_Mathurin Regnier and the Renaissance at Chartres_
‘J’ai vécu sans nul pensement
Me laissant aller doucement
A la bonne loi naturelle;
Et si m’étonne fort pourquoi
La Mort daigna penser à moi
Qui ne pensai jamais à elle.’
_Epitaph of Régnier._
Unlike the English, who, in public, prefer to ignore genius, the French
provincials, when they have any great men born within the borders of
their town, are not ashamed to honour them. They erect monuments easily,
and it even occurs to them to call their streets after the names of
great writers. In Chartres you have the Rue Félibien[92] and the Rue
Régnier,[93] with the house in which Mathurin Régnier was born.
God has made the men of La Beauce in the image of the soil whence they
have sprung. They have the regularity, the monotony and the hardness of
their native land. They are without passion or imagination, cold and
avaricious, and their women are like them. Their wit, when they have
any, is of the kind that delights in carping, ironical raillery. Their
minds, when they are developed, are cast in a logical and scientific
mould. Therefore it is that the representative writers of the sixteenth
and seventeenth centuries at Chartres are Pierre Nicole, the moralist
and theologian of the Port Royal School (_Essais de Morale_); Michel
Félibien, the critical and scientific historian of Paris (_Histoire de
la Ville de Paris_); the cold, but elegant, courtier poet, Philippe
Desportes, and his nephew, Mathurin Régnier, the creator of French
satire (1573-1613).
The School of Chartres had, we know, long been famous. When, at the end
of the fifteenth century, the new movement in literature, philosophy and
art began to be felt through France, the successors of Fulbert were not
unaffected by it. They welcomed the new learning. The discussions of the
schoolmen yielded place to the new appreciation of Greek and Latin, art
and literature. Nor were the Chartrains slow to apply the new discovery
of the art of printing. Twelve years after the introduction of
Gutenberg’s invention into France, Pierre Plume, a learned canon of
Notre-Dame, caused to be printed, at his own expense, in his house in
the cloister, and by the printer Jean Dupré, a magnificent folio missal
for the use of the diocese (1482). A fine copy of this missal (_Missale
Secundum usum ecclesiæ Carnotensis_) is in the town library.
In the architecture of this period the same tendency towards the
adoption or imitation of classical models, as interpreted by the Italian
artists, is evident. Jean de Beauce abandoned the Flamboyant style in
which he had hitherto so triumphantly wrought, and built the Renaissance
clock tower of the Cathedral; and a certain doctor, Claude Huvé by name
(1501-1559), in his enthusiasm for the revival of the old classical
style, erected the house in the Rue du Grand Cerf (number
[Illustration: Courtyard Maison du Medecin]
8), which still goes by the name of the _Maison du Médecin_. The
Renaissance façade and court of this house contrast strikingly with the
narrow, mediæval streets and Gothic style of the old town. They speak
with strange distinctness of the intellectual and artistic awakening of
the world after the slumber of the Dark Ages. And, as you read the
inscription on the front of the house--
SIC CONSTRUXIT CLAUDI HW’
IAT ΡΟΣ DECORI URBIS
AC POSTERITATI CONSULENS,[94]
--you sympathise at once in the pride and delight which this child of
the new era must have taken in the new birth of old things revealed to
him by the Italian artists of the Renaissance. The front of this house
may be compared with the entrance of the Château d’Anet, built by Philip
Delorme at the same period (1548), and now preserved in L’École des
Beaux Arts at Paris.
About the same time, in the domain of literature, the satiric turn of
mind which we have noted as typical of his countrymen, was illustrated
by a young poet of good Chartrain family, named Laurent des Moulins. He
wrote a long poetical satire, which is, however, really only a sermon in
verse, entitled _Le Catholicon des mal advisés_. It is an allegorical
vision, written after the manner of the _Roman de la Rose_. For Master
Laurent, like all the poets of the fourteenth and fifteenth century,
cast his verses in the mould of Guillaume de Loris and Jean de Meung. He
turns a good verse out of that mould now and again, and he writes with a
genuine moral intention, so that, in spite of his oddities, his
tediousness and his prosaic view of life, he goes some way towards
filling up, for the curious student of French letters, the dreary gap
which separates Villon from Marot. He shows us the usual dreamer falling
asleep, like William Langland, ‘on a May morning on Malvern Hills,’ and
seeing troops of types in whom there is no good. And of them (‘All I saw
sleeping, as I shall you tell’) he writes in several thousand lines,
good, bad and indifferent,--
‘Mêlant le vin rouge avec le vin blanc.’
Very different in style and in spirit from this sombre and unpolished
poet was Philippe Desportes, Abbot of Tiron and Josaphat (1546-1606),
the favourite poet, first, of Charles IX., who gave him ten thousand
crowns for his _La Mort de Rodomont_, and afterwards of Henry III. and
his _mignons_.
To them this most unclerical cleric, this courtier poet and successful
diplomatist, wrote in his earlier days songs and sonnets of remarkable
sweetness and grace, and was rewarded with poetic crowns and many
abbacies. Devoid of the poetic passion and picturesque invention of his
master, Ronsard, he was often content to translate or imitate an Italian
celebration of an imaginary mistress, and to compensate by his gift of
happy expression for his utter lack of sentiment or enthusiasm. Though
the most prominent of Ronsard’s own particular disciples, his style is
so simple and correct that he seems to be rather a forerunner of
Malherbe than a follower of the school which had endeavoured to
introduce into French poetry curious words and a peculiar phraseology,
and to substitute, for simplicity and directness of speech, ingenious
periphrases.
The following _villanelle_, charming in its neatness of expression and
polished elegance of style and form, is, I think, a good example of
Desportes at his best in his lighter and more mundane manner. It was
repeated, one may note, by Henri de Guise at Blois a few minutes before
he fell by the dagger of an assassin.
‘Rozette, pour un peu d’absence
Votre cœur vous avez changé
Et moi, sachant cette inconstance,
Le mien, autre part j’ai rangé.
Jamais plus beauté si légère
Sur moi tant de pouvoir n’aura.
Nous verrons, volage bergère,
Qui premier s’en repentira.
Tandis qu’en pleurs je me consume
Maudissant cet éloignement,
Vous, n’aimiez que par coutume
Caressiez un nouvel amant.
Jamais légère girouette
Au vent si tôt ne se vira.
Nous verrons, bergère Rozette,
Qui premier s’en repentira.
Où sont tant de promesses saintes,
Tant de pleurs versés en partant?
Est-il vrai que ces tristes plaintes
Sortissent d’un cœur inconstant?
Dieux, que vous êtes mensongère!
Maudit soit qui plus vous croira!
Nous verrons, volage bergère,
Qui premier s’en repentira.
Celui qui a gagné ma place
Ne vous peut aimer tant que moi;
Et celle que j’aime vous passe
De beauté, d’amour et de foi.
Gardé bien votre amitié neuve;
La mienne plus ne variera;
Et puis nous verrons à l’épreuve
Qui premier s’en repentira!’
Later, Desportes had other moods, more befitting his cloth, and under
their influence he wrote devotional poems of considerable merit and
somewhat feeble versions of the Psalms. Malherbe was quite justified in
his criticism;--‘Your soup is better than your Psalms.’ For the table of
the rich and sensual Abbot of Tiron, Bonport, Aurillac and other places
was excellent, whilst the more edifying verses of his old age failed to
acquire the bouquet of his wines.
Mathurin Régnier was born at Chartres in 1573. His mother was the sister
of Desportes, and Mathurin, in spite of his father’s protests,
determined to follow in the footsteps of his uncle and to be a poet. So
great was his natural talent that, notwithstanding his idleness and such
indulgence in debauchery that his life was shortened by his excesses, he
certainly succeeded. He holds a place unique in French literature. For
he is, perhaps, the only French poet before the so-called classical
period who has had the good fortune continuously to maintain his
position. He attacked Malherbe, yet was praised by him. He was an ardent
supporter of the Pléiade, that group of men who, with Ronsard, ‘the
prince of poets,’ at their head, aimed at the reformation of the French
language and literature by means of the study and imitation of ancient,
classical models. His defence of the Ronsardising tradition secured him,
later, the approval of the first Romantics. But he earned also the
admiration of Boileau. And the praise of Boileau, who said that he was
the French writer, before Molière, who best knew human nature, made his
reputation safe during the eighteenth century.
Of his life we do not know much: what we do know is chiefly
discreditable. His father was a citizen of position, and he wisely
desired for his son the ecclesiastical but not the poetical eminence of
his brother-in-law, Desportes. Mathurin, therefore, was tonsured at the
age of eleven. For himself he had no hesitation. His uncle’s example
was too alluring. He began to write early, and he never wholly shook off
the tradition of the school which his uncle represented and Malherbe
with excessive bitterness and pedantry attacked. As he says himself in
his Ninth Satire, wherein he so vigorously criticises the critics of the
Pléiade:--
‘Je vais le grand chemin que mon oncle m’apprit
Laissant là ces Docteurs que les Muses instruisent
En des arts tout nouveaux; et s’ils font, comme ils disent,
De ses fautes un livre aussi gros que le sien,
Telles je les croirai quand ils auront du bien,
Et que leur belle muse, à mordre si cuisante,
Leur donra, comme à lui, dix mil écus de rente.’
His father, so he tells us, had endeavoured to keep him from following
the paths of poetry by instancing the present troubles of the country
and the troubles that threatened. Poetry, he said, like many another
father since, with as good reason and with as little effect, would not
pay. His uncle’s good fortune was exceptional and misleading.
‘La muse est inutile, et si ton oncle a su
S’avancer par cet art, tu t’y verras deçu.
Un même astre toujours n’éclaire en cette terre;
Mars tout ardent de feu nous menace de guerre,
Tout le monde fremit et ces grande mouvements
Couvent en leurs fureurs de piteux changements;
Penses-tu que le luth et la lyre des poëtes
S’accordent d’harmonie avec les trompettes,
Les fifres, les tambours, le canon et le fer
Concert extravagant des musiques d’enfer.’
_Sat. IV._
The clatter of drums and cannons, however, was destined soon to cease,
and the voice of Régnier’s muse was before long to be heard in the land.
Régnier was a true child of the Renaissance in that he not only
imitated, like his uncle, the Italian poets of his day, but he also
based his satire on a close study of the classical writers. For he knew
his Ovid thoroughly; like Ronsard, he modelled himself on Juvenal, and,
like Joachim du Bellay, he recalls the manner of Horace. But apart from
the knowledge and appreciation of great models, Régnier enjoyed also the
genuine inspiration of a poet. He tells us how, in his youth, he would
wander in the woods dreaming of fame and fortune, and learning the
mysteries of the Muse:--
‘Rêveur je m’égarai tout seul par les détours
Des antres et des bois affreux et solitaires,
Où la Muse, en dormant, m’enseignait ses mystères,
M’apprenait des secrets, et m’échauffant le sein
De gloire et de renom relevait mon dessein.’
_Sat. IV._
This and other passages are enough to show that Régnier had the
imagination as well as the temperament of the true poet. Therefore, in
spite of his free imitation of the ancients, he remains original--a
great poet of the order of Clément Marot. What he borrows he makes his
own, and in adapting passages from the Roman writers to the Gallic
manners of his own day he not infrequently improves them. And apart from
his satires, he reveals in his lyrics, to a high degree, the same
poetical sensibility, and he describes with a melodious melancholy the
poet’s regret for the days that are no more:--
‘Un regret pensif et confus
D’avoir été et n’être plus
Rend mon âme aux douleurs ouverte;
A mes dépens, las! je vois bien
Qu’un bonheur comme était le mien
Ne se cognait que par la perte.’
Mathurin was relieved from the restraints of paternal authority in 1591.
For in that year his father was thrown into prison, under circumstances
typical of the time. Philippe Desportes had chosen Jacques Régnier to
farm one of his benefices, the Abbey of Josaphat, but he, instead of
devoting himself wholly to the peaceful cultivation of the land, exerted
himself politically on the side of the Chartrain _Ligueurs_. The good
King Henry, whose habit it was to draw less blood than money from
rebellious citizens, fined him sixteen hundred crowns, and, when he
failed to pay, threw him into prison at Chartres. There he remained some
months. His son, meanwhile, who had already got himself into trouble by
writing lampoons on the inhabitants of his native town, and repeating
them to the frequenters of a tennis-court which his father had built,
took this opportunity of slipping away to Paris. There his uncle,
Desportes, recommended him to the Cardinal-Archbishop of Toulouse,
François de Joyeuse, and he took part in that prelate’s embassy to Rome.
At the same time he was presented with the small priory of Bouzancourt.
Thus one fine morning he,
‘Vif de courage abandonna la France.’
He seemed to be on the high road to fortune. But though a better poet he
was a worse courtier than his uncle. In ten years spent with Joyeuse and
his successor, the young secretary earned nothing except experience. Of
that and its fruits he earned more than enough. He indulged without
restraint in the careless joy of living, and he suffered, like so many
of his contemporaries, from the intense delight in life and the feverish
gratification of the pleasures of the flesh which marked the Renaissance
movement. For men were encouraged to give free reign to the _bonne loi
naturelle_ by the whole spirit of an age which was a revolt from the
gloomy monasticism of the Middle Ages. Of the results, in his own case,
of such indulgence and of his sufferings, which had nothing in common
with those of the saints, Mathurin Régnier tells us in some of his
passages more than we care to know.
They taught him at any rate a certain philosophy of a not very exalted
sort, which he expounds to us in one of his satires. It is a kind of
epicurean pococurantism, summed up in the words of Swinburne, ‘Hope thou
not much and fear thou not at all,’ and expressed by the poet himself:--
‘N’avoir crainte de rien et ne rien espérer
Ami, c’est ce qui peut les hommes bien-heurer.’
The best comment on it, perhaps, is that implied in the epitaph on
himself which heads this chapter.
Régnier returned from Italy, then, with an ample provision of memories,
and perhaps with those poems which are based on the works of the Italian
satirists. He took up his abode in his uncle’s house at Paris, and
there, as in Rome, he noted in the intervals of dissipations the manners
and the characters of men. He saw and knew the high personages who
frequented the house of Desportes, and whose names occur in his poems.
And not being a time-server himself,
‘Instruit par le temps à la fin j’ai connu
Que la fidélité n’est pas grand revenu,’
he was content to draw with biting irony the portrait of a courtier
bard, who,
‘Ambitieux, pour les vers qu’il compose,
Quelque bon benefice en l’esprit se propose,
Et dessus un cheval comme un singe attaché
Meditant un sonnet, medite un evesché.’
_Sat. II._
Or of the vain beggar poets who
‘L’œil farouche et troublé, l’esprit à l’abandon
Vous viennent accoster comme personnes yvres,
[Illustration: Renaissance
Oriel Rue de la Corroierie]
Et disent pour bon-jour “Monsieur, je fais des livres,
On les vend au Palais, et les doctes du temps,
A les lire amusez, n’ont autre passe-temps.”’
_Sat. II._
Or, again, he marks down a courtier with a vigour and point which
Molière could not surpass:--
‘Laissons-le discourir,
Dire cent et cent fois: Il en faudrait mourir;
Sa barbe pinçoter, cageoller la science,
Relever ses cheveux, dire; En ma conscience;
Faire la belle main, mordre un bout de ses gants,
Rire hors de propos, monstrer ses belles dents,
Se carrer sur un pied, faire arser son épée,
Et s’adoucir les yeux ainsi qu’une poupée.’
_Sat. VIII._
A dozen other examples might be quoted to show with what satiric acid he
can etch a portrait. Régnier can paint a scene, too, with same unerring
detail and bitter accuracy, as, for instance, ‘Le Souper Ridicule’ and
the less savoury ‘Mauvais Gîte.’ The latter poem is indeed the only one
which deserves the imputation conveyed by Boileau’s phrase about the
author’s _rimes cyniques_. Régnier is essentially a moral writer, for he
makes vice, even when he describes it openly, the reverse of attractive.
The worst that can and may be said of him is that, like Juvenal, he
attacks vice with arms that make virtue blush. He says himself:--
‘Je croirai qu’il n’est rien au monde qui guarisse
Un homme vicieux comme son propre vice,’
and certainly the sincere and vigorous pictures he draws will prove a
temptation to no one, though they may inspire, like his habit of calling
a spade a spade, feelings of repugnance and disgust. But this is the
aim, as these are the means of all genuine satirists. Régnier’s comment
on his own failings is pathetic, but does not condone them. It reminds
one of Ovid’s words, ‘_Video meliora proboque. Deteriora sequor._’
‘Étant homme, on ne peut
Ni vivre comme on doit, ni vivre comme on veut.’
For, happily, the consequences of his loose living had wrought in him a
tardy repentance. His conversion was as late and as sincere as that of
La Fontaine--and not less needed. As he left politics alone, and
attacked not individuals but social types, he made no enemies. For most
men group others in classes but not themselves, or at any rate suppose
themselves to be free from the vices of the class to which they belong.
So they called our satirist Bon Régnier, as later they spoke of Bon la
Fontaine, and the _bonhomie_ implied by their nickname had the same
seasoning of malice. But it was not rewarded with any great share in the
goods of this world. His uncle, dying in 1606, left him only a legacy of
2000 _livres_ on the Abbey _des Vaus de Cernay_. Henry IV., by
conferring this request, gained the friendship of the poet, who
expressed his gratitude in the admirable verses of his first satire. In
1608, the year in which his works were first published, he was presented
with a stall in the Cathedral of Chartres. But only five years later he
left Royaumont, the abbey of the Bishop of Chartres, who always made him
welcome, and found his way to Rouen. There he consulted a quack doctor,
a famous empiric, Le Sonneur by name, who promised to heal him of all
his diseases. But he died after dining with this too encouraging
physician.
I have spoken of Régnier as the creator of French satire, and so, in a
sense, he was. But the phrase requires qualification. His satires are
not indeed absolutely the first of their kind in France. They had been
preceded by the terrific invectives of D’Aubigné, the vigorous
outbursts of Jean de la Taille, and the less vehement but more polished
satirical portraits of Vauquelin de Fresnaye. But in breadth and
technical merit he far surpassed all his predecessors, and, in force,
all except D’Aubigné. The longest, the best known, and undoubtedly the
best of his sixteen satires, is the thirteenth. There, under the title
of Macette, he describes an old woman who hides vice under a mask of
hypocrisy, and corrupts youth with her evil philosophy of the world and
its ways. The type is not new, but Régnier’s description of it is
original and vigorous in the extreme. His Macette, in fact, is the
grandmother of Molière’s Tartuffe.
‘Loin du monde elle fait sa demeure et son giste
Son œil tout penitent ne pleure qu’eau beniste.
Enfin c’est un exemple, en ce siècle tortu
D’amour, de charité, d’honneur et de vertu.
Pour beate partout le peuple la renomme,
Et la gazette même a déja dit à Rome,
La voyant aimer Dieu et la chair maîtriser
Qu’on n’attend que sa mort pour la canoniser.’
Clearly the style of comedy had been found when a man could write like
that, and Molière, fifty years later, had only to choose among the lines
of Régnier when he wished to draw the character of Tartuffe.
‘Le péché que l’on cache est demi-pardonné,’
becomes in Tartuffe
‘Et ce n’est point pécher que pécher en silence.’
And in many other instances our Chartrain poet has supplied the great
comedian with lines and hints, which Molière, true to his principle, _Je
prends mon bien où je le trouve_, has appropriated as unblushingly and
as successfully as a Vergil. This, apart from his other merits, and in
spite of his faults, is in itself enough to justify the existence of the
_rimes cyniques_ of Mathurin Régnier.