Oxford Companion to French
Literature
[1st edition 1959, revised/reprinted many times; in 1995
replaced by the New Oxford Companion to French Literature]
Marot, Clment(1496-1544).
Marot, Clément (1496-1544). Protestant poet, born in
Cahors, son of Jean Marot. Clément moved to Paris when his father
became secretary to Anne de Bretagne. He may have studied law, and
it is known that he was page to Nicolas de Neufville some time
between 1510 and 1519. In 1519 he became valet de chambre in
the household of Marguerite d'Alençon (later de Navarre), who was to
protect him throughout his life, and in 1526, after the death of his
father, he succeeded him as valet de chambre to François Ier. He was
imprisoned in the Châtelet in 1526 for breaking the
Lenten fast, indicative of his Protestant sympathies. His earliest
poems date from around 1515, and his first collection of poetry, L'Adolescence
Clémentine, was published in 1532, followed by the Suite
de l'Adolescence Clémentine in 1533. Forced to flee in the
wave of persecution of Protestants following the Affaire des
Placards in 1534, he took refuge firstly with Marguerite in Navarre,
and then in Italy, with another French princess of Protestant
sympathies, Renée de Ferrare. In 1536, when François Ier declared a
general amnesty for exiled Protestants, he returned to France,
solemnly abjuring his errors in Lyon. During a further period at the
French court Marot enjoyed considerable literary success, his Oeuvres
being published in 1538. He had been working on his
translations of the Psalms for many years, and it was probably the
publication of the Trente psaumes de David in 1541,
coinciding with a renewal of anti-Protestant measures, which led to
a second period of exile from 1542 in Geneva, where he was welcomed
by Calvin. He died in Turin in 1544.
Marot's poetry is immensely varied, both in genre and in tone. Among
his early works are a number of long allegorical pieces: e.g. the Temple
de Cupido, a pure Rhetoriqueur's poem: L'Enfer, a
curious hybrid of medieval allegory and Renaissance protest, which
recounts his experiences in the Châtelet prison; the Déploration
de Florimond Robertet, a medieval funeral complainte used as
a vehicle for Protestant theology. They also contain examples of two
of the medieval formes fixes, ballades and rondeaux.
He was perhaps at his best in the épitres, which
he wrote throughout his life. The majority are light pieces, many of
them begging-letters to patrons or friends, e.g. Au roi pour
avoir été dérobé (a request for money) and A son ami
Lyon (a plea to his lifelong friend Lyon Jamet to secure his
release from prison). Virtually all the épitres are in decasyllabic
rhyming couplets, but the coq-à-l'âne, a sub-species of
the épitre, are ludic, anarchic, satirical poems written in
octosyllables. Many of his épigrammes, the best of them
wittily satirical, show the influence of classical writers such as
Martial. Among them, the two blasons, Du beau tétin and
(later) Du laid tétin, which sparked off a Concours
des Blasons, are very revealing of contemporary attitudes to
women. His long plaintive élégies are love poems, though
not particularly successful ones. In his own day his supreme lyrical
achievement was probably seen as the chansons and the translations
of the Psalms, songs of love, profane and sacred, their popularity
in both cases being enhanced by their musical settings.
Marot was undoubtedly many-sided. On the one hand a frivolous court
entertainer, summed up by Boileau's "mitons de Marot l'élégant
badinage", on the other a committed Protestant polemicist. As a
poet, he is a Janus-like figure who both looks back to the Middle
Ages (his earliest works perpetuate late-medieval poetic traditions,
and he edited François Villon and the Roman de la
Rose [view now abandoned, dw] and at the same time ushers in
the first phase of the French Renaissance (he translated Virgil,
Ovid, and Petrarch, and he may well have been the first to write
sonnets in French). He was a witty and sometimes biting satirist,
often savagely anticlerical, but with a buoyant confidence in the
New Age. Marot was rapidly eclipsed by the Pléiade, but remained
both popular and influential when the Pléiade fell into disfavour in
the 17th and 18th c.
Bibliography
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C. A. Mayer,Clment Marot(1972)
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R. Griffin,Clment Marot and the Inflections of Poetic Voice(1974)