; see esp. Paradise Regained iv, where Christ uses the enlightenment of religion to show his independence—as reader—from classical wisdom: “... who reads / Incessantly, and to his reading brings not / A spirit and judgment equal or superior? / (And what he brings, what needs he elsewhere seek?) / Uncertain and unsettled still remains ...” (ll. 322–26).

²⁶ P. 136. Du Bellay also offers the modern epic poet the rather backhanded encouragement that, by aspiring to “le premier ranc,” he may be content to achieve the second, even the third (p. 132). These hints of historical pessimism anticipate a position more fully developed in his later work, where secondary literature, including even Roman poetry of imitation and “artifice miserable,” is seen as a degeneration from the primary—natural and inspired—poetry of the Greeks. See, e.g., the poem to Bertran Bergier in Les Divers Jeux rustiques, Œuvres, v, 119–20; and Antiquitez, Sonnet 25, where Du Bellay laments the loss of an Orphic invention and associates his own “secondary” art of portraiture with Vergil's imitative efforts.

²⁷ My discussion of Du Bellay's portrait of the Renaissance writer as the “perpetual child” of the ancients draws on a seminar paper written by Thomas Fay, of the Yale Univ. Graduate School.

²⁸ P. 73. This passage draws heavily on a speech in Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue, where the Platonic overtones are even clearer: language may be “ripresa” because it is only the “sogna & ombra del vero cibo dell” intelleto.“ I quote from the text of the Dialogo printed in the Appendix of Villey, p. 141.

²⁹ P. 67. This sentence too is virtually translated from Speroni, who asserts that the arts and sciences are “al présente nelle mani de Latini et de Greci” (Villey, p. 137). Cf. also Deffence, p. 72, where Du Bellay says that because knowledge has always been “en la puissance des Grecz & Romains ... nous croyons que par eux seulement elles puyssent & doyvent estre traictées.”

³⁰ A passage in Bk. ii, Ch. xii, highlights the dangerous loss of identity Du Bellay envisions for the imitator. He who tries to write in the “famous” languages may be heard in more places, Du Bellay says, but his fame will be ephemeral: “Mais bien souvent, comme la fumée, qui sort grosse au commencement, peu à peu s'evanouist parmy le grand espace de l'air, il se perd, ou pour estre opprimé de l'infinie multitude des autres plus renommez, il demeure quasi en silence & obscurité.” The imitator is contrasted to the vernacular poet, whose fame is more secure because he is not “divisée en tant de lieux ... ayant son siege & demeure certaine” (p. 188). The contrast between a “demeure certaine” and an amorphously large, hostile space becomes a leitmotiv in Regrets, where Rome is repeatedly compared to a sea in which the poet may drown.

³¹ Deffence, p. 43, n. 2. Quintil adds that Du Bellay's error here is common to those who '“veulent metaphoriser ou il n'est besoing, & appliquer figures ou propriété seroit mieux convenante....”

³² For the concept of “innutrition,” see Robert Griffin, Coronation of the Poet: Joachim du Bellay's Debt to the Trivium, Univ. of California Publications in Modern Philology, No. 96 (Berkeley, 1969), p. 79.

³³ Du Bellay has difficulty finding a metaphorical formulation to express his paradoxical desire for a “force” of language that is distinct from a “surface” of language. He resorts to odd spatial dichotomies, surface/depth or inside/outside, because he must conceive of the desired “force” as something separate from a quality of style, which, as he has said, is untranslatable. His difficulty in having it both ways, as it were, is dramatized by the metaphor he uses to describe “elocution”—the “most difficult part” of the orator's art (p. 34). Elocution is the sword presently covered by the sheath of “useless things.” Quintil explains this obscure metaphor as an “impropre similitude” that attempts to free a “sword” of eloquence from “la rudesse impolie du dur langage” symbolized by the “sheath” (p. 34, n. 3). One kind of language is somehow covered by another; but as Quintil rightly notes, the spatial metaphor is inadequate to express a qualitative distinction: “une gayne ... couvre l'espée reluisante qui y est dedans & dessouz: mais la rudesse & durté ne couvre point l'éloquence qui avec rudesse est nulle.”

³⁴ The peculiarity of Du Bellay's thought in this passage lies partly in his subversion of Quintilian. Du Bellay introduced his discussion of imitation here with an echo of Quintilian's statement, “Neque enim dubitari potest, quin artis pars magna contineatur imitatione” (Institutio, Bk. x, Ch. ii, Sec. 1); he follows the Institutio just to the point of mentioning Nature's failure to eradicate difference. Quintilian uses the fact of difference to emphasize the modern poet's need to depend on invention: the “mere follower” must “lag behind” the great originals because, as Nature herself has demonstrated, “there is nothing harder than to produce an exact likeness”; it is therefore “generally easier to make some advance than to repeat what has been done by others” (Bk. x, Ch. ii, Sec. 10). What Du Bellay does, then, is to substitute a supranatural concept of imitation for the invention Quintilian advocates in response to the natural law of difference.

³⁵ For Quintilian's comments on “creative” paraphrase, see Institutio, Bk. x, Ch. v, Sec. 5; Vida's discussion of an imitation that changes the original author by an act of graceful deceit is in Ars Poetica, Bk. iii, ll. 216–31; a dual-language version is available in The Art of Poetry, ed. Albert S. Cook (Boston: Ginn, 1892). The “altra significazione che la lor propria” phrase is in Il Cortegiano, Bk. i, Ch. xxxiv, ed. Silvano del Messier (Novara: Agostini, 1968), p. 98.

³⁶ See, e.g., Antiquitez, Sonnet 6, where Du Bellay ironically plays on the distance between Vergil's historical perspective and his own by putting Vergil's prophecy of Rome's future greatness, “Imperium terris, animos aequabit Olympo,” into a past definite tense: “celle qui fit egale / Sa puissance à la terre, & son courage aux deux.”

³⁷ P. 80. One area of contradiction that this essay addresses only indirectly is the relation between nature and art (as artifice or “industrie”). The evocation of a “natural” eloquence in this passage should be aligned with the description of the “course legere” by which the ancients attained their literary greatness, in the passage on “les larges campaignes” (p. 190). Du Bellay's nostalgia for a kind of golden age of ease emerges in the interstices of his argument that industry and artifice were just as necessary for the ancients as they are for the moderns. As he says in Bk. i, Ch. iii, the eloquence of the Romans showed “toutes les quelles choses, non tant de sa propre nature que par artifice”; and the Romans achieved their greatness only “avecques grand labeur & industrie” (pp. 26–27).

³⁸ If the distinction between neo-Latin and vernacular imitators is logically tenuous, so is the one between translators and ideal imitators. Chamard draws attention to the attack on Deffence by Guillaume d'Autelz, which shows “que l'imitation, telle que l'entend Du Bellay, ne diffère pas essentiellement de la traduction qu'il proscrit” (p. 104, n. 1). Both distinctions depend on a slippery definition of the true imitator's goal; as Quintil remarks, it is never clear exactly what the imitator should look for in the original: “ou les choses, ou les parolles?” (p. 102, n. 2).