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Myth, Patronage and the Literary Coterie: The Greek Poems of La Puce de Madame Des Roches

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Notes

  1. A. H. Schutz, ‘The Group of the Dames Des Roches in Sixteenth-Century Poitiers’, PMLA, 48, 1933, pp. 648–54; G. E. Diller, Les Dames des Roches: Étude sur la vie littéraire à Poitiers dans la deuxième moitié du XVIe siècle, Paris, 1936, pp. 63–74; L. C. Keating, Studies on the Literary Salon in France, 1550–1615, Cambridge, MA, 1941, pp. 49–69; A. R. Jones, ‘Enabling Sites and Gender Difference: Reading City Women with Men’, Women’s Studies, 19, 1991, pp. 239–49; id., ‘Contentious Readings: Urban Humanism and Gender Difference in La Puce de Madame Des-Roches (1582)’, Renaissance Quarterly, 48, 1995, pp. 109–28; K. B. Tarte, Writing Places: Sixteenth-Century City Culture and the Des Roches Salon, Newark, 2007, pp. 26–59; F. Rouget, ‘Academies, Circles, “Salons”, and the Emergence of the Premodern “Literary Public Sphere” in Sixteenth-Century France’, in Making Publics in Early Modern Europe: People, Things, Forms of Knowledge, ed. B. Wilson and P. Yachnin, New York, 2010, pp. 53–67. On the other hand, K. B. Tarte, ‘Creatures of Paper and Confessions of the Flesh: Reading Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches in the 21st Century’, L’Esprit Créateur, 60, 2020, pp. 23–33 (25–27), shows the legitimacy of considering certain components of the collection in isolation from the literary coterie.

  2. On the poems of Pasquier and Catherine Des Roches, see, e.g. C. Yandell, ‘Of Lice and Women: Rhetoric and Gender in La Puce de Madame Des Roches’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, 20, 1990, pp. 123–35; Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above); and T. P. Olson, ‘La Femme à la Puce et la Puce à l’Oreille: Catherine Des Roches and the Poetics of Sexual Resistance in Sixteenth-Century French Poetry’, Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies, 32, 2002, pp. 327–42. On the poems of Turnèbe and Le Loyer, see Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above), pp. 124–5; M.-M. Fontaine, ‘Les Antiquitez chez les dames des Roches: les Sonets sur les ruines de Luzignan d’Odet de Turnèbe (1579)’, Oeuvres et Critiques, 20, 1995, pp. 197–208; A. R. Larsen, ‘On Reading La Puce de Madame Des-Roches: Catherine des Roches’s Responces (1583)’, Renaissance and Reformation / Renaissance et Réforme, 22, 1998, pp. 63–75 (69–71); Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 69–73, 104–5; id., ‘Quelle musique pour La Puce de Madame Des-Roches?’, Albineana, 33, 2021, pp. 85–98 (94–8). The work that has done the most to date to explore the lesser-known contents of La Puce is id., Writing Places (n. 1 above).

  3. The full title of the original 1582/1583 edition, published in Paris by Abel L’Angelier, is La Puce de Madame Des-Roches, qui est un recueil de divers poëmes grecs, latins et françois, composez par plusieurs doctes personnages aux Grans Jours tenus à Poitiers l’an M.D.LXXIX. Except where I indicate otherwise, I quote throughout from this edition of the collection (henceforth cited as La Puce).

  4. On the publication history of La Puce, see J. Balsamo, ‘Abel L’Angelier et ses dames: les Dames des Roches, Madeleine de l’Aubespine, Marie le Gendre, Marie de Gournay’, in Des femmes et des livres: France et Espagnes, XIVe–XVIIe siècle, ed. D. de Courcelles and C. Val Julián, Paris, 1999, pp. 117–36 (123–5); Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 27–36.

  5. See n. 3 above.

  6. La Puce, sig. aiiv.

  7. In editing the Greek poems, I have normalized diacritics in accord with current practice. A brief overview of the phenomenon of Neualtgriechisch in France may be found in L.-A. Sanchi, J.-M. Flamand and R. Menini, ‘France’, in The Hellenizing Muse: A European Anthology of Poetry in Ancient Greek from the Renaissance to the Present, ed. F. Pontani and S. Weise, Berlin, 2022, pp. 359–402 (359–61).

  8. La Puce, fol. 49r.

  9. Literally, ‘among the Pictones’, the Gallic tribe that gave its name to the city and the region.

  10. The practice of paradoxical encomium as a means to notoriety is only briefly entertained in standard accounts of the genre: A. S. Pease, ‘Things Without Honor’, Classical Philology, 21, 1926, pp. 27–42 (30–31, 35–6); A. H. Tomarken, The Smile of Truth: The French Satirical Eulogy and Its Antecedents, Princeton, 1990, pp. 4–5; P. Dandrey, L'éloge paradoxal de Gorgias à Molière, Paris, 1997, pp. 300–301. With respect to La Puce, see Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above), p. 115.

  11. In transcribing French, I have throughout respected the orthography and capitalization of the source except to enforce the distinctions i/j and u/v, to resolve abbreviations and to introduce, as appropriate, acute accents on final -e/-ee except where followed by the plural marker -z.

  12. La Puce, sig. aiiiv.

  13. The repetition of tant de (vv. 2 and 4) reinforces the parallelism between the warriors of Greek myth and the Puce poets. On the topographical treatment of Des Roches’s body, see Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 60–76. Such imagery is encouraged by Des Roches’s surname.

  14. On the trumpet as symbol of epic, and of epic’s power to secure glory for the poet’s patron, see F. Joukovsky, La Gloire dans la poésie française et néolatine du XVIe siècle: Des rhétoriqueurs à Agrippa d'Aubigné, Geneva, 1969, p. 340; C. Zecher, Sounding Objects: Musical Instruments, Poetry, and Art in Renaissance France, Toronto, 2007, pp. 50–54.

  15. On the constructedness of the flea, note ἐτύχθη and ἔτευχε in the Greek epigram.

  16. Joukovsky, La Gloire (n. 14 above), pp. 542–7; D. Desrosiers-Bonin, ‘Les lieux de l’immortalité héroïque’, Nouvelle Revue du XVIe Siècle, 12, 1994, pp. 21–32 (21–8).

  17. Scholars who have examined the use of myth in La Puce include Yandell, ‘Of Lice and Women’ (n. 2 above); A. R. Jones, The Currency of Eros: Women’s Love Lyric in Europe, 1540–1620, Bloomington, 1990, pp. 56–8; id., ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above); Olson, ‘La Femme à la Puce’ (n. 2 above); Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 61–8. In the Puce poets’ evocations of classical myth, the indispensable points of reference are Ovid and Hyginus. For the presence of these two authors in the Des Roches’s own oeuvre, see Diller, Dames Des Roches (n. 1 above), pp. 184 and 186–7. In early modernity Hyginus was considered an essential guide to poetry, as reflected in the titles of many early printed editions of both the De astronomia and the Fabulae (e.g. the editio princeps of the latter: C. Iulii Hygini Augusti liberti fabularum liber, ad omnium poëtarum lectionem mire necessarius et antehac nunquam excusus …, Basel, apud Joan. Hervagium, 1535). Comparable language is used of some of Ovid’s works, e.g. by Bartolomeo Merula, who terms the Metamorphoses a praeclarissimum opus et perquam necessarium ad poetarum intelligentiam: see F. T. Coulson, H. L. Levy and H. Anderson, ‘Publius Ovidius Naso, Metamorphoses’, in Catalogus Translationum et Commentariorum. Mediaeval and Renaissance Latin Translations and Commentaries, XII, ed. G. Dinkova-Bruun, J. H. Gaisser and J. Hankins, Toronto, 2022, pp. 1–530 (409).

  18. For a succinct overview of catasterism in the Greco-Roman world, see P. Domenicucci, Astra Caesarum: Astronomia, astrologia e catasterismo da Cesare a Domiziano, Pisa, 1996, pp. 19–26. On the encomiastic uses of catasterism narratives in Antiquity, see, e.g. E. Gee, Ovid, Aratus and Augustus: Astronomy in Ovid’s Fasti, Cambridge, 2000, pp. 154–74.

  19. La Puce, sig. aiiiiv.

  20. Pasquier’s image was perhaps prompted by the ending of the ‘Pulex’ of Joseph Scaliger (ibid., fol. 14r–v), where a mechanism of the flea’s immortality is described: the flea, a new Pegasus, has created a second Hippocrene, through its bite rather than through the impression of a hoof. The resulting spring inspires poets, who in turn secure the flea’s eternal life in verse. This is another instance of the treatment of Catherine Des Roches’s body in topographical terms, similar to a case where her breasts are implicitly likened to the twin peaks of Parnassus, also associated with a spring that inspired poets: Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 67–9. The notion that the flea creates poets connects Scaliger’s poem with epigrams in La Puce that liken the flea to the Trojan Horse (La Puce, fol. 49r, in addition to Pasquier’s liminary epigram discussed above): Scaliger’s flea bears poets (ibid., fol. 14v, vv. 24, 33) just as the Trojan Horse gave birth to heroes (ibid., fol. 49r, vv. 15–16; a glance at Virgil, Aeneid, II.49 in v. 13 further identifies the flea as another Trojan Horse). On the tradition of conceptualizing the Trojan Horse as pregnant, a metaphor most accessible in Virgil, see N. Horsfall, Virgil, Aeneid 2: A Commentary, Leiden, 2008, p. 56. Scaliger’s adaptation of the myth of Pegasus represents the interdependence of poet and poetic subject I have highlighted in the body of this article.

  21. See Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above) on the coexistence of ‘contestatory modes’ and ‘cooperative fame-building’ in La Puce. The combination of competition and collaboration in ‘lifting the flea to the skies’ is encapsulated in the words of Jacques Mangot at La Puce, fol. 20v, vv. 7–8.

  22. For a plausible identification of this De la Guérinière, see J. Brunel, Un poitevin poète, humaniste et soldat à l’époque des guerres de religion: Nicolas Rapin (1539–1608). La carrière, les milieux, l’oeuvre, 2 vols, Paris, 2002, I, pp. 50–51 and 290. As is true of many of the poems studied in this article, De la Guérinière’s sonnet has, in effect, never received critical attention; I know only of its characterization as a ‘fatras poétique’ in La Puce de Mme Desroches, ed. D. Jouaust, Paris, 1868, p. 119.

  23. La Puce, fol. 44r.

  24. That is, during the summer.

  25. For lexical reminiscences, cf. v. 2 to Georgics, I.34–5 and v. 11 to Georgics, I.32.

  26. The baleful influence of the constellation Scorpio and its associations with Mars are well known; its use here is well suited to the context of civil war in which De la Guérinière was writing. For some of the violent connotations of Scorpio in Roman literature, see F. Barrenechea, ‘The Star Signs at Brundisium: Astral Symbolism in Lucan 2.691–2’, Classical Quarterly, 54, 2004, pp. 312–17 (314–17). For some ancient precedent for the idea of Scorpio’s poisoning the lands below, see Pliny the Elder, Naturalis historia, XVI.82. The identification of Orion by his baldric further emphasizes the Flea’s role in chasing away violence; on a similar citation of Orion’s belt at Lucan, Bellum civile, I.665, see Barrenechea, ‘Star Signs at Brundisium’ (this note), p. 314. The flea’s relationship to Orion in the night sky inverts the scene of violence previously commemorated there in the hunter’s continual flight from Scorpio (emphasized in Aratus, Phaenomena, 634–46, and its Latin translators, on which see E. Berti, ‘Il mito di Orione in Arato e nei suoi traduttori latini’, Latomus, 79, 2020, pp. 595–624).

  27. La Puce, sig. aiiiiv.

  28. On Astraea and her political connotations, see F. A. Yates, Astraea: The Imperial Theme in the Sixteenth Century, London, 1975; L. B. T. Houghton, ‘Astraea Revisited: The Virgilian Golden Ages of Tudor England’, Neulateinisches Jahrbuch, 21, 2019, pp. 135–68.

  29. La Puce, sig. aiir–v. The real possibility that through this unknown Jacques de Sourdrai speaks Pasquier himself has been raised by C. Magnien-Simonin, ‘Réflexions sur l’anonymat au XVIe siècle: l’exemple d’Étienne Pasquier (1529–1615)’, Littérales, 39, 2007, pp. 9–28 (11 n. 9).

  30. La Puce, sig. aiiiiv, v. 5.

  31. Ibid., sig. aiiiiv, v. 9: ‘relache tes espris’.

  32. The Grands Jours, in session between 10 September and 19 December 1579, had originally been set to last only until St Martin’s Day but were subsequently extended at the king’s order to Christmas: Jacques-Auguste de Thou, Historiae sui temporis, LXVIII.10 (Jac. Augusti Thuani Historiarum sui temporis libri CXXXVIII, ed. S. Buckley, 7 vols, London, 1733, III, p. 676); see also the relevant lettres patentes of Henri III in, e.g. Les Grands-Jours de Poitou. Registres criminels (1531, 1567, 1579, 1634), ed. H. Imbert, Niort, 1878, pp. 123 and 127, and the poem of René Chopin on the subject in La Puce, fol. 69v. Such extensions are not unknown in the case of other Grands Jours: so, without noting the present example, J.-M. Augustin, ‘Les Grands Jours de Poitiers, ou le parlement chimérique’, in Les Parlements de province: pouvoirs, justice et société du XVe au XVIIIe siècle, ed. J. Poumarède and J. Thomas, Toulouse, 1996, pp. 89–104 (93 n. 20), with the remarks of F. Pasquier, Grands-Jours de Poitiers de 1454 à 1634, Paris, 1874, pp. 86–7. The last flea poem of the collection, François de la Couldraye’s ‘Propempticon carmen’, bids farewell to the jurists as they leave Poitiers and is dated 22 December 1579: La Puce, fol. 57r. (On the contributions of this young poet to La Puce, see C. Magnien-Simonin, ‘Un humaniste breton. François de la Couldraye, de Pontivy (1558–1619)’, Mémoires de la société d'histoire et d'archéologie de Bretagne, 66, 1989, pp. 251–83 (262–4, 282).) Prior to the extension, the Grands Jours would have taken place entirely while the sun was in Virgo, Libra (Chelae) and Scorpio, the three constellations in play in the Virgilian passage and in De la Guérinière’s sonnet.

  33. La Puce, fols 1r–2v.

  34. Nicolas Rapin, Oeuvres, ed. J. Brunel, 3 vols, Geneva, 1982–1984, I, pp. 276–7; Brunel, Un poitevin poète (n. 22 above), I, pp. 304–5. On the spontaneous generation of fleas, see C. Le Doze, La Puce: De la vermine aux démangeaisons érotiques, Paris, 2010, pp. 54–66.

  35. E.g. Hyginus, De astronomia, II.26. Nicolas Rapin, who in his ‘Contre-Puce’ (fols 53r–55v) takes an antagonistic attitude towards the praise of the flea made by both Des Roches and many of the other poets, favours a ‘correction’ to the myth. For him, the flea is the daughter of Orion, so disrupting its immediate descent from the gods and attributing its origin purely to the process of urination (borrowing from an ancient etymology to understand ‘Orion’ to mean ‘pisseur’/‘urinator’). Subverting Des Roches’s myth, Rapin emphasizes the unsavoury origin of the animal in order to dispraise it.

  36. La Puce, fols 17r–18v. Loisel’s poem frames itself, with a nod to the opening of Juvenal’s Satire I, as a latecomer to the poetic contest, written at Martinmas, at which point the Grands Jours had already been underway for a couple of months (addressing Achille de Harlay in the latter’s capacity as president: ‘Da veniam facilis, da libertate novembri / Quando ita Martinus voluit pater optimus, uti’/‘Kindly give leave, allow me to avail myself of November license, since good Father Martin wished it so’, ibid., fol. 17r).

  37. After the similar expression used to describe Maera: cf. Ovid, Amores II.16.4, Fasti IV.939. For the myth of Icarius, see Hyginus, Fabulae, 130, and De astronomia, II.4.

  38. As indicated by the expression ‘te duce, Pręses’ (La Puce, fol. 18r, v. 15). The title of the poem in the 1610 edition of La Puce clarifies this: ‘Pulex Pictonicus ad c<larum> v<irum> Achillem Harlaeum Praesidem. aut lasellu’ (p. 598), where the last two terms must be a compositor’s error for ‘Ant<onii> Loisellii’. On this later edition of La Puce (henceforth cited as La Puce 1610), published in La jeunesse d’Estienne Pasquier et sa suite, Paris, 1610, at pp. 563-682, see below. I discuss here the second of two different accounts of the flea’s origins given by Loisel in his ‘Pulex’. The first has been studied by Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above), pp. 116–18; and Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 39–44.

  39. There is no single classical model followed by Loisel, though several details call to mind Ovid’s Baucis and Philemon (for ‘mortalis specie’ at La Puce, fol. 18r, v. 24, cf. Ovid, Metamorphoses, VIII.626).

  40. ‘Materque et filia’. This expression nicely evokes the mother-daughter bond between Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches that they themselves promoted in their published works; on this relationship, see M. Lazard, ‘Les Dames des Roches: une dévotion réciproque et passionnée’, in Autour de Mme de Sévigné. Deux colloques pour un tricentenaire. Rapports mère-fille au XVIIe siècle et de nos jours, ed. R. Duchêne and P. Ronzeaud, Paris, 1997, pp. 9–18; L. L. Chang, Into Print: The Production of Female Authorship in Early Modern France, Newark, 2009, pp. 64–72; and N. Kenny, Born to Write: Literary Families and Social Hierarchy in Early Modern France, Oxford, 2020, pp. 113–20. Loisel’s association of the two runs counter to the tendency in La Puce to isolate Catherine from her mother; on this, see Chang, Into Print (this note), p. 84, and n. 47 below.

  41. On the objectives of the Grands Jours, see J.-M. Augustin, ‘Les Grands Jours, une cour supérieure foraine sous l'Ancien Régime’, Histoire de la justice, 21, 2011, pp. 41–7, esp. 44–5. For a sense of the political and religious orientation of the Des Roches, see, e.g., Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 189–200; on their social and economic status, see the summary treatment in Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, From Mother and Daughter: Poems, Dialogues, and Letters of Les Dames des Roches, ed. A. R. Larsen, Chicago, 2006, pp. 2–3, 6 and 16–17. The distinction Loisel makes in social status is, in real terms, exaggerated, though consonant with the classical theoxenic scenes that he would have had in mind, in which those who properly entertain the gods are often of lowly station. In the background of Loisel’s mythic construct lies perhaps also the idea that in such episodes of divine visitation those who refuse or resist the god (in Loisel’s poem, Astraea, i.e. the Justice of the Grands Jours) are severely punished (e.g. Lycaon at Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.209–40, or the neighbours of Baucis and Philemon at Metamorphoses, VIII.689–97); the Grands Jours similarly encountered, and broke, the resistance of certain locals.

  42. La Puce, fol. 18v, v. 2; cf. Virgil, Aeneid, I.328.

  43. Loisel tacitly builds an aetiology for the flea’s susceptibility to the fires of love (‘pulicis ardentis’/‘the burning flea’, La Puce, fol. 18v, v. 9) in its origins in Sirius (‘cane natus adusto’/‘born of the inflamed dog’, ibid., fol. 18r, v. 32).

  44. Ibid., fol. 18v, v. 18.

  45. Ibid., fol. 18v, v. 12. In star myth, Jupiter is the divinity most frequently responsible for stellification, which he sometimes grants upon petition (e.g. Diana’s intercession on behalf of Orion or that of the Muses for Crotus).

  46. Ibid., fol. 18r, v. 18.

  47. Ibid., fols 44v–45v. Apparently by Madeleine: attributed to Catherine in La Puce, but then to her mother in Les Secondes Oeuvres, whose publication was overseen by the Des Roches themselves. The same happened to Madeleine’s verses at fols 79[71]v–80r (‘Catherine Des Roches à E. Pasquier’), falling into the mother’s half of Les Secondes Oeuvres (Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Les Secondes Oeuvres, ed. A. R. Larsen, Geneva, 1998, pp. 117–18). Whether intentional or not, the elision of Madeleine Des Roches has an effect that is certainly consonant with the overall homosocial dynamic of La Puce (on which see Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above), p. 116): the only female voice left is that of Catherine Des Roches, the eroticized pretext for the competition between the male members of the coterie.

  48. La Puce, fol. 44v, vv. 9–12.

  49. Ibid., fol. 45r, v. 27–fol. 45v, v. 2 (emphasis mine).

  50. The reference to Loisel is identified at Des Roches and Des Roches, Secondes Oeuvres (n. 47 above), p. 116 n. 22. Des Roches is perhaps drawing on Claude Binet’s poem to Loisel, analysed below.

  51. That is, Hyginus, as ‘harbinger’, or officer in charge of arranging lodgings for troops, had not given it a chapter and a place in the sky in De astronomia.

  52. For similar language used of the celestial flea, see also Jacques de Courtin de Cissé, ‘Imitation des vers de Joseph de L’Escale’, La Puce, fol. 16v, vv. 15–18, and Odet de Turnèbe, ibid., ‘Puce’, fol. 34v, vv. 12–14.

  53. Ibid., fols 53r–55v.

  54. Ibid., fol. 53r, v. 24. On the ‘Contre-Puce’ generally, see Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above), pp. 119–20; Brunel, Un poitevin poète (n. 22 above), I, pp. 301–8, and II, pp. 1159–63. The text is edited in Rapin, Oeuvres (n. 34 above), I, pp. 269–77.

  55. La Puce, fol. 53v, v. 1.

  56. Rapin’s ‘De pulice Pictavii decantato’ (ibid., fol. 52v) similarly presents the patently guilty flea as put on trial at the Grands Jours and yet benefitting from the defence of the Parisian advocates.

  57. Ibid., fols 38v–39v. On Macefer (François Grelière, sieur de Macefer), see F. Lachèvre, Les recueils collectifs de poésies libres et satiriques publiés depuis 1600 jusqu’à la mort de Théophile (1626), Paris, 1914, p. 293; Brunel, Un poitevin poète (n. 22 above), I, pp. 290–91.

  58. Macefer, in referencing medical spirits, is elaborating upon an idea found in Catherine Des Roches’ own poem (‘Puce’, La Puce, fol. 1r, vv. 15–16). On the representation of Prometheus as a sculptor who steals fire to bring his creation to life, see O. Raggio, ‘The Myth of Prometheus. Its Survival and Metamorphoses up to the Eighteenth Century’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 21, 1958, pp. 44–62; R. Trousson, Le thème de Prométhée dans la littérature européenne, 3rd edn, Geneva, 2001, pp. 128–9.

  59. La Puce, fol. 39r, v. 10. Cf. Catherine Des Roches, ‘Puce’, ibid., fols 1v, v. 28–2r, v. 6.

  60. Ibid., fol. 39r, vv. 22–4.

  61. On the figure of Icarus in La Puce, see Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 63–5, and ‘Apollon en Puce’, La Puce, fol. 51v, vv. 1–4 (for which cf. Horace, Carmina IV.2.1–4). The artificiality of the flea’s flight implied by the likeness to Icarus (a metaphor for its dependence on the poets) takes us back to Pasquier’s sonnet to Achille de Harlay, discussed above.

  62. La Puce, fol. 39v, vv. 13–14.

  63. See R. Cotgrave, A Dictionarie of the French and English Tongues, London, 1611, s.v. ongle. On the method, once frequently applied, of destroying fleas by catching them and crushing them on one’s fingernails, see Le Doze, La Puce (n. 34 above), pp. 29–30. Macefer playfully adopts the moralizing approach to Prometheus that one finds, e.g. in emblem books, where the Titan (along with Icarus) is associated with the arrogant pursuit of divine knowledge: see Andrea Alciato, Emblematum liber, Augsburg, 1531, sig. B4r-v (a source in which the bird is said to use its talon to carry out the punishment).

  64. Brunel, Un poitevin poète (n. 22 above), p. 296; Rapin, Oeuvres (n. 34 above), I, p. 266 n. 19. However, Macefer’s poem is at least as good a candidate. Des Roches in this stanza refers to ‘Celuy qui la reprend d’estre injuste et cruelle’ (‘The one who accuses the flea of being unjust and cruel’, La Puce, fol. 45r, v. 10). This is a position more consistently developed in Macefer’s poem than in Rapin’s, and there are close parallels in Macefer’s descriptions of the flea’s ‘cruelle offense’, ‘fait inique’ and ‘injuste faute’ (ibid., fol. 39r, vv. 9 and 24, and fol. 39v, v. 2).

  65. Ibid., fol. 45r, v. 10.

  66. Ibid., fol. 30v.

  67. This despite appearances: see J. P. Barbier-Mueller, Ma bibliothèque poétique. Quatrième partie, tome IV: Contemporains et successeurs de Ronsard, de Marquets à Pasquier, Geneva, 2005, pp. 599–600; Magnien-Simonin, ‘Réflexions sur l’anonymat’ (n. 29 above), pp. 10–11; M. Campanini, ‘“Faire le procès à son livre”. Épistolarité et discours d’auteur chez Étienne Pasquier’, Revue italienne d'études françaises, 8, 2018, pp. 1–11 (7).

  68. Pasquier’s ‘Voeu’, in La Puce 1610, pp. 663–4, which includes Catherine Des Roches but places Pasquier’s own name first, and Madeleine Des Roches’s ‘Quatrains aux Poëtes chante-Puce’, ibid., pp. 659–61, which, as discussed above, alludes to Catherine Des Roches at the beginning but on the whole dilutes her role in the poetic contest.

  69. Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above), pp. 126–7; Larsen, ‘On Reading La Puce’ (n. 2 above), p. 67; Magnien-Simonin, ‘Réflexions sur l’anonymat’ (n. 29 above), p. 13 n. 19.

  70. La Puce 1610, p. 563.

  71. On Des Roches and Pasquier as mirror images in this text, see Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 30–32. The letter, published in Pasquier’s 1586 Lettres, has been edited in Choix de lettres sur la littérature, la langue et la traduction, ed. D. Thickett, Geneva, 1956, pp. 13–19. Magnien-Simonin, ‘Réflexions sur l’anonymat’ (n. 29 above), pp. 11–12, considers the letter to Pithou a fiction, a further elaboration on the 1582 notice ‘Au lecteur’ prepared by Pasquier for his Lettres of 1586. While not discrediting the possibility, I adopt the usual assumption, that the letter pre-existed, and served as the basis for, the note to the reader in the original edition of La Puce. The issue does not, in any case, affect the present discussion, which compares the notices ‘Au lecteur’ found in the 1582/1583 and 1610 editions of La Puce. The alteration on which I focus here is not found in the text of the letter to Pithou in the 1586 Lettres.

  72. La Puce, sig. aiiir–v. The translation that follows is a lightly adjusted version of the one made by Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 30–31.

  73. On the significance of the emotion of surprise and its relationship to the activities and intellectual qualities favoured by the literary coterie, see Larsen, ‘On Reading La Puce’ (n. 2 above), pp. 64–5.

  74. La Puce 1610, p. 566.

  75. Ibid., p. 661.

  76. Ibid., p. 662.

  77. On the Gigantomachy as the quintessentially epic theme, see D. C. Innes, ‘Gigantomachy and Natural Philosophy’, Classical Quarterly, 29, 1979, pp. 165–71.

  78. On the potent negative connotations of the Giants in French poetry of the sixteenth century, see V. Robert-Nicoud, The World Upside Down in 16th-Century French Literature and Visual Culture, Leiden, 2018, pp. 229–35.

  79. The flea catasterism, as an expression of paradoxical encomium, naturally contrasts with a tendency in Roman literature to link celestial honours to the practice of virtus (e.g. Horace, Carmina, III.2.21–4). On the passage from the Fasti, see I. Pantin, La poésie du ciel en France dans la seconde moitié du seizième siècle, Geneva, 1995, p. 101.

  80. The identification of the Giants here as ‘Terrigenae’ (‘the Earth-born’) underscores moreover the origin they hold in common with the flea.

  81. ‘Magnus author’ (i.e. ‘auctor’). Much of the poem’s lexicon and structure, as well as its comparison of mortal and divine, looks to Martial, Epigrams, I.6.

  82. In the French adaptation: ‘... Puce, qui par Pasquier prend son vol jusqu’aux cieux’. The Latin quotation is a somewhat bold reworking of Horace, Carmina, IV.8.29, since Pasquier is claimed to be blessing not the recipient of praise (Horace’s ‘dignum laude virum’/‘man worthy of praise’) but the sky itself. On the ode of Horace, see further n. 83 below.

  83. As Loisel puts it: ‘foelices animae metris coeloque beatae’ (‘Happy the souls blessed with verse and possession of the sky!’, La Puce, fol. 18v, v. 20, with corrigendum on fol. 94[91]v). This is an amalgamation of Ovid, Fasti, I.297 (praising those who by studying the sky have earned a place in it) and Horace, Carmina, IV.8.29 (‘caelo Musa beat’). The latter was an influential expression of the association of poetry and immortality in the 16th century: it was Du Bellay’s motto, and the newly founded University of Leiden displayed these words at its entrance: K. van Ommen, ‘The Legacy of Josephus Justus Scaliger in Leiden University Library Catalogues, 1609–1716’, in Documenting the Early Modern Book World: Inventories and Catalogues in Manuscript and Print, ed. M. Walsby and N. Constantinidou, Leiden, 2013, pp. 51–82 (51). On its presence in emblem books, see R. J. Clements, ‘The Cult of the Poet in Renaissance Emblem Literature’, PMLA, 59, 1944, pp. 672–85 (673–4 and 680). It was used to assert not only the immortality of the poetic subject, but also that of the poet himself, e.g. in Marc-Antoine Muret, The Iuvenilia ... , ed. K. M. Summers, Columbus, 2006, p. 185, on Epistles 3.33. In La Puce, cf. also Barnabé Brisson, ‘Pulex’, fol. 7v, v. 2.

  84. Compare the dynamic described by Desrosiers-Bonin, ‘Lieux d’immortalité’ (n. 16 above), p. 24.

  85. That is, Οὐιρ-.

  86. Cf. Aristophanes, Clouds, 459.

  87. La Puce, fols 8v–9r.

  88. In the Culex, at the time universally attributed to Virgil. Joseph Scaliger had moreover recently argued the poem to be not merely a boyish prelude to an illustrious career, but rather a product of Virgil’s maturity and a masterful imitation of Catullan narrative style: S. Brammall, ‘Rewriting the Virgilian Career: The Scaligers and the Appendix Vergiliana’, Renaissance Quarterly, 74, 2021, pp. 763–801 (789–92).

  89. In the Muscae encomium.

  90. Catherine Des Roches, by allusion to her surname and perhaps to the topography of her native Poitiers.

  91. A second reference to Catherine Des Roches’s ‘Puce’.

  92. La Puce, fols 1r–2v.

  93. Ibid., fols 3r–5r.

  94. The death of the flea at the hand of Des Roches (or its avoidance of that hand) is imagined, in addition to the examples discussed elsewhere in this article, in the poems of Scaliger (ibid., fol. 14r–v, with its French imitation by Jacques de Courtin de Cissé, ibid., fols 15r–16v), Mangot (ibid., fols 20v–22r), Binet (ibid., fols 22v–24r), Raoul Cailler (ibid., fols 41r–43v), and an anonymous poet (ibid., fol. 48r–v).

  95. Ibid., fol. 1v, v. 16.

  96. Ibid., fol. 2v, v. 22. On Des Roches’s use of the myth of Syrinx, see Yandell, ‘Of Lice and Women’ (n. 2 above), pp. 126–7; Olson, ‘La Femme à la Puce’ (n. 2 above), pp. 334–5. When Des Roches says that le nom remains the same, she is playing with the similarity between pucelle and puce, while looking back to her Ovidian model, which culminates in an aetiology for the name of the object into which Syrinx is transformed (see Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.712).

  97. Ovid, Metamorphoses, I.708.

  98. Olson, ‘La Femme à la Puce’ (n. 2 above), p. 334. Olson’s position marks an advance on assumptions—e.g. Yandell, ‘Of Lice and Women’ (n. 2 above), p. 131—that Des Roches is referring to her own hand.

  99. Choix de lettres (n. 71 above), p. 14: ‘je dis à Madame des Roches ... que j’estimois ceste Pulce, la plus prudente et hardie que l’on eust sceu desirer … très-hardie, de s’estre mise en un si beau jour, parce que, si je me mutinois, je me donnerois assez tost la loy de l’oster, et en estre le meurtrier, pour la voir prendre la hardiesse de se loger en si haut lieu. Et comme ce propos fut rejetté d’une bouche à autre, par une contention mignarde, finalement je luy dis…’, and here follows the proposal to commemorate the flea in verse.

  100. One may compare Pasquier’s punning use of dépuceler (to deflea, or to deflower) that occurs in the section of his poem in which he seems to allude to his proposal to kill the flea (fol. 4r, vv. 19–26). On the erotic overtones of l’épuçage, see Le Doze, La Puce (n. 34 above), pp. 101–5.

  101. Des Roches’s abilities along these lines prompt Pasquier’s admiring description in a second letter written to Pierre Pithou during the Grands Jours: ‘C’est une Dame qui ne manque point de response. Et neantmoins il ne sort d’elle aucun propos qui ne soit digne d’une sage fille’ (Choix de lettres (n. 71 above), p. 20).

  102. La Puce, sig. aiiir-v.

  103. From ‘parce que, si je me mutinois’ to ‘en si haut lieu’ in the part of the passage reproduced in n. 99.

  104. I am therefore in agreement with the assessment of Chang, Into Print (n. 40 above), pp. 81–2.

  105. On Brisson’s ‘Pulex’, see W. L. Little, ‘A Renaissance Imitator of the De pulice’, Manuscripta, 64, 2020, pp. 257–83 (260–67). Brief accounts of Brisson’s role in La Puce are to be found in P. Gambier, Au temps des Guerres de Religion. Le Président Barnabé Brisson, ligueur (1531–1591), Paris, 1957, pp. 31–4; and E. Barnavi and R. Descimon, La Sainte Ligue, le juge et la potence: l’assassinat du Président Brisson (15 novembre 1591), Paris, 1985, pp. 83–7.

  106. La Puce, sig. aiir–v. The language used is that of bringing scattered pieces together: ‘Je pris plaisir à recueillir le plus fidelement qu’il me fut possible plusieurs gentilles et doctes inventions en vers’. Similarly in the second notice of Jacques de Sourdrai at sig. Qiv.

  107. A similar observation is made by Chang, Into Print (n. 40 above), p. 83.

  108. Choix de lettres (n. 71 above), p. 15.

  109. Of seven poet catalogues in La Puce, only one does not mention Brisson. Of the remainder, four place Brisson in first position. I include among these catalogues the reference to Brisson made in lines 7–10 of Loisel’s ‘Pulex’ (La Puce, fol. 17r). As often happens in these catalogues, Brisson is not expressly named here, and Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 39–40, takes these lines together with those that follow as all describing René Chopin. But the ‘ille etiam’ (‘he, too’) in line 11 clearly marks a transition to another figure (the anaphora ‘je voy … je voy’ makes the corresponding division in Pasquier’s French imitation of this poem, La Puce, fol. 19r). Furthermore, the 1610 edition of La Puce, whose publication was overseen by Pasquier, prints a marginal note to both the Latin and the French versions that clarifies the reference to Brisson (La Puce 1610, pp. 598, 603). My list of poet catalogues in La Puce is a little different from that of Brunel, Un poitevin poète (n. 22 above), I, p. 296 n. 233, as I include Chopin’s reference to the early Puce poets (La Puce, fol. 13v) and exclude Brisson’s ‘Sermo’ (ibid., fols 66r–67v), which does not deal with these poets’ productions on the flea. I also leave out of account the ‘Pulex’ of Laurent Bouchel (‘Bochellus’; ibid., fol. 46r–v), which is vaguer than the others and groups the poets by criteria (esp. metre employed) other than order of composition.

  110. I expand here upon an idea presented by Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), p. 36.

  111. La Puce, fol. 8r.

  112. Ibid., fols 9v–11v.

  113. Ibid., fols 1r–6r.

  114. Ibid., fols 22v–31r. Though a poem by his uncle, Jean Binet, as touched up by the nephew, is located outside this grouping (ibid., fol. 12r–v): on it, see Little, ‘A Renaissance Imitator’ (n. 105 above), pp. 267–70.

  115. La Puce, fols 31v–37v.

  116. This statement applies most obviously to Scaliger, resident in Poitou and whose presence in La Puce was discussed above at n. 20. On his attainments in Greek verse, see A. Grafton, Joseph Scaliger: A Study in the History of Classical Scholarship, 2 vols, Oxford, 1983–1993, I, pp. 103–104. Scaliger had, in fact, already produced a Greek version of Catherine Des Roches’s ode Au Roy (Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, Les Oeuvres, ed. A. R. Larsen, Geneva, 1993, pp. 302–4). Specimens of Le Loyer’s Greek verse may be found in a volume published the very year of the Grands Jours de Poitiers (Les Oeuvres et meslanges poétiques de Pierre Le Loyer Angevin, Paris, 1579), and La Croix du Maine credits Odet de Turnèbe with ‘plusieurs vers Grecs, Latins et François’ (Premier volume de la bibliothèque du sieur de La Croix du Maine, Paris, 1584, p. 365, though it seems that he did not have first-hand knowledge of any such Greek poetry). Nicolas Rapin also wrote poetry in Greek, though our only known example comes from much later in his life: Brunel, Un poitevin poète (n. 22 above), II, pp. 928–31.

  117. La Puce, fols 49r–50r.

  118. La Puce 1610, pp. 646–7. The 1610 edition omits the longer Greek poem as well. On Pierre de Soulfour, see the pages referenced under his name in the index nominum of M. Popoff, Prosopographie des gens du Parlement de Paris (1266–1753), 2nd edn, Paris, 2003. Soulfour is apparently the author of the longer poem that follows at fols 50v–52r, entitled ‘Apollon en Puce’ and signed ‘P. D. S.’; see Tarte, Writing Places (n. 1 above), pp. 224 n. 27 and 228 n. 32. His authorship of this piece finds some confirmation in the epithet ‘Délien’ attached to him in the ‘Quatrains aux Poëtes chante-Puce’: Des Roches and Des Roches, Secondes Oeuvres (n. 47 above), p. 115.

  119. F. Lachèvre, Bibliographie des recueils collectifs de poésies du XVIe siècle, Paris, 1922, pp. 188–91.

  120. Bulletin de la librairie Morgand et Fatout, 1, 1876–1878, pp. 382–3.

  121. Sig. aiir-v. Hauboesius mentions that his interest in the Hellenismos was stirred by his teacher, Bressius. This links him to Maurice Bressieu, who began his career by teaching Greek and Latin before gaining the chair of mathematics established by Petrus Ramus at the Collège royal in 1575, a few years before this preface was written; see Salomon de Merez, Vie de Maurice Bressieu, ed. A. Lacroix, Valence, 1880, pp. 10–11.

  122. For this division of the authors of La Puce into two ‘worlds’, see Brunel, Un poitevin poète (n. 22 above), I, p. 286.

  123. On the prominent use of such titles in La Puce, see Jones, ‘Contentious Readings’ (n. 1 above), pp. 118–19.

  124. I borrow from the conception of Abel L’Angelier as ‘infiltrator’ of the coterie developed by Chang, Into Print (n. 40 above), pp. 83–4. Hauboesius’s poem is likely one of those mentioned by Jacques de Sourdrai as having been composed after the Grands Jours were over (La Puce, sig. aiiv). A mention of Greek in Loisel’s ‘Pulex’ (fol. 17v, v. 6) indicates that, by the time of that poem’s composition (St Martin’s Day: see n. 36 above), at least one poet had already ventured into Greek. Whether this should be taken to refer to Soulfour, Hauboesius, or some other poet whose Greek verse did not make it into La Puce I cannot say.

  125. In the context of his legal scholarship: Loisel, ‘Pulex’, fol. 17r, v. 8.

  126. On the social composition of an early literary salon like that of the Des Roches, see Rouget, ‘Academies, Circles, “Salons”’ (n. 1 above), pp. 58–9. Brunel, Un poitevin poète (n. 22 above), I, pp. 308–9, shows how Nicolas Rapin used the opportunity presented by the poetic contest, in tandem with the services he rendered to the Grands Jours, to distinguish himself before the visiting dignitaries, with resounding success.

  127. This figure (‘mon homme’) is introduced only in the 1610 edition, but the note to the reader in the original edition and the letter to Pithou published separately from La Puce likewise describe the sending of the poem rather than its recitation.

  128. Choix de lettres (n. 71 above), pp. 14–15: ‘elle [la puce] meritoit encore d’estre enchassée dans nos papiers…’; ‘nous meismes la main à la plume en ce mesme temps…’; ‘Ces deux petits jeux ont commencé à courir par les mains de plusieurs …’ This anticipates other traces of the manuscript circulation of the Puce poems of which we know, beginning in this very letter to Pithou, to which Pasquier appended copies of his and Des Roches’s poems with a promise to bring the others back with him to Paris. In a subsequent letter to Pithou, Pasquier represents the ongoing battle of wits with Des Roches as one carried out in writing: ‘je ne la sçaurois si bien assaillir, qu’elle ne se deffende trop mieux, d’une plume si hardie, que je douteray desormais de luy escrire’, Choix de lettres (n. 71 above), p. 20. Another individual in attendance at the Des Roches salon during the Grands Jours left annotations in his copies of Les Oeuvres and Les Secondes Oeuvres. This Pierre Cadot comments on Catherine’s musical abilities, but does not help us determine whether any of the poems on the flea were performed. For a summary of what we know of these annotations, see Des Roches and Des Roches, From Mother and Daughter (n. 40 above), p. 39; many of them are examined in greater detail by É. Berriot-Salvadore, ‘Les femmes dans les cercles intellectuels de la Renaissance: De la fille prodige à la précieuse’, in Études corses, études littéraires. Mélanges offerts au doyen François Pitti-Ferrandi, Paris, 1989, pp. 210–37 (218–23).

  129. Of our two fullest sources on the Des Roches salon one mentions poetry as an important component of its activities, but in such a way as to suggest the recitation of previously composed verse rather than games of on-the-spot poetic improvisation: Pasquier’s second letter to Pithou, in Choix de lettres (n. 71 above), p. 20; Scévole de Sainte-Marthe, Oeuvres complètes, VI: Gallorum doctrina illustrium elogia, ed. J. Brunel, Geneva, 2018, pp. 214–17. In the titles of a few of the responces included in La Puce are found the expressions faite promptement (Catherine Des Roches to Pierre Le Loyer, fol. 85v; Pierre Le Loyer to Catherine Des Roches, fol. 86r; cf. the usage in Catherine Des Roches’s poem to Pasquier ‘Au printemps de vostre jeunesse’, at fol. 80r) and faite sur le champ (Catherine Des Roches to Odet de Turnèbe, fol. 37v), which might be taken as indications of verse improvised in the salon. Neither of these phrases, however, necessarily denotes oral improvisation rather than rapidity of written composition (and so a fact observable by spectators rather than an element of poetic self-representation). For examples of sur le champ being used both of speech and of writing, see Dictionnaire du Moyen Français, s.v. champ E.3; cf. Philibert Monet, Invantaire des deus langues, françoise et latine, assorti des plus utiles curiositez de l'un et de l'autre idiome, Lyon, 1636, p. 188, and in particular, the note reproving the habit of translating sur le champ into Latin as in promptu in such expressions as dicere in promptu and scribere in promptu. On the other hand, an instance of the expression used undeniably to denote public, instantaneous composition of verse is found in Pasquier’s description of the act that initiated the poetry of La main ou oeuvres poétiques faits sur la main de Estienne Pasquier, advocat au Parlement de Paris, Paris, Michel Gadouleau, 1584 (at sig. aiiv). However, it is notable that even in this moment designed to showcase Pasquier’s genius, we are dealing only with a single distich of improvised verse.

  130. La Puce may be situated among the poetic albums dedicated to salonnières by their guests: A. R. Larsen, ‘Marie Bruneau, Dame des Loges: Salon Conversation and the honnête femme’, L’Esprit Créateur, 60, 2020, pp. 100–112 (p. 110 n. 16). Another, rather different analogue would be the volume entitled La main (see n. 129 above), which parallels La Puce in its genesis (instigated by Étienne Pasquier at the Grands Jours de Troyes of 1583), in its poetics of light and rapid composition and in its representation of a lively and learned community of collaborating poets without, however, any apparent role for a salon-like, semi-private space where that community would gather for the purposes of conviviality. For the origin story of that collection, see La main, sig. aiir–eiiiir.

  131. See, e.g. the remarks found in Des Roches and Des Roches, Secondes Oeuvres (n. 47 above), pp. 64–5.

Acknowledgements

For their suggestions on different aspects of this article, I am most grateful to Antoine Haaker, Stephen Hill and Benjamin Hoffmann.

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Little, W.L. Myth, Patronage and the Literary Coterie: The Greek Poems of La Puce de Madame Des Roches. Int class trad 30, 351–380 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12138-022-00626-6

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