“Comment du Corps l'Ame on peult deslyer”: Unraveling the Numerological Underpinnings in Maurice Scève'sDélie

Ferdinand Brunetière, “La Pléiade française”,Revue des Deux Mondes 162 (1900): 109. Brunetière's equation, 5+441+3, was later refined to read: 5+(9×49)+3, i.e., five preliminary poems+forty-nine neuvaines+three concluding poems, Albert-Marie Schmidt, “Haute Science et Poésie française au seizième siècle”,Les Cahiers d'Hermes 1 (1947): 14.Google Scholar

V. L. Saulnier,Maurice Scève, vol. 1. (Paris: Klincksieck, 1948), 136.Google Scholar

Charlotte Melançon, “Les Décimales de la ‘Délie’”Etudes Françaises 11 (1975): 39.Google Scholar

In numerology, the digits of any number greater than nine are added together until they equal a single-digit number, e.g. 1536=1+5+3+6=15+1+5=6. Further explanations and examples can be found in Vincent F. Hopper,Medieval Number Symbolism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964). Numerology draws on both the Pythagorean and the cabalistic conception of numbers as the essence of all things, a view probably inspired by the Greek and Hebrew alphabets whose letters are also numbers. Thus, in some Renaissance minds, the alphabet becomes a tangible illustration of corresponding levels of reality. Understandably, then, Renaissance thinkers like Guillaume Postel “... regarded names as magical şeals which attach all things to the secret principals of the universe...”; (William J. Bouwsma,Concordia Mundi (Cambridge: Harvard U. P., 1957) 104) likewise, Renaissance architects like Andrea Palladio sought to incorporate the “ratios of musical consonance” in the design and structure of buildings. Rudolph Wittkower,Architectural Principles in the Age of Humanism (London: Academy Editions, 1973) 113.Google Scholar

Edwin Duval, “Articulation of the ‘Délie’: Emblems, Numbers, and the Book”,Modern Language Review 75 (1980): 65 ff.Google Scholar

Duval explains that Scève's printer: ... had everything to gain by arranging the emblems in such a way that they would always occupy the same position in each chase; after the first impression, the special devices required to hold curvilinear or broken-line type for the mottoes could be attached to forms in four sections of the chase and left in place for the second impression of the entire book (73).Google Scholar

Philo Judaeus, writing in the first century B.C., further explains that the number six “... is in its nature both male and female, and is a result of the distinctive power of either. For among all things that are, it is the odd that is male, and the even female. Now of odd numbers 3 is the starting point, and of even numbers 2, and the product of these two is 6. For it was requisite that the world, being the most perfect of all things that have come into existence, should be constituted in accordance with a perfect number, namely 6 ...” Cited by Christopher ButlerNumber Symbolism (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1970) 22–23.Google Scholar

In his preface to the facsimile edition, Dudley Wilson observes that D90 is followed by D100.Maurice Scève: Délie 1544, ed. John Horden. (Yorkshire: The Scolar Press, 1972) n.p. Further perusal also reveals that on p. 87 of the facsimile, the number CXCVI appears instead of CXCV. The error is then corrected on p. 180 where CCCCIIII appears for the second time. As a result, all 24 emblems from “Le Basilisque, & le miroir” to “La Lampe sur la table” have gloss poems whose numbers add up to seven rather than to six. The faulty numbering may have been done deliberately in order to conceal theDélie's numerical composition so that anyone looking for corresponding poems would surely come up with the wrong ones. A critic explains that although numerological patterns can be found in abundance during the Renaissance, these patterns were traditionally well hidden. Alastair Fowler,Spenser and the Numbers of Time (New York: Barnes & Noble, 1964) 238.Google Scholar

In considering the importance of the first dizain, a critic notes that it prefigures both textual and pictorial elements:girouttoit anticipates Emblem XV, “La Giroutte”,Mon Basilisque, Emblem XXI, “Le Basilisque, & le miroir”, andIdole, Emblem III, “La Lampe & l'idole”, Ruth Mulhauser,Maurice Scève (Boston: Twayne, 1977) 84.Google Scholar

Ian D. McFarlane, ed.,The Délie of Maurice Scève (Cambridge: Cambridge U. P., 1966) 17.Google Scholar

Doranne Fenoaltea,‘Si haulte architecture’: The Design of Scève's Délie (Lexington, Ky.: French Forum, 1982) 69.Google Scholar

See François Rigolot,Le Texte à la Renaissance (Geneva: Droz, 1982) 155–57. See also Charles S. Singleton, “The Poet's Number at the Center”,Modern Language Notes”, 8 (1965): 1–10.Google Scholar

All quotations are from the McFarlane edition of theDélie, op. cit..Google Scholar

All numbers in parentheses indicate word frequencies in theDélie: Jerry C. Nash,Maurice Sceve: Concordance de la Délie, 2 vols (Chapel Hill: North Carolina Studies in Romance Languages and Literatures, 1976) viii.Google Scholar

Even the division by 12, arrived at by dividing the work into 12 groups of 37 poems each, can be described as the division by 37 in reverse, for a perusal of the former reveals little more than the regularity of recurrence throughout the work of given themes.Google Scholar

Pairs of gloss poems are found in 13 of the 37 groups, recurring in an exact numerical sequence which again valorizes the number 6: group one with two gloss poems is followed by six groups containing a single gloss poem each; then come three groups with two each, followed again by six groups containing only one, etc. Whenever two gloss poems and their emblems are members of a given group, some form of correspondence always obtains.Google Scholar

Even D116, through its veiled allusion to the supposed poisoning of the dauphin, seems to reflect indirectly the thematics of the thirty-seventh group.Google Scholar

The first group is the only one which is virtually without correspondences, barring a single clear echo found in the fifth lines of very distant poems: D6 Quipar sahaulte, & diuineexcellence D376 Mais par pouoir de tahaulte excellence, The wordexcellence (3) is very rare, recurring here alone with the other two italicized words.Google Scholar

Several groups contain one poem which, like D162, does not appear to relate to the others.Google Scholar

In the eighth group, for example, lines 2, 4, and 5 of both D87 and D420 contain the rhymetendre-contentendre-estendre, unique in ire.Délie, and both of these poems are linked by the theme of erotic destheGoogle Scholar