Emblems of Desire: Selections from the Delie of Maurice Sceve - Softcover

Maurice Sceve

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0977857654 ISBN 13: 9780977857654

Publisher: Archipelago, 2007

Synopsis

A forgotten masterpiece of French poetry, Emblems of Desire is a selection of 449 love poems first published in Lyons in 1544. Full of passionate ironies and charged obscurity, Scève is considered a sixteenth-century Mallarmé. His oblique self-portraiture laid the groundwork for many contemporary poets. This edition is accompanied by fifty emblems created by the author. The illustrations and Latin mottoes contained within each emblem offer poignant, and often witty, responses to his poems.

About this title

About the Author:

Maurice Scève (c.1500–c.1564) was at the center of Lyonnese côterie that elaborated the theory of spiritual love.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.:

Introduction

Voy ce papier de tous costez noircy
Du mortel dueil de mes iustes querelles
—Délie, 188

In a life singularly devoid of recorded biographical incident—even his dates of birth and death remain in doubt—a single story about Maurice Scève stands out. It is recounted by the Lyonese publisher Jean de Tournes in the preface to his handsome 1545 Italian-language edition of Il Petrarca, dedicated to his esteemed friend "M. Mauritio Scæva." De Tournes had just brought out the Délie, Scève's masterpiece, the previous year—it was the first full-fledged Petrarchan canzoniere ever to appear in French—so the (apocryphal?) tale he tells in this preface was no doubt motivated on the one hand by his desire to market his new author as France's true inheritor of the laurels of Petrarch and, on the other, by his patriotic zeal to establish the Provençal origins of the Italian poet's legendary muse.

According to de Tournes, who claimed to have had this story, "narrated at length," from Scève himself, it was in 1533, during the course of his studies at Avignon, that the latter was contacted by two Italian notables to aid in the discovery of the tomb of Laura—who, by Petrarch's own account, had died there on April 6, 1348, exactly twenty-one years (to the very day) after he had first met her on the banks of the Rhône. Local tradition maintained that she was none other than Laure de Nove, wife of Hughes de Sade, and Scève accordingly led his Italian cohorts to a Franciscan chapel originally founded by the House of Sade—the very same family whose name would later be illustrated by the Divine Marquis. There an unmarked tomb was discovered by the amateur archaeologists and duly opened. De Tournes describes what followed:

Initially nothing was found except earth and tiny bones, but near an intact jaw lay an iron box bound shut by a copper wire, which you [Scève] immediately opened, discovering within it a sheet that was folded and sealed with green wax and a bronze medal with a miniature figure of a lady on one side and nothing on the other; which lady seemed to be spreading her dress open over her breasts with her two hands, and surrounding her there were four letters only: M.L.M.I., which everyone tried his best to explain, and it so happened that Your Lordship approached more closely and, without guaranteeing that this was indeed so, proposed the following interpretation: Madonna Laura Morta Jace. That is, "Here Lies Dead Madonna Laura."

This scene reads like an allegory of the triumphs of humanist philology—Lorenzo da Valla unmasking the Donation of Constantine as a forgery, Horopollo deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphs, or Petrarch himself uncovering ancient manuscripts that brought new life to the past. It is a scene, moreover, that uncannily prefigures the poetics of Scève's own Délie, in which each 10 x 10 dizain presents itself as a hermetically sealed box or tomb which must be opened in order to reveal its hidden contents—more or often than not involving (as here) the enigmatic presence of an eroticized icon of the Lady and her attendant (funerary) inscription. By penetrating into Laura's crypt and conquering its hermeneutic mysteries, Scève thus Orphically repossesses Petrarch's lost object as his own.

Like Mallarmé, Scève is a poet of meanings and morphemes endlessly pleated and unpleated. So it is only appropriate that the folded sheet ("membrana piegata") buried in Laura's reliquary be now unsealed:

Once the piece of paper was opened, inside there was discovered a sonnet that was difficult to read because the letters written along the crease were effaced by time. The paper then being handed to you to see whether you might be able to decipher it, Your Lordship read it completely, holding it up against the light of the sun, and made a copy of it which . . . I have reproduced below.

Difficult though it is to envisage how in the obscurity of a chapel a sheet of paper might be held up against the light of the sun, the same metaphor will be applied to Scève's own muse Délie, for she is the source of illumination, be it lunar or solar, that allows him to decipher the text of his own darkness, that enables him to read, as it were, across his own crease. The Italian poem of which Scève here transcribes a copy—medieval scribal culture modulating into Renaissance intertextuality—and which de Tournes subsequently reproduces at the end of his preface as a sonnet by Petrarch, is attributed by at least one modern editor to Scève himself.

Attracted by the news of the discovery of Laura's tomb (so the narrative continues), King François I, en route to Marseilles to confer with Pope Clement about the upcoming marriage of his son Henri to Catherine de' Medeci, stopped off at the chapel in Avignon, "had the slab of stone lifted, took the box, and read the sonnet." In honor of Petrarch's muse, the monarch then dashed off an epitaph which de Tournes also quotes at the end of his preface:

O gentille Ame estant tant estimée
Qui te pourra louer qu'en se taisant?
Car la parolle est tousjours réprimée
Quand le subject surmonte le disant.
O gentle Soul, being so esteemed,
Who could praise you save in silence?
For speech is always restrained
When the subject surpasses the speaker.

Generally thought to be a composition of François I himself (in a chapter of his Memoirs recounting his visit to Laura's tomb in 1802, Chateaubriand quotes these lines as illustrative of the French poet-king's patronage of Italian artists), scholars such as Saulnier have instead suggested that these decasyllables may in fact have been ghostwritten by Scève himself. If this is indeed the case, then Stendhal, who was inordinately fond of the phrase "le sujet surpasse le disant" and who cited it in his autobiography whenever too overcome with emotion or memory to continue writing, was unwittingly (mis)quoting the single line of Scève's to have survived in literary posterity until his work was finally exhumed from oblivion in the early 20th century. Quand le subject surmonte le disant—an apt motto for the poetics of the Délie, whose 450 poems obsessively attempt to seize that "Object of Highest Virtue" which forever lies just beyond the ambit of articulate speech.

§

When Scève published his Délie in 1544, he was already a figure of considerable note in his native Lyons. By birthright he descended from one of the city's most prosperous and illustrious families: his father, a prominent municipal magistrate, was named ambassador to the court upon the accession of François I to the throne in 1515; his sisters, well-married into the noblesse de robe, entertained local literati in their salons and wrote verse for their amusement; his cousins, Guillaume and Jean, were also minor published poets and benefactors of the arts. As for Scève himself, the record is far more scanty. He may have taken minor orders in his youth (which might explain why he never to chose to marry) and he may have pursued advanced studies in Italy (he is referred to as a "doctor" (of law?) in a 1540 document), but he never seems to have pursued any profession, preferring instead the vocation of a man of letters whose independent wealth allowed him to pursue his humanist learning while protecting him from the political vagaries of court patronage (experienced only all too cruelly by his poetic mentor, Clément Marot or, for that matter, his English contemporary Sir Thomas Wyatt).

Scève's first published work, characteristically unsigned, was a translation of a Spanish novel by Juan de Flores, Grimalte y Gradissa, a continuation of Boccaccio's popular romance Fiammetta (1481). Published as a commercial venture in 1535 by François Juste (who had brought out Rabelais's Gargantua the previous year), La déplourable fin de Flamete is above all notable for its translator's confession in the preface that, like the characters in this tragic tale, he too had known the "torment of love" and had spent "the best years of [his] life" attempting to traverse its "perilous ford"-an allusion, Scève's biographers infer, to some ill-starred romance of his youth, also hinted at in various poems of the Délie. During this same year of 1535, Clément Marot, in exile at the court of Ferrara, composed his "Blason du Beau Tétin," inviting his fellow French poets to emulate his example with further celebrations of portions of the female anatomy. Scève's contribution to this poetic joust, a delicate encomium of The Eyebrow—most of the other contestants had aimed somewhat lower—was adjudged the winner by Renée, duchess of Ferrara, thus gaining him his first measure of courtly fame.

In 1536, while the court of François I was summering in Lyons in preparation for the Italian campaign against Charles V, the young Dauphin unexpectedly died among suspicious circumstances (poisoning by agents of the Austrian Emperor was suspected). Under the leadership of Lyons' most prominent humanist, Etienne Dolet, the city's poets immediately marshalled their collective talents to issue a volume of memorial tributes, Recueil de vers latins et vulgaires, de plusieurs Poëtes françoys, composés sur le trespas de feu Monsieur le Dauphin. Scève's contributions to this tombeau accounted for nearly one third of the volume: five Latin epigrams, two French huitains, and a lengthy eclogue, Arion, in which the late Dauphin was allegorically metamorphosed into a dolphin. Scève's prominence in this bilingual collection is indicative of his rising reputation among the poets of Lyons and, in particular, among the group known as the Sodalitium Lugdunense, a coterie of intellectuals who, under the guidance of Dolet, were committed to making neo-Latin the official language of French verse, the better to rival and surpass their erudite humanist contemporaries abroad. The French monarchy, however, was moving in the opposite direction, issuing the edict of Villers-Cotterets in 1539, which decreed that all legal documents be henceforth recorded in French. Dolet's sodality (Bourbon, Ducher, Visagier, etc.), inspired in part by the example of Petrarch's move from Latin into the vulgar tongue, similarly began placing more emphasis on literary production in the vernacular. Scève's Délie is in a sense the culmination of this Lyonese evolution toward a more local, more native literary language—as much a Deffence et Illustration de la langue francoyse as Du Bellay's more celebrated manifesto, published five years in its wake.

Around 1536, in his mid-thirties, nel mezzo del cammin, Scève fell violently in love. This mind- and heart-shattering moment of Petrarchan innamoramento, which he describes in the very first dizain of the Délie as a catastrophic death-blow to the very integrity of his own identity, will be returned to again and again over the course its 449 poems—an originary trauma that is endlessly revisited and from which he can never fully recover. Although opinions differ, it is more or less generally agreed that Scève's obscure object of desire was Pernette du Guillet, a blonde-haired, blue-eyed budding young poet of Lyons some twenty years his junior and whose marriage in 1538 effectively guaranteed that his passion would thereafter remain unrequited. In D 161, he vents his jealousy in a rage as chiselled as the lyrics of Catullus, Tibullus, or Propertius:

Alone with myself, she with her husband:
I in my anguish, she in her cozy bed.
Wrapped in grief, I wallow in Nettles,
And she lies there naked in his arms.
Ha! (unworthy him), he holds, he fondles her:
And she gives in: &, frailer of the two,
Violates love by this unjust bond,
Sealed by human, not divine, decree.
O holy law, just to all, except to me,
For I am punished for her misdeeds.

But Pernette, to judge from the collection of her Rymes that was published posthumously in 1545 (and for which Scève provided three epitaphs), was not content merely to act the passive partner in this neo-Platonizing agon of love. As feminist readings have argued, her poems addressed to Scève are less echoes of her mentor's dizains than coolly ironic undercuttings of the metaphorical ground of their intellectual and erotic exchange. Rather than agreeing to play the reflected light of the Moon to his masculine Sun, for example, she prefers instead to picture herself as the journée (daytime) accompanying his jour (daylight), the emphasis falling less on gendered antithesis than on elusive complimentarity.

To restrict the figure of Scève's Délie to the biographical instance of Pernette du Guillet, however, is to considerably limit the resonance of this "Object of Highest Virtue"—a composite divinity inspired by any number of loves and, perhaps even more importantly, culled from the vast mnemonic storehouse of his reading, which included the Greek Anthology, the Latin lyric, the medieval poets of courtly love, Dante, Petrarch, and more contemporary French and Italian versifiers such as the Rhétoriqueurs Marot and Lemaire de Belges and the neo-Petrarchans Cariteo, Serafino, and Bembo. As Jacqueline Risset observes, the Délie conflates the act of literary citation with the fantasy of erotic fusion, in the process generating a text that is continually open to available tradition, continutally in colloquy with what lies beyond its borders. When Scève's canzoniere began circulating in manuscript in the mid 1530s, the work thus became the maieutic center of all the concentric circles of literary Lyons, not only exerting its gravitational pull on the poetry of Pernette du Guillet, Louise Labé, and Pontus de Tyard, but also gathering the promotional talents of Dolet and Marot into its orbit. Little wonder, then, if Jean de Tournes trumpeted the 1544 appearance of the Délie, interspersed with fifty allegorical woodcuts—it was the first book of the Renaissance fully to integrate poems and emblems—as the crowning achievement of the city's cosmopolitan humanist culture.

After the publication of the Délie, the ever-shadowy Scève seems to go into retreat, given over to protracted mourning: Marot expires in exile in Turin in 1544; Pernette dies of the plague in 1555; his cousin Guillaume passes away in 1546, the same year that his close friend Dolet is burned at the stake in Paris for heresy; in 1547, the poet-king François I dies, followed two years later by his sister, Marguerite de Navarre, Scève's sometime protector and patron, for whose two collections of poetry, the Marguerites and the Suyte des Marguerites (published by de Tournes in 1547), he provided liminary sonnets. The fruit of his rural retreat, Saulsaye (Willow Grove), was brought out in 1547, with the melancholy subtitle, "Eclogue of the Solitary Life," and in 1549, in a similarly meditative mood, he published translations of Psalms XXVI and LXXXIII. In 1548, he returned briefly to public life, organizing the ceremonial Entry of the new king Henri II and his wife Catherine de' Medeci into Lyons, a spectacular municipal festival for which Scève designed and directed the elaborate allegorical pageantry, just as he had earlier superintended the 1540 Entry of Hippolyte d'Este as archbishop of Lyons in collaboration with the Florentine painter Benedetto dal Bene.

The remainder of Scève's life is given over to the compos...

About this edition

• Publisher: Archipelago
• Publication date: 2007
• ISBN 10: 0977857654
• ISBN 13: 9780977857654
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 224