Mar14
Amours retranchées 5
De toy, Paschal, il me plaist que j’escriveQui de bien loin le peuple abandonnant,Vas des Romains les tresors moissonnant,Le long des bors où la Garonne arrive. Haut d’une langue éternellement vive,Son cher Paschal Tholose aille sonnant,Paschal, Paschal, Garonne resonnant,Rien que Paschal ne responde sa rive. Si ton Durban, l’honneur de nostre temps,Lit quelquefois ces vers par passe-temps,Di-luy, Paschal (ainsi l’aspre secousse Qui m’a fait cheoir, ne te puisse émouvoir)Ce pauvre Amant estoit digne d’avoirUne Maistresse, ou moins belle, ou plus douce. Of you, Paschal, it pleases me to write You who far off, abandoning the common throng, Go harvesting the treasures of the Romans Along the banks where the Garonne runs. Loudly in a language eternally alive Toulouse goes on praising its dear Paschal; The Garonne replying ‘Paschal, Paschal’, Its banks echoing nothing but Paschal. If your Durban, the pride of our times, Sometimes reads these verses at leisure, Tell him, Paschal (for the harsh shock Which has made me fall cannot thus move you) That this poor lover was worthy of having A mistress either less beautiful or more gentle. We’ve met Paschal before and seen how Ronsard became less enchanted with him too. It’s not surprising that this sonnet ended up being withdrawn when that happened, naming him 6 times as it does! (And that’s even more obvious if you typeset the name in capitals each time, as is done by Marty-Laveaux, following some of the early sixteenth-century editions… But the story of how Paschal rose and fell is interesting, not principally to see Ronsard being duped by someone who didn’t have the same talent as he did, but rather for showing how it could have happened. It’s all about what was important at the time, and how values have changed; what is valued now, is not what was valued then. But first the contemporary notes on the sonnet written by Muret: Line 1: ‘He addresses this sonnet to Pierre Paschal, a gentleman native to Languedoc, a man who, beyond an understanding of the sciences worthy of a fine mind (in which he has few equals) is endowed with such eloquence in Latin that even the Venetian Senate was astonished several times by it.’ Line 3: commenting on an earlier version of this line, which begins “Vas du Arpin…” (‘Go harvesting the treasures of the man from Arpinum’ – Cicero’s birthplace), Muret paraphrases “Go carefully gleaning the riches of Ciceronian eloquence”, and adds ‘he says that, because Paschal is one of those best-versed in Cicero who are alive today’ Line 4: ‘River which passes through Toulouse, where Paschal has his residence’ Line 9: ‘Michel-Pierre de Mauléon, protonotary of Durban, councillor in the Toulouse parliament, a very excellent fellow. Between him and Paschal is so great a friendship that effaces all those which are recommended by ancient authors.’ So, now to the story of Paschal’s rise and fall. It’s easy to forget – in an age when the ‘vulgar tongue’ has triumphed – that the Renaissance was not the re-birth of art, or of vernacular poetry, but pre-eminently was the re-birth of classical Latin & Greek literary style. All (or almost all) languages have a day-to-day form, and a higher style used in poetry and literature; and sometimes the gap between them is bigger, sometimes smaller. During the centuries since the fall of Rome, when Latin had remained the language of the church and of communication, the gap had become quite small – as it is today in English. But in the 1300s and 1400s, Italians rediscovered what the Golden Latin (& Silver Latin) poets and writers had done, and realised that the literary style could be much more refined than it was. And it was Latin, in particular, where their efforts were focused. Languages like French and Italian were, literally, secondary – and scholars even doubted whether anything good could be written in them. Ronsard and his peers were taking a risk by ‘renewing’ the French language as a language capable of birthing poetry of a quality comparable with the Greek and Roman ‘classics’. Petrarch in Italy, and now Ronsard in France, were determined to show that the local language could be used as stylishly as Latin; but they lived within a humanist world which still valued Latin higher. When you see one or more dedicatory poems in Latin at the beginning of one of Ronsard’s collections, it’s not an affectation: it is a statement that what follows is literature worthy of the name, and the Latin is there to prove it. It’s also important to realise that good style was valued enormously highly. In Florence, in the 1400s, reputations were made and lost on the turn of a (Latin) phrase. So Paschal’s Italian training in good classical Roman style was a strong weapon in his armoury. It’s worth noting that Paschal had published only the short book in 1548 (beautifully presented, of course – see it online here) containing his prosecution speech at a murder trial in Venice, and some Latin letters describing his Italian impressions, which would be his calling-card on being introduced to the poets; indeed, he would publish little else. That his reputation, on this basis, should equal Ronsard’s, looks crazy to us at this distance, but gives some idea of the importance the Renaissance attached to style rather than substance: what mattered was writing well, not necessarily the originality or substantive content of what you wrote. And Paschal did, indeed, write Latin well. Paschal’s career was traced at length by Pierre de Nolhac a century back – well worth a read. His rise really begins when he came back from Italy in 1553, fluent in the ‘Ciceronian’ style of oratorical Latin which was favoured by the Italian stylists, and was introduced to some of the Pleiade poets: Ronsard, along with Olivier de Magny, was his first and strongest supporter. For what it’s worth, Baif’s first published piece of poetry was a dedicatory sonnet in another little booklet publishing a French translation of that Venetian speech of Paschal’s. The promise of writing eulogies of France’s greatest poets in Latin had a strong appeal to all of them, even though they were wedded to the renewal of the French language, for they ‘knew’ instinctively that histories and eulogies written in Latin were longer-lasting and more significant than the equivalent in French. Publication in Latin would ensure that their reputation was Europe-wide, for a Latin eulogy would reach educated people across the whole of Europe. And Henri II ‘knew’ that it was more important that the history of his reign was undertaken by someone who could write high-quality Latin, than by someone who could handle sources etc with a historian’s insight. Which is why Paschal rose so quickly to the position of Historiographer of France, in 1554. He was – or presented himself as – the pre-eminent Italian-trained Ciceronian writer in France. Not until Muret went to Rome would he have a direct rival. But his fine Latin did not make him a good historian. Although Ronsard and others ridiculed him for not having managed to write any of his history, three volumes of drafts survive in manuscript, and show that he was good at writing speeches etc, but not at military history or the undercurrents of politics. So his history skimped on what we think of as ‘history’, and majored on long speeches and extended praises of the main characters. And when Henri II died in 1559, he fell from favour and was replaced, returned to the south, and died soon afterwards (in 1565, aged only 45) leaving his history unfinished. By 1554, then, Paschal was an important personage, and with the prospect of being immortalised in Latin, it was important that the poets continued to praise him. As late as 1558 Bellay placed him alongside Ronsard, he the master of prose, Ronsard the master of poetry; and in the mid-1550s Ronsard amended one of his 1550 odes so that it now said ‘Paschal will at some point make me immortal by his eloquence … It’s you who will make me eternal!’. To us, both the statement, and the breath-taking sycophantism of it, look unbelievable. And indeed back in 1555 Etienne Pasquier had already warned Ronsard that he was over-estimating and over-praising Paschal. (Further south, in Paschal’s home, people were less convinced by him: as early as 1551 a humanist poet and professor of law, Etienne Forcadel, had written: ‘Hear what his gilded eloquence actually says: that speech, however sweet, is empty’. So Ronsard’s line 5, about Toulouse praising Paschal, is not entirely true!) (Incidentally, Paschal’s dear friend Durban was, as Muret’s note explains, a member of the Mauléon family. Paschal’s printed speech from Venice was as prosecutor in a trial for the murder of a Mauléon; though it’s not clear if the family chose him for his known eloquence in Ciceronian-style prosecutions, or because of some prior connection in Toulouse. Ronsard, in his 1559 invective, later reproached Durban for having ‘imposed’ the mediocre Paschal on him and for over-praising him among the poets. In fact, of course, Ronsard did quite a lot of that himself!) Ronsard was not alone in preparing biographical material in French which Paschal could convert into a more significant publication, in Latin. But Paschal failed to deliver on his ‘hall of fame’ – though there is evidence that, again, he made some progress towards it: interestingly, there is a piece on Mellin de Saint-Gelais which survives – so perhaps his popularity with Ronsard’s set was affected by his taking a different view of just who was important to mention in this ‘hall of fame’! But then the Pleiade poets began to see through the ‘emperor’s clothes’ and realise that his talents were, in fact, limited. It is interesting that this happened in 1559, when the King his supporter died and he did not gain the new King’s support. Could Ronsard and his friends have been playing safe up to that point? But when the gloves came off they really did get vituperative. Adrien Tournebu published a vicious Latin satire, and Baif published a French translation; Ronsard wrote, but only circulated in manuscript, a vicious anti-eulogy of him – in Latin. In Latin, because that was Paschal’s home turf, and because it carried more weight. Incidentally, although Ronsard’s Latin is fine and even stylish, it’s not in the same league as Paschal’s. Each had their specialism, and each was excellent within it. Is it coincidental that Ronsard also prepared a first collected edition of his works very shortly afterwards in 1560, and removed Paschal’s name from all the poems and dedications he had given him? (He wanted to re-dedicate his Hymne de la Mort to Bellay – but Bellay refused ‘someone else’s leftovers’.) It was about the same time that Ronsard wrote, in his Elegie to Jérôme L’Huillier, of the way others, more adept than him but less deserving, won honours from kings while he struggled to make ends meet. As usual though, Ronsard’s anger was short-lived. His poem beginning “Je meurs Paschal” dates from about 1564, when Paschal had retired to the south; and Ronsard also mentioned him favourably in some of his anti-Calvinist poetry. By this time, though, Paschal was dead, so Ronsard’s cooling anger may have had as much to do with that early death and the sadness of potential unfulfilled, as with any genuine reconciliation. A minor detail of Ronsard history to close: in 1554 it was Paschal who, in Toulouse, persuaded the jury of the ‘Jeux Floraux’ to award the prize to Ronsard, and it was Paschal who accepted the award on his behalf. The silver flower never reached Ronsard, but the next year the committee had a silver statuette of Minerva made instead and sent that. Ronsard presented it to the King!
Oeuvres de Ronsard 