Joachim du Bellay

• 1. Introduction

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  Joachim du Bellay was born around 1522 in a castle called La Turmelière, near the town of Liré, not far from Angers. He died on the 1st of January 1560, at thirty-eight. In those less than four decades, he helped invent modern French literature.

  Both his parents were gone before he was old enough to fend for himself. His elder brother René took guardianship and paid little attention to the boy's education, leaving him to wander the grounds of La Turmelière largely unsupervised. What kind of writer emerges from that kind of neglect? What happens when a man who spent his childhood half-wild ends up writing the founding manifesto of an entire national literature?

  This documentary follows du Bellay from the castle where he grew up untended, through a chance meeting at a roadside inn that changed French poetry forever, to four and a half years of bitter exile in Rome where his greatest work was born. It asks why a document called the Défense et illustration de la langue française still matters, and what the recent discovery of a lead coffin beneath Notre-Dame has reopened about the question of where his bones actually rest.

• 2. The Inn on the Road to Poitiers

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  At twenty-three, du Bellay finally received permission to study law at the University of Poitiers. The family's goal was practical: his kinsman Cardinal Jean du Bellay was well-placed, and a legal education could open doors to clerical preferment. But Poitiers had a literary atmosphere that proved more powerful than any career plan.

  At Poitiers, du Bellay came into contact with the humanist Marc Antoine Muret and with Jean Salmon Macrin, a Latin poet who was well-known in his day, born in 1490. He probably also met Jacques Peletier du Mans there, a figure who had already published a translation of Horace's Ars Poetica with a preface that sketched in rough outline much of what would later become the program of La Pléiade.

  The decisive moment came probably in 1547. On the road to Poitiers, at an inn, du Bellay met Pierre de Ronsard. Scholars have described this encounter as the starting point of the French school of Renaissance poetry. The two men found they had a great deal in common and became close friends. Du Bellay went back with Ronsard to Paris, where they joined the circle of students gathered around the scholar Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret.

  Within that circle, the two friends occupied distinct intellectual territories. Ronsard and Jean-Antoine de Baïf were most drawn to Greek models. Du Bellay, by contrast, was primarily a Latinist. His deep familiarity with a language so closely related to French may help explain why his poetry would eventually strike a more personal and nationally rooted note than his companions'.

• 3. The Manifesto and Its Enemies

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  In 1548, a poet and theorist named Thomas Sébillet published his Art poétique. The book articulated many of the ideas that Ronsard and his circle had been developing, but with a crucial difference: Sébillet held up Clément Marot and his followers as the models worth emulating. Ronsard and his friends disagreed forcefully. They also felt, not unreasonably, that their ideas had been poached and then misrepresented.

  The response came in 1549: the Défense et illustration de la langue française, the manifesto of the Pléiade. The work was inspired in part by Sperone Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue of 1542. Ronsard was the acknowledged leader of the group, but it was du Bellay who was trusted with writing it.

  The argument du Bellay made was double-edged and deliberately provocative. He held that French, as it then stood, was too poor a language to carry the higher forms of poetry. But he insisted this was not a permanent condition. With proper cultivation, French could be raised to the level of Greek and Latin. Writers who had given up on their mother tongue and retreated into Latin were, in his view, wrong. For translations from the ancient world he would substitute imitations, though he was vague in the Defense itself about exactly what that process should look like.

  The book also called for a separate poetic language and style, distinct from prose. French should be enriched by developing its own internal resources and by borrowing carefully from Italian, Latin, and Greek. Both du Bellay and Ronsard stressed that this borrowing had to be disciplined; neither wanted to be accused of simply Latinizing French.

  The attacks came quickly. Sébillet replied in the preface to his translation of Euripides' Iphigenia. A Lyonnese poet named Guillaume des Autels accused du Bellay of ingratitude to his literary predecessors and pointed to the logical weakness in arguing for imitation over translation. Barthélemy Aneau, regent of the Collège de la Trinité at Lyons, published his Quintil Horatian in 1551, a work generally attributed at the time to a poet named Charles Fontaine. Aneau's central charge was sharp: it was inconsistent to preach imitation of the ancients while dismissing native French poets in a work that claimed to be defending the French language.

  Du Bellay answered his critics in a preface to the second edition of his sonnet sequence Olive, which appeared in 1550 alongside two polemical poems: the Musagnaeomachie and an ode to Ronsard titled Contre les envieux fioles.

• 4. Olive and the Sonnet in French

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  Olive itself had first appeared in 1549, the same year as the Défense. It was a collection of sonnets modeled after the poetry of Petrarch, Ariosto, and contemporary Italians published by Gabriele Giolito de' Ferrari. Printed alongside it were thirteen odes under the title Vers lyriques.

  The name Olive has attracted speculation. Some readers have supposed it was an anagram for a Mlle Viole, a real woman. But the poems themselves show little evidence of genuine passion, and may be better understood as a Petrarchan exercise. The second edition reinforced that reading: du Bellay quietly replaced the dedication to his lady with a dedication to Marguerite de Valois, sister of the king Henry II.

  Du Bellay did not introduce the sonnet form into French poetry. But he made it feel at home there. When the fashion for writing sonnets eventually became what contemporaries described as a mania, he was among the first to mock its excesses.

  Around this same period, du Bellay suffered a serious illness that lasted two years, from which his deafness began to develop. He was also managing an anxious guardianship of his nephew, who died in 1553. With the boy's death, du Bellay's title changed: he had been known as sieur de Liré; he became seigneur of Gonnor.

  In 1549 he had also published a Recueil de poésies dedicated to the Princess Marguerite, and in 1552 a version of the fourth book of Virgil's Aeneid appeared, alongside other translations and occasional poems. These were the years in which he was building a reputation and a body of work, before the journey that would transform him as a writer.

• 5. Rome as Exile

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  In 1553, du Bellay traveled to Rome as one of the secretaries to Cardinal du Bellay. He would stay for four and a half years. The experience was nothing like what a poet might have hoped for.

  His duties were those of an attendant, not a man of letters. He had to manage the cardinal's creditors and keep the household finances afloat. The city of Rome, loaded with classical memory and ancient ruin, surrounded him while he dealt with bills and obligations. His isolation from France, from Ronsard, from the literary world he had helped create, amounted to something he described plainly as exile.

  Out of that exile came forty-seven sonnets collected as the Antiquités de Rome, published in 1558. Sonnet III of the sequence, "Nouveau venu qui cherches Rome en Rome," has been traced directly to the influence of a Latin poem by a Renaissance scholar named Jean Vitalis, also known as Janis Vitalis. The Antiquités carried further consequences: Edmund Spenser rendered them into English as The Ruins of Rome in 1591, and the same sonnet about Rome was translated into Spanish by Francisco de Quevedo in 1650 under the title "A Roma sepultada en sus ruinas."

  Du Bellay did find community in Rome. Among Italian scholars he had many friends, and he formed a close friendship with another exiled French poet, Olivier de Magny, whose circumstances echoed his own. Towards the end of his Roman stay he fell deeply in love with a Roman woman named Faustine, guarded by an old and jealous husband. In his poems she appears under the names Columba and Columbelle. His eventual success in this affair may have played some part in his decision to leave for Paris at the end of August 1557.

• 6. The Regrets and the Return

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  Du Bellay came back from Rome carrying several manuscripts. In 1558 he published the Latin Poemata, the Antiquités de Rome, the Divers Jeux Rustiques, and the Regrets, 191 sonnets the greater number of which had been written in Italy.

  The Regrets are where du Bellay's voice becomes unmistakably his own. The simplicity and tenderness that critics have identified as his defining qualities surface most clearly here: in the sonnets about his unlucky love for Faustine, and in the poems saturated with homesickness for the banks of the Loire. The Antiquités had struck a note that later French writers would return to; Volney and Chateaubriand are both traceable to that particular register.

  The Regrets also make plain that du Bellay had moved away from the strict theories he had set out in the Défense. The polemical confidence of 1549 had given way to something rawer. Among the sonnets there are sharp satirical portraits of Roman manners; after his return to Paris, several are appeals for patronage, candid about need.

  His close friendship with Ronsard was not renewed on his return. Instead he formed a new intimacy with the scholar Jean de Morel, whose house served as a center for a learned circle.

  In 1559 he published at Poitiers La Nouvelle Manière de faire son profit des lettres, a satirical epistle translated from the Latin of Adrien Turnèbe, and together with it Le Poète courtisan, a work that introduced the formal satire into French poetry. Both texts appeared under a pseudonym, J Quintil du Troussay. The courtier-poet of Le Poète courtisan was widely taken to be Mellin de Saint-Gelais, though du Bellay had in fact always been on friendly terms with him. The Nouvelle Manière is believed to be aimed at Pierre de Paschal, elected as royal historiographer, who had promised to write Latin biographies of the great and produced none.

• 7. Death and the Lead Coffin

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  By 1559 du Bellay was in poor condition. His deafness made his official duties difficult; his health was failing; his chief patron, Marguerite de Valois, to whom he was sincerely attached, had left Paris for Savoy. He was still in the employ of Cardinal du Bellay, who had grown cooler toward him since the frankly outspoken Regrets. He had also quarrelled with Eustache du Bellay, the bishop of Paris, which further strained his standing with the cardinal.

  That year he dedicated a long and eloquent Discours au roi to Francis II. The piece detailed the duties of a prince and was translated from a Latin original by Michel de l'Hôpital. It reportedly secured du Bellay a pension, though it was not actually published until 1567, seven years after his death. On the 1st of January 1560, he died. He was thirty-eight years old.

  Du Bellay had been a canon of Notre-Dame of Paris at one point, and so he was buried in the cathedral. A later claim that he had been nominated archbishop of Bordeaux in the final year of his life is described as unauthenticated by documentary evidence and, in itself, extremely improbable.

  In April 2022, excavations at Notre-Dame following the cathedral fire of 2019 turned up a lead coffin. The excavations were carried out by the National Institute for Preventive Archaeological Research, known as Inrap. By 2024, the remains reportedly inside had been identified, with some confidence, as du Bellay's. The skeleton showed traces of bone tuberculosis and chronic meningitis, conditions the poet was known to have suffered in his final years. Éric Crubézy, a doctor and professor of anthropology at Toulouse III - Paul Sabatier University, stated that these signs left little doubt about the identity.

  But isotope analysis of the bones introduced a complication. The results suggested the person buried in that coffin came from the west of France, which contradicts du Bellay's origins in the east. Some of the excavators have proposed that the remains may instead belong to Édouard de la Madeleine, a French knight of the sixteenth century. The question of where Joachim du Bellay's bones lie has not been closed.