Short answers, pulled from the story.
Joachim du Bellay was a French poet and critic born around 1522, and a founding member of La Pléiade, the group that shaped Renaissance French poetry. He wrote the Défense et illustration de la langue française in 1549, a manifesto arguing that French could equal Greek and Latin as a literary language.
The Défense et illustration de la langue française is a literary manifesto du Bellay published in 1549 on behalf of La Pléiade. It argued that French was not inherently inferior to the classical languages, but needed cultivation through imitation of ancient models and careful borrowing from Italian, Latin, and Greek. It was partly inspired by Sperone Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue of 1542.
The Regrets is a collection of 191 sonnets du Bellay published in 1558, the majority written during his four and a half years in Rome. The poems are known for their personal tone, expressing homesickness for the Loire, satirical portraits of Roman life, and the story of his love for a Roman woman named Faustine.
Du Bellay traveled to Rome in 1553 as a secretary to Cardinal du Bellay and remained for four and a half years. His duties were largely administrative, managing the cardinal's creditors and household finances. He produced his Antiquités de Rome, a sequence of 47 sonnets, and formed a close friendship with fellow exiled French poet Olivier de Magny.
Du Bellay met Pierre de Ronsard probably in 1547 at an inn on the road to Poitiers. The encounter is regarded as the starting point of the French school of Renaissance poetry. The two became close friends and du Bellay returned with Ronsard to Paris to study under Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret.
Du Bellay was buried at Notre-Dame Cathedral in Paris, where he had served as a canon. In April 2022, excavations following the 2019 cathedral fire uncovered a lead coffin. By 2024 the remains were tentatively identified as du Bellay's based on evidence of bone tuberculosis and chronic meningitis, though isotope analysis has since suggested the bones may belong to the sixteenth-century knight Édouard de la Madeleine.