by Will Durant
III. SCHOLARS
The distinctive task of the universities, the academies, and the humanists in the Renaissance was to gather, translate, and transmit the old world of Greece and Rome to the young world of modern Europe. The task was grandly accomplished, and the classic revelation was complete.
Two men remain to be commemorated as oracles of this revelation. Guillaume Budé, after living sixty-two years in hopes of making Paris the heir of Italian humanism, came into his own when Francis founded the Collège Royale. He began his adult studies with law, and for almost a decade he buried himself in the Pandects of Justinian. To understand these texts better—Latin in language but Byzantine in bearings—he took up Greek with John Lascaris, and so devotedly that his teacher, departing, bequeathed to him his precious library of Greek books. When, at forty-one, Budé published Annotationes in XXIV libros Pandectarum (1508), the Digest of Justinian, for the first time in Renaissance jurisprudence, was studied in itself and its environment, instead of being displaced by the commentaries of the “glossators.” Six years later he issued another monument of recondite research, De asse et partibus—on its surface a discussion of ancient coins and measures, but actually an exhaustive consideration of classical literature in relation to economic life. Still more impressive were his Commentarii linguae graecae (1529), a work loosely ordered, but so rich in lexicographic information and illumination that it placed Budé at the head of all European Hellenists. Rabelais sent him a letter of homage, Erasmus paid him the compliment of jealousy. Erasmus was a man of the world, to whom scholarship was only a part of life; but to Budé scholarship and life were one. “It is philology,” he wrote, “that has so long been my companion, my associate, my mistress, bound to me by every tie of affection.... But I have been forced to loosen the bonds of a love so devouring... that I found it destructive to my health.” 21 He mourned that he had to steal time from his studies to eat and sleep. In moments of distraction he married and begot eleven children. Jean Clouet’s portrait of him (in the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York) shows him in a pessimistic mood, but Francis I must have found some warmth in him, for he made him librarian at Fontainebleau, and liked to have the old scholar near him, even on tours. On one of these Budé caught a fever. He left precise instructions for an unceremonious funeral, and quietly passed away (1540). The Collège de France is his monument.
Paris had not yet in his time absorbed the intellectual life of France. Humanism had a dozen French hearths: Bourges, Bordeaux, Toulouse, Montpellier, and, above all, Lyons, where love and humanism, ladies and literature, made a delightful mixture. And in Agen, where no one would have looked for an emperor, Julius Caesar Scaliger ruled imperiously over the philological scene after Budé’s death. Born probably at Padua (1484), he came to Agen at forty-one, and lived there till his death (1558). Every scholar feared him, for he had a masterly command of vituperative Latin. He made a name for himself by attacking Erasmus for belittling the “Ciceronians”—sticklers for a precise Ciceronian Latin. He criticized Rabelais, then criticized Dolet for criticizing Rabelais. In a volume of Exercitationes he examined Jerome Cardan’s De subtilitate, and undertook to prove that everything affirmed in that book was false, and everything denied in it was true. His De causis linguae latinae was the first Latin grammar based upon scientific principles, and his commentaries on Hippocrates and Aristotle were remarkable for both their style and their contributions to science. Julius had fifteen children, one of whom became the greatest scholar of the next generation. His Poetice, published four years after his death, shared with the work of his son—and the influence of the Italians who followed Catherine de Médicis to France—in turning French humanism back from Greek to Latin studies.
A special gift of the Greek revival was Amyot’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives. Jacques Amyot was one of Marguerite’s many protégés; through her he was appointed to a chair of Greek and Latin at Bourges. His translations of Daphnis and Chloë and other Greek love stories were rewarded, in the genial oddity of the times, with a rich abbey. So secured, he traveled widely in Italy, indulging his antiquarian and philological tastes. When he published the Lives (1559) he prefaced the book with an eloquent plea for the study of history as the “treasure house of humanity,” a museum in which a thousand examples of virtue and vice, statesmanship and decay, are preserved for the instruction of mankind; like Napoleon, he considered history a better teacher of philosophy than philosophy itself. Nevertheless he proceeded to translate also Plutarch’s Moralia. He was promoted to the bishopric of Auxerre. and died there in the ripeness of eighty years (1593). His version of the Lives was not always accurate, but it was a work of literature in its own right, endowed with a natural and idiomatic style quite equal to that of the original. Its influence was endless. Montaigne reveled in it, and turned from the France of St. Bartholomew to this select and ennobled antiquity; Shakespeare took three plays from North’s virile translation of Amyot’s translation; the Plutarchian ideal of the hero modeled a hundred French dramas and revolutionists; and the Vies des hommes illustres gave to the nation a pantheon of celebrities fit to stir the more masculine virtues of the French soul.
IV. THE FRENCH RENAISSANCE
It is customary and forgivable to call by this term, so rich in overtones, the period between the accession of Francis 1(1515) and the assassination of Henry IV (1610). Essentially this colorful flowering of French poetry and prose, manners and arts and dress was less a rebirth than a ripening. By the patient resilience of men and the new growth of the new-seeded earth, the French economy and spirit had recovered from the Hundred Years’ War. Louis XI had given France a strong, centered, orderly government; Louis XII had given it a fruitful decade of peace. The free, loose, fantastic creativeness of the Gothic age survived, even and most in Rabelais, who so admired the classics that he quoted nearly all of them. But the great awakening was also a renascence. French literature and art were unquestionably affected by a closer acquaintance with ancient culture and classic forms. Those forms and the classic temper—the predominance of intellectual order over emotional ardor—continued in French drama, poetry, painting, sculpture, and architecture for almost three centuries. The fertilizing agents in the new birth were the French discovery and invasion of Italy, the French study of Roman rums, jurisprudence, and literature, of Italian letters and arts, and the influx of Italian artists and poets into France. To the happy issue many other factors contributed: printing; the dissemination and translation of classic texts; the patronage of scholars, poets, and artists by French kings, by their mistresses, by Marguerite of Navarre, by ecclesiastics and aristocrats; and the inspiration of women capable of appreciating other beauties than their own. All these elements came together in the flourishing of France.
Francis I, who inherited all this, had as á page the poet who served as a transition from Gothic to classic, from Villon to Renaissance. Clément Marot entered history as a frolicsome lad of thirteen who amused the King with jolly tales and sprightly repartees. Some years later Francis smiled upon the youth’s adventures and quarrels with “all the ladies of Paris,” for he agreed with Marot that they were very charming indeed:
La Françoise est entière et sans rompeure;
Plaisir la meine, au profit ne regarde.
Conclusion: qui en parle ou brocarde,
Françoises sont chef-d’oeuvre de nature—
“The Frenchwoman is flawless and complete; pleasure leads her; she does not look for profit. To conclude: whatever anyone may say to ridicule them, Frenchwomen are nature’s masterpiece.”22
Marot babbled poems like a bubbling spring. They were seldom profound, but often touched with tender sentiment; they were verses of occasion, conversation pieces, ballads, roundels, madrigals, or satires and epistles reminiscent of Horace or Martial. He noted with some pique that women (himself to the contrary notwithstanding) could be more readily persuaded by diamonds than by dithyrambs:
Quant les petites vilotières
Tro
uvent quelque hardi amant
Qui faire luire un diamant
Devant leurs yeux riants et verts,
Coac! elles tombent à l’envers.
Tu ris? Maudit soit-il qui erre!
C’est la grande vertu de la pierre
Qui éblouit ainsi leurs yeux.
Tels dons, tels présents servent mieux
Que beauté, savoir, ni prières.
Ils endorment les chambrières,
Ils ouvrent les portes fermées
Comme s’elles étaient charmées;
Ils font aveugles ceux qui voient,
Et taire les chiens qui aboient.
Ne me crois-tu point?
That is to say:
When little trollops make their price,
And find some moneyed lover bold
Who can a sparking diamond hold
Before their olive laughing eyes,
Coac! They fall quite inside out.
You laugh? Damn him who here goes wrong!
For to that stone virtues belong
That would seduce eyes most devout.
Such gifts and boons do more avail
Than beauty, prayers, or wisdom staid;
They send to sleep the lady’s maid,
And dogs forget to bark or wail.
Closed doors fly open to your will,
As if bewitched by magic mind,
And eyes that saw become quite blind.
Now tell me, do you doubt me still?
In 1519 Marot became valet-de-chambre to Marguerite, and fell in love with her dutifully; gossip said she returned his moans, but more likely she gave him nothing but religion. He developed a moderate sympathy with the Protestant cause in the intervals of his amours. He followed Francis to Italy, fought like a Bayard at Pavia, had the honor to be captured with his King, and—no ransom being expected for a poet—was released. Back in France, he announced his Protestant ideas so openly that the bishop of Chartres summoned him, and kept him under genteel imprisonment in the episcopal palace. He was set free by Marguerite’s intercession, but was soon arrested for helping prisoners to escape from the police. Francis bailed him out, and took him to Bayonne to sing the charms of his new bride, Eleanor of Portugal. After another session in jail—for eating bacon in Lent—he followed Marguerite to Cahors and Nérac.
Presently the affair of the placards revived the campaign against the French Protestants. News reached Marot that his rooms in Paris had been searched, and that a warrant had gone out for his arrest (1535). Fearful that even Marguerite’s skirts would not suffice to hide him, he fled to Italy, to the Duchess Renée in Ferrara. She welcomed him as if a reborn Virgil had arrived from Mantua; and perhaps she knew that he liked to link his name with that of Publius Vergilius Maro. He resembled more the lighthearted, amorous Ovid, or his favorite Villon, whose poems he edited and whose life he relived. When Duke Ercole II let it be known that he was surfeited with Protestants, Clément moved on to Venice. Word reached him that Francis had offered pardon to abjuring heretics; Marot, thinking the ladies of Paris worth a Mass, abjured. The King gave him a house and garden, and Clément tried to be a bourgeois gentilhomme.
François Vatable, who was teaching Hebrew in the Collège Royale, asked him to translate the Psalms into French verse, and expounded them to him word for word. Marot put thirty of them into melodious poetry, and published them with a judicious dedication to the King. Francis liked them so much that he gave a special copy to Charles V, who was momentarily his friend; Charles sent the poet 200 crowns ($5,000?). Marot translated more of the Psalms, and issued them in 1543 with a dedication to his first love, “the ladies of France.” Goudimel put them to music, as we have seen, and half of France began to sing them. But as Luther and Calvin also liked them, the Sorbonne suspected them of Protestantism; or perhaps in the ordeal of success Marot had remumbled his heresies. The campaign against him was renewed. He fled to Geneva, but found the theological climate there too severe for his health. He slipped into Italy, and died in Turin (1544) at the age of forty-nine, leaving an illegitimate daughter to the care of the Queen of Navarre.
V. RABELAIS
1. Himself
The unique, inexhaustible, skeptical, hilarious, learned, and obscene author of “the most diverting and most profitable stories which have ever been told”23 burst into the world in 1495, son of a prosperous notary at Chinon. He was entered at too early an age into a Franciscan monastery; he complained later that women who “carry children nine months beneath their hearts... cannot bear to suffer them nine years... and by simply adding an ell to their dress, and cutting I know not how many hairs from the top of their head, by means of certain words they turn them into birds”—i.e., they tonsure them and make them monks. The boy accepted his fate because he was inclined to study, and probably, like Erasmus, he was drawn to the books in the monastic library. He found there two or three other monks who wished to study Greek, and who were excited by the vast ancient world that scholarship was revealing. François made such progress that he received a letter of praise from Budé himself. Matters seemed to be going well, and in 1520 the future doubter was ordained a priest. But some older monks scented heresy in philology; they accused the young Hellenists of buying books with the fees they received for preaching, instead of handing the money over to the common treasury. Rabelais and another monk were put in solitary confinement and were deprived of books, which were to them half of life. Budé, apprised of this contretemps, appealed to Francis I, who ordered the scholars reinstated in freedom and privileges. Some further intercession brought a papal rescript permitting Rabelais to change his monastic allegiance and residence; he left the Franciscans, and entered a Benedictine house at Maillezais (1524). There the bishop, Geoffroy d’Estissac, took such a fancy to him that he arranged with the abbot that Rabelais should be allowed to go wherever he wished for his studies. Rabelais went, and forgot to return.
After sampling several universities he entered the School of Medicine at Montpellier (1530). He must have had some prior instruction, for he received the degree of bachelor of medicine in 1531. For reasons unknown he did not proceed to earn the doctorate, but resumed his wandering until, in 1532, he settled down in Lyons. Like Servetus, he combined the practice of medicine with scholarly pursuits. He served as editorial aide to the printer Sebastian Gryphius, edited several Greek texts, translated the Aphorisms of Hippocrates into Latin, and was willingly caught in the humanistic stream then in full flow at Lyons. On November 30, 1532, he dispatched a copy of Josephus to Erasmus with a letter of adulation strange in a man of thirty-seven, but savoring of that enthusiastic age:
George d’Armagnac .... recently sent me Flavius Josephus’ History.... and asked me... to send it to you.... I have eagerly seized this opportunity, O humanest of fathers, to prove to you by grateful homage my profound respect for you and my filial piety. My father, did I say? I should call you mother did your indulgence allow it. All that we know of mothers, who nourish the fruit of their wombs before seeing it, before knowing even what it will be, who protect it, who shelter it against the inclemency of the air—that you have done for me, for me whose face was not known to you, and whose obscure name could not impress you. You have brought me up, you have fed me at the chaste breasts of your divine knowledge; all that I am, all that I am worth, I owe to you alone. If I did not publish it aloud I should be the most ungrateful of men. Salutations once more, beloved father, honor of your country, support of letters, unconquerable champion of truth.24
In that same November 1532 we find Rabelais a physician in the Hôtel-Dieu, or city hospital, of Lyons, with a salary of forty livres ($1,000?) a year. But we must not think of him as a typical scholar or physician. It is true that his learning was varied and immense. Like Shakespeare, he seems to have had professional knowledge in a dozen fields—law, medicine, literature, theology, cookery, history, botany, astronomy, mythology. He refers to a hundred classic legends, quotes half a hundred classic authors; sometimes he parades his
erudition amateurishly. He was so busy living that he had no time to achieve meticulous accuracy in his scholarship; the editions that he prepared were not models of careful detail. It was not in his character to be a dedicated humanist like Erasmus or Budé; he loved life more than books. He is pictured for us as a man of distinguished presence, tall and handsome, a well of learning, a light and fire of conversation.25 He was not a toper, as an old tradition wrongly inferred from his salutes to drinkers and his paeans to wine; on the contrary, except for one little bastard26—who lived so briefly as to be only a venial sin—he led a reasonably decent life, and was honored by the finest spirits of his time, including several dignitaries of the Church. At the same time he had in him many qualities of the French peasant. He relished the bluff and hearty types that he met in the fields and streets; he enjoyed their jokes and laughter, their tall tales and boastful ribaldry; and unwittingly he made Erasmus’ fame pale before his own because he collected and connected these stories, improved and expanded them, dignified them with classic lore, lifted them into constructive satire, and carefully included their obscenity.
One story, then current in many rural areas, told of a kindly giant named Gargantua, his cavernous appetite, his feats of love and strength; here and there were hills and boulders which, said local traditions, had dropped from Gargantua’s basket as he passed. Such legends were still told, as late as 1860, in French hamlets that had never heard of Rabelais. An unknown writer, perhaps Rabelais himself as a tour de rire, jotted some of the fables down, and had them printed in Lyons as The Great and Inestimable Chronicles of the Great and Enormous Giant Gargantua (1532). The book sold so readily that Rabelais conceived the idea of writing a sequel to it about Gargantua’s son. So, at the Lyons fair of October 1532, there appeared, anonymously, the Horribles et espouvantables faictz et prouesses du très renommé Pantagruel (The Horrible and Dreadful Deeds and Prowesses of the Most Renowned Pantagruel). This name had been used in some popular dramas, but Rabelais gave the character new content and depth. The Sorbonne and the monks condemned the book as obscene, and it sold well; Francis I enjoyed it, some of the clergy relished it. Not till fourteen years later did Rabelais admit his authorship; he feared to endanger, if not his life, his reputation as a scholar.
