Joachim du Bellay

Poet and prose writer, born in Lire, NW France. After his friend and fellow-student, Ronsard, he was the most important member of the Pléiade. His Défense et illustration de la langue Française (1549, The Defence and Illustration of the French Language), the manifesto of the Pléiade, advocating the rejection of mediaeval linguistic traditions and a return to Classical and Italian models, had a considerable influence at the time.

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Joachim du Bellay (c.

He was born at the château of La Turmelière, not far from Liré, near Angers, being the son of Jean du Bellay, seigneur de Gonnor, cousin-german of the cardinal Jean du Bellay and of Guillaume du Bellay.

Both his parents died while he was still a child, and he was left to the guardianship of his elder brother, René du Bellay, who neglected his education, leaving him to run wild at La Turmelière. When he was twenty-three, however, he received permission to go to Poitiers to study law, no doubt with a view to his obtaining preferment through his kinsman the Cardinal Jean du Bellay. There too he probably met Jacques Peletier du Mans, who had published a translation of the Ars Poetica of Horace, with a preface in which much of the programme advocated later by the Pléiade is to be found in outline.

It was probably in 1547 that du Bellay met Ronsard in an inn on the way to Poitiers, an event which may justly be regarded as the starting-point of the French school of Renaissance poetry. Du Bellay returned with Ronsard to Paris to join the circle of students of the humanities attached to Jean Dorat at the Collège de Coqueret.

While Ronsard and Jean-Antoine de Baïf were most influenced by Greek models, du Bellay was more especially a Latinist, and perhaps his preference for a language so nearly connected with his own had some part in determining the more national and familiar note of his poetry.

The famous manifesto of the Pléiade, the Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (Defense and Illustration of the French Language, 1549), was at once a complement and a refutation of Sébillet's treatise. This book (inspired in part by Sperone Speroni's Dialogo delle lingue (1542)) was the expression of the literary principles of the Pléiade as a whole, but although Ronsard was the chosen leader, its redaction was entrusted to du Bellay. Du Bellay maintained that the French language as it was then constituted was too poor to serve as a medium for the higher forms of poetry, but he contended that by proper cultivation it might be brought on a level with the classical tongues. Both du Bellay and Ronsard laid stress on the necessity of prudence in these borrowings, and both repudiated the charge of wishing to latinize their mother tongue.

The violent attacks made by du Bellay on Marot and his followers, and on Sébillet, did not go unanswered. Guillaume des Autels, a Lyonnese poet, reproached du Bellay with ingratitude to his predecessors, and showed the weakness of his argument for imitation as opposed to translation in a digression in his Réplique aux furieuses defenses de Louis Meigret (Lyons, 1550) ;

Du Bellay replied to his various assailants in a preface to the second edition (1550) of his sonnet sequence Olive, with which he also published two polemical poems, the Musagnaeomachie, and an ode addressed to Ronsard, Contre les envieux fioles. Du Bellay did not actually introduce the sonnet into French poetry, but he acclimatized it;

About this time du Bellay had a serious illness of two years' duration, from which dates the beginning of his deafness.

In the next year he went to Rome as one of the secretaries of Cardinal du Bellay. Nevertheless he found many friends among Italian scholars, and formed a close friendship with another exiled poet whose circumstances were similar to his own, Olivier de Magny. Faustine was guarded by an old and jealous husband, and du Bellay's eventual conquest may have had something to do with his departure for Paris at the end of August 1557. In the next year he published the poems he had brought back with him from Rome, the Latin Poemata, the Antiquités de Rome, the Jeux rustiques, and the 191 sonnets of the Regrets, the greater number of which were written in Italy.

The simplicity and tenderness specially characteristic of du Bellay appear in the sonnets telling of his unlucky passion for Faustine, and of his nostalgia for the banks of the Loire. In 1559 du Bellay published at Poitiers La Nouvelle Ivlanière de faire son profit des lettres, a satirical epistle translated from the Latin of Adrien Turnèbe, and with it Le Poète courtisan, which introduced the formal satire into French poetry. These were published under the pseudonym of J Quintil du Troussay, and the courtier-poet was generally supposed to be Mellin de Saint-Gelais, with whom du Bellay had always, however, been on friendly terms.

A long and eloquent Discours au roi (detailing the duties of a prince, and translated from a Latin original written by Michel de l'Hôpital, now lost) was dedicated to Francis II in 1559, and is said to have secured for the poet a tardy pension. In the exercise of these functions Joachim quarrelled with Eustache du Bellay, bishop of Paris, who prejudiced his relations with the cardinal, less cordial since the publication of the outspoken Regrets. Du Bellay's health was weak; du Bellay is Œuvres francaises (2 vols., 1866-1867), edited with introduction and notes by C. The chief source of his biography is his own poetry, especially the Latin elegy addressed to Jean de Morel, "Elegia ad Janum Morellum Ebredunensem, Pytadem suum," printed with a volume of Xenia (Paris, 1569). of the Travaux et mémoires de l'université de Lille (Lute, 1900), contains all the available information and corrects many common errors.

See also

Sainte-Beuve, Tableau de la poésie française au XVI siècle (1828) La Défense et illust. de la langue française (1905), with biographical and critical introduction by Leon Séché, who also wrote Joachim du Bellay--documents nouveaux et inédits (1880), and published in 1903 the first volume of a new edition of the Œuvres Lettres de Joachim du Bellay (1884), edited by P. de Nolhac George Wyndham, Ronsard and La Pléiade (1906) Hilaire Belloc, Avril (1905) Arthur Tilley, The Literature of the French Renaissance (2 vols., 1904).