Biography in Early Modern France, 1540-1630

Forms and Functions

Katherine MacDonald

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9781905981113
• eBook ISBN: 9781351195256
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Literature

"When the famous Royal Professor of Philosophy and Eloquence Petrus Ramus (1515-1572) gave a lecture, one of his most promising pupils stood by, ready to tug on his coat if he made a mistake. That pupil was Ramus's future biographer, the much less famous Nicolas de Nancel (1539-1610), who recounted this anecdote in hisVita Rami (1599). Nancel's insertion of himself into his life of Ramus is typical of early modern biographies of men of letters. As biographer, the humanist man of letters situated himself within the same cultural field as his subject, thereby accrediting himself as a fellow man of letters by his display of humanistic competence. The first study of monograph lives of men of letters in sixteenth-century France, this ground-breaking book offers valuable insights into biography's role as a form of social and cultural negotiation geared to advance the biographer's career."

FIGURE 1. Portrait of Budé from Jean-Jacques Boissard, Bibliotheca chalcographica, hoc est virtute et eruditione clarorum virorum imagines (Heidelberg: Clemens Ammon, 1669), p. 117. © The British Library Board. All Rights Reserved. 555.c.5.(1.)

Chapter 1
‘Puis que peut faire un courtisan vagabond?’ Le Roy’s Gulielmi Budœi Vita (1540)

On 22 August 1540, Guillaume Budé (b. 1468), the great pioneer of Greek studies in France and instigator of the humanist Collège royal (the future Collège de France), died of a protracted bout of fever. According to his biographer and fellow Hellenist Louis Le Roy (1510?–1577), the physical agony Budé experienced paled in comparison to his mental horror at the prospect of his imminent death.¹ This rather unchristian attitude warrants some explanation, especially in the case of a scholar who had been preoccupied throughout his career with reconciling the secular study of the arts with his Christian vocation.² Le Roy duly provided clarification: Budé did not shrink from death out of a selfish excessive attachment to his own life — on the contrary, as Le Roy hoped his biography would amply demonstrate, Budé’s outstanding works of scholarship guaranteed his immortal fame and his piety secured the passage of his spirit to a better place. No, Budé hesitated to depart from this world because he feared for the material well-being of his family. During his life he had elected to set his studies above the advancement of his magisterial career.³ Now that he saw his end approaching, Budé bitterly regretted not having paid more attention to securing the family fortunes.⁴

As the father of eleven children including seven sons, Budé’s concerns were, it turns out, partially justified. Although Le Roy did not see fit to mention this in the Gulielmi Budæi Vita, Budé had entrusted his sons’ careers to the current chancellor, his own patron and friend Guillaume Poyet (1473–1548, chancellor 1538–1542).⁵ This would doubtless have seemed a prudent move, for, at the time of Budé’s death, Poyet stood at the height of his power. As effective prime minister of France, the chancellor’s influence with the king, François I, easily eclipsed that of the other two royal officers in charge of the navy and the army respectively, the admiral Philippe de Chabot (1492–1543) and the connétable, Anne de Montmorency (1492–1567), by whose agency Poyet had been appointed.

Of the same generation as Budé’s sons, the thirty-year-old Le Roy had only just returned to Paris in 1540, fresh from a stint at Toulouse’s famous law faculty. Despite his recent arrival at court, Le Roy certainly knew about the current chancellor’s importance in the royal administration and about Poyet’s patronage of Budé. Indeed, on the advice of a local prelate, Philippe de Cossé, bishop of Le Roy’s native Coutances in Normandy, he dedicated the Vita to Poyet as Budé’s intimate friend. As he wrote in the dedication to Poyet, Le Roy hoped that the Vita would provide him, as yet an obscure young law student, with access to the great royal officer.⁶

Still, even an aspiring scholar with such impeccable humanistic credentials as those of Le Roy, the favoured student of Budé’s disciple Jacques Toussain (1490?– 1547),⁷ took a calculated risk in approaching Poyet for support. Poyet’s power made him often arrogant, for one thing. Moreover, contemporary opinions diverged on Poyet’s susceptibility to act as a patron of letters. Some, like the orientalist and cabbalist Guillaume Postel (1510–81), consistently upheld, often against the evidence, Poyet’s commitment to humanism (‘bonæ literæ’/‘good letters’) and in particular to Budé’s pet project, the instauration of a trilingual (Greek, Latin and Hebrew) college under royal patronage. Others upbraided Poyet for allowing fiscal concerns to impede its establishment in a palace to be built on the left bank of the Seine, directly facing the Louvre, a powerful visual symbol of the importance of the new humanism to the monarchy. While the Italian humanist, churchman and poet, Jacopo Sadoleto (1477–1547) praised Poyet’s eloquence, detractors abounded.⁸

Le Roy nonetheless seems to have achieved his mercenary ends, winning a place in Poyet’s household soon after penning the dedication of the Vita. As for Budé’s heirs, the chancellor’s protection served them rather less well, or perhaps they lacked the adroitness needed to turn it to their advantage. In 1541, for example, the assembly of Paris municipal magistrates, the ‘Conseil des échevins’ rejected Budé’s son Dreux as municipal councillor because Poyet, who had more than once held Parliament in contempt, had recommended him.⁹ Le Roy, though, proved a marginally more skilful operator. Despite Poyet’s disgrace and imprisonment for fiscal impropriety (1542), Le Roy managed to retain his post in the chancellery. Relatively untarnished by his early association with Poyet, Le Roy remained in the employ of his successors François Errault (d. 1544, ‘garde des sceaux’ or minister of justice, 1543) and François Olivier (1487–1560, chancellor 1545–60).¹⁰ Still, for the next ten years, Le Roy would follow the court as a ‘courtisan vagabond’, taking up commissions as they were offered — including missions involving travel to England, Germany, and Italy — but not obtaining a secure post.¹¹ During this period, Le Roy attempted to consolidate his reputation as a humanist by producing a series of French translations from Greek philosophers and orators.¹² Budé had made his scholarly début in similar fashion: his first publication was a Latin translation of Plutarch’s De placitis philosophorum ( On the opinions of the philosophers, Paris: Josse Bade, 1505), the first published original translation of Greek by any French person.¹³ With the onset of the Wars of Religion in the 1560s, Le Roy turned his hand to political pamphleteering, producing a series of occasional works which demonstrate a pro-monarchist political conservatism, again in sympathy with Budé’s own views.¹⁴ Only in 1572 did Le Roy achieve a measure of security when he succeeded no less a scholar than Denis Lambin (c.1520–72), the renowned translator of Aristotle, as royal Professor of Greek in the humanist college Budé had lobbied so hard to found.

Thus Le Roy’s career path shows a number of similarities with that of Budé.¹⁵ A generation apart, they belonged admittedly to different social classes. The Budés owned land in the form of ‘seigneuries’, held important posts in royal administration and hovered on the periphery of nobility, whereas the impecunious Le Roy could claim no such pedigree. Both Le Roy and Budé, however, had received some training in law before turning to philology and in particular to Greek studies. Translation served each as a preliminary to the production of original works. Both scholars were reluctant followers of the royal court, yet staunchly defended the crown in their political writings. And the crown ultimately rewarded their monarchist, Gallican politics by conferring prestigious appointments on each man, albeit after long years of service. François I made Budé ‘maître des requêtes’ (literally ‘master of petitions’, a high-level judicial and administrative office in the royal household) in 1522, when he was sixty-four,¹⁶ and Charles IX approved Le Roy’s elevation to Royal Professor of Greek at roughly the same age.

The Vita may, as Kelley has observed, have ‘set a formal literary seal’ on Budé’s reputation as France’s ‘arch-humanist’.¹⁷ It also provided Le Roy with a convenient template for building his own humanistic career, a strategy we shall see the magistrate and diplomat Paschal replicate later in his Vie de Pibrac (Chapter 2). Le Roy’s remarks about Budé’s deathbed anxiety for the future prosperity of the family would thus betray his own concern with social advancement, as would his strategic choice of patron. Moreover, Le Roy’s exploitation of Budé’s demise by writing a memorial designed to launch his own career transcended the opportunistic solicitation of Poyet as a potential employer. The Vita did not just afford Le Roy the chance to bask in the reflected glory of the great Budé; even more importantly, it allowed him to introduce the philosophy of human history which would inform his mature writings. Scholars such as Gundersheimer have noted how the final pages of Le Roy’s biography of Budé contain, alongside an ‘entirely conventional eulogy of François I’, the nucleus of his later theoretical writings about human history.¹⁸ As Le Roy intimated in these pages of the Vita, universal human history possessed the dual characteristics of endless vicissitude and of cyclicality. Individual achievements in arms and letters drove a perpetual cycle of rise and fall in all civilizations. In the present happy age of renascence, both arms and letters flourished under François I. Divine providence guided the alternating cycles of rise and fall to make the underlying trajectory one of progress, and the moderns thus took precedence over the ancients. Le Roy argued passionately for their superiority on the grounds of their technological innovations, such as the printing press, gunpowder and the marine compass. He expressed this conception of history most fully in his masterwork as a mature scholar, De la Vicissitude ou variété des choses en l’univers (1576), a text which enjoyed considerable international success with publishers, going through five reprints in nine years and being translated into English and Italian before the end of the sixteenth century.¹⁹

Even in Le Roy’s most distinctive work, though, he remained in the intellectual shadow of Budé. As Kelley has observed, the Vicissitude ‘reverberates with echoes of Budé’s discussion of human culture’ from such philosophical works as De studio literarum recte et commode instituendo ( The Ways of Right Learning, 1532), and De philologia (On Philology, 1532), both of which advocated humanistic studies as enabling progress in civilization.²⁰ Furthermore, the Vicissitude, essentially a history of civilization in twelve books, has an encyclopaedic quality which places it in the direct line of Budé’s own style of scholarship.²¹ All of Budé’s works take the same delight in displaying his immense erudition, in often unwieldy, digressive enumerations of recondite information.²² Thus Kelley sees in the wide-ranging Vicissitude a popularization and continuation of Budé’s thought.

In an even more immediate sense, the same applies to the earlier text of the Vita, for much of which the direct sources lie in Budé’s published writings, in particular autobiographical passages in his correspondence with Erasmus and the English humanist Cuthbert Tunstall (1474–1559), as well as in De philologia.²³ Thus, by humbly transmitting to posterity his hero’s own self-construction, Le Roy effectively acted as Budé’s posthumous publicist, rather as Binet would later do for Ronsard (Chapter 3).²⁴ This...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 'Puis que peut faire un courtisan vagabond?': Le Roy's Gulielmi Budœi Vita (1540)
• 2 Diplomacy and Biography in the Wars of Religion: Charles Paschal's Life of Guy du Faur de Pibrac (1584)
• 3 The Traffic of Mercury: Claude Binet and the Vie de Ronsard (1586)
• 4 Medicine and Method in Nicolas de Nancel's Petri Rami Vita (1599)
• 5 Staging Baroque Autobiography: Spectacle in Agrippa d'Aubigné's Sa Vie à ses enfants (1629)
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index