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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 December 2020
Renaissance students know the story told by Pasquier concerning a gathering of legal notables and their friends during the Grands Jours at Poitiers, wherein one day a keen observer espied a flea proceeding across the bosom of the erudite but engaging Catherine. Straightway the muses of the assembled guests were set to work, the result being a quantity of facetious or merely ingenious verses on the subject of the venturesome flea and its fair prey. If, as we realize, the aesthetic quality of the product is dubious and the literary interest from that point of view scant, the milieu deserves better at our hands. It is the purpose of this study to present this milieu and to bring out its significance, which is real, for we have here no accidental or inconsequential gathering, but a true salon in the sixteenth century meaning of that term, italianate in origins and character, parallel to many of its more highly praised contemporaries, and as important as they in the evolution of social form in the century to come.
1 Œuvres, T. ii, col. 162 and 984 ff. ed. of 1723.
2 Champion, Ronsard et son temps, p. 416, n. 1; Nolhac, Ronsard et l'humanisme, p. 197.
3 Bibliothèque Françoise, ii, p. 71. Cf. Series, i, Notice, p. xii.
4 Serée viii, T. iii, p. 187.
5 Ibid., p. 174.
6 Ibid., p. 188.
7 Ibid., T. ii, S. vi, p. 26.
8 T. I, Discours, p. xiv.
9 Sc. de Ste Marthe, Liber Elogiorum, v.
10 De la Marsonnière, in Mémoires de la Société des Antiquaires de l'Ouest, viii (1841), 37; cf. also Dreux du Radier, Bibl. du Poitou, ii, p. 270.
11 Abbé Goujet, Bibl. Françoise, xiii, p. 272.
12 Loc. cit.
13 Hilarion de Costes, Eloges des Dames Illustres, p. 402; cf. n. 12.
14 Op. cit., xiii, p. 256.
15 Fremy, L'Acad. des derniers Valois. Note that Jourda, in his thesis on the Heptameron, calls the group of Marguerite now a salon, now a cénacle, showing how difficult it is still, with all our perspective, to draw the line. Cf. pp. 982 and 765 respectively.
16 Nolhac, op. cit., p. 197.
17 Scaligeriana, p. 431, quoted by Dreux du Radier, Hist. litt. du Poitou, p. 269. If it is true that Madame des Roches knew no Latin, that, seemingly, did not deter the learned guests from sprinkling the Recueil with copious poems in Latin—and in Greek.
18 Revue universelle, v (1921), p. 537 (P. de Nolhac). The wife of Michel de l'Hôpital, godmother of Lucrèce, might have been there, but we have no assurance to that effect.
19 Champion, Ronsard et son temps, p. 286, announces an article of J. Lavaud on the salon of the Maréchale, to appear “prochainement.” This is in 1925. I have failed to locate it as yet.
20 R. L. Hawkins, Maistre Charles Fontaine, Parisien, p. 62, cites J. Désormaux, Revue du siècle, iii (1889), 45. Cf. Baur, M. Scève et la Ren. lyonnaise, p. 18.
21 A letter of Pasquier (Bk. ii, Lettre v), relating a gathering at his own home on the “Jour des Rois,” wherein the guests drew up certain Arrests d'Amour, shows equal proportions of men and women; but this is obviously a more familiar type of affair.
22 Loc. cit.
23 Dejob, in Petit de Julleville, Hist., iii, 618.
24 Dames x, 82, 83; ix, 479.
25 Bk. vi, Lettre viii.
28 pp. 822, 982.
27 The semantics of this word needs to be further developed. Our modern meaning is implied in such a title as Civil Conversazione (Guazzo), but is not clearly delimited.
28 Les mœurs polies et la litt. de cour, p. 394–395.
29 Pasquier, Œuvres, ed. 1723, T. ii, col. 987.
30 Petit de Julleville, loc. cit.