Contentious readings: urban humanism and gender difference in 'La Puce de Madame Des-Roches (1582).'

Jones, Ann Rosalind

Recent research into early modern social groups in which women gained access to literary language has focused on the coteries in which they learned to perform alongside men, improvising poems later printed in books.(1) The typical coterie in Italy, through which women such as Veronica Franco made their way into print, was the humanist academy centered around a court or a group of urban noblemen, such as the Venier academy in Venice. In sixteenth-century France such groups took two forms: the provincial salon attended by professional men - humanist lawyers, diplomats, doctors, publishers - as in Lyon and Poitiers, and the aristocratic salons linked to the court. One mark of the class difference between patrician academy and bourgeois salon was their different methods of textual production: both kinds of group committed their exchanges to paper, but courtly salons in France produced manuscript albums rather than printed books. In France such handwritten albums were assembled for the salon organized by the Villeroys (he the Secretary of State to Henri III), which met in a chateau on the Seine, and for the salon maintained by the Duc and Duchesse de Retz at the Hotel de Dampierre in Paris.(2)

In the provincial city of Poitiers, however, a bourgeois salon run by a mother-daughter pair, Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches, produced an anthology of poems and prose by various hands that was published for the first time in Paris in 1582, again in 1583, and a third time in 1610, this time in the collected early works of one of its contributors, the humanist lawyer Etienne Pasquier. The anthology, originally entitled La Puce de Madame Des-Roches, records a literary contest in the form of epigrams improvised on a limited but stimulating - indeed, a piquant - topic: a flea that Pasquier claimed to have seen on Catherine Des Roches's breast. A poem by Catherine opens the collection, followed immediately by Pasquier's "La Puce." This pair leads on to over sixty texts by more than a dozen hands, composed in Greek, Latin, Italian and Spanish, as well as French. Most of the writers were hommes de robe, Parliamentary lawyers who had come down from Paris to preside over extra court sessions called "Les Grands Jours de Poitiers" in 1579. The printed anthology preserves poems that had been read out loud in the Des Roches' house, as well as texts by other writers who took up the topic after hearing about the exchange in Poitiers or returning to Paris. In a prefatory letter Jacques de Sourdray, a lawyer of Poitiers, dedicates the poems to a fellow townsman who has asked to see them because rumor has reached him of the witty merriment at the Des Roches' salon. Indeed, a kind of poetic contagion seems to have been invading Poitiers; Sourdray explains that "Seigneur Ant. de P., Gentilhomme Poictevin" and his guests have also composed poems on the topic of a flea. And when Abel Langelier first published the collection in Paris three years after Les Grands Jours, he admitted he was doing so without the permission of many of its participants - obviously hoping to profit from widening interest in the contest.

This instance of group composition has significance for a range of questions now being raised about authorship and reading in early modern Europe. La Puce is a collaborative text, but also an intensely competitive and contradictory one. It records the spontaneous oral language-work of the salon at the same time that it reveals its contributors' desire for scripted fame, the humanists' ambition that their writing circulate among contemporary scholars and be preserved for posterity. But Pasquier also set up a less rarified reception for the collection by adding French translations of most of the Greek and Latin texts. And the collection closes with a text drawn from outside the salon circuit, a satire of a braggart soldier entitled "Au Capitaine Bourgoin," evidence that the publisher shared Pasquier's hopes that the earlier poems would be read as amusing drollery as well as "doctes inventions."(3) The anthology also records a struggle between differently gendered readings. As its contributors, many men and one woman, take up classical models and comment on each other's poems, they manipulate them in order to shape diverse responses from readers outside the salon to the risque humor generated within it by the theme of a flea on a woman's breast.

La Puce dramatizes an urban microhistory, one related to the project of cultural historians such as Roger Chartier, who asks in "Texts, Printings, Readings": "Should we place at the center of . . . a history [of reading] the text to be read or the reader who takes it up?"(4) Chartier continues:

The reader is, in effect, always thought by the author (or the commentator) to be necessarily subjugated to a single meaning, to a correct interpretation, to an authorized reading. . . . But in thus postulating the absolute efficacy of the text tyrannically to dictate the meaning of the work to the reader, do we not in fact deny all autonomy to the act of reading? . . . experience shows that reading is not simply submission to cultural machinery. Whatever it may be, reading is a creative practice, which invents singular meanings and significations that are not reducible to the intentions of authors or of texts or of producers of books. (156-57)

Lynn Hunt remarks of Chartier, "His focus on the triangular relationship between the text as conceived by the author, as printed by the publisher, and as read (or heard) by the reader throws into doubt some of the canonical conceptions of the history of culture," and other critics have argued similarly that coterie writing, a central mode of early modern literary practice, calls into question traditional interpretations centered on single authors and print rather than manuscript circuits.(5) As a genre, the group-authored anthology insistently multiplies the possibilities of diversified readings. Its writers write after they have heard and read one another; they read each other critically as well as admiringly; and the ways that individual poets in such a collection hope to be read - in chorus or in debate with one another - play against the uses and audiences envisioned by later editors and publishers. La Puce makes available a wide-spectrum glimpse into a professional culture, a proto-feminist woman's entry into it, and the commercial exploitation of this mix that put the group process of an urban coterie into print in the 1580s.

The published record of the Poitiers contest clearly reveals the heterogeneity in social status, regional affiliation, and gender among the reader-writers who took part in it. Poitiers as a site provided an opening for Catherine Des Roches because, like other early modern cities, it supported the mixed-class groups in which women could learn the rituals and vocabularies of polite culture. As a semi-private event located in an open house nonetheless limited by controlled networks of access, a salon meeting provided a space in which women could act as hostesses and leaders of the game or outside their own salons as accepted guests. The obvious reason that women sought out such gatherings was that they were excluded from public institutions such as universities and courts of law. Another was the ideology that equated women's appearances in public with sexual promiscuity. Jean Bouchet, a writer of conduct books published frequently in Poitiers from the 1530s to the 1560s, warns his "pucelles" ("maidens") that speaking openly and frequently, like being seen at banquets, will destroy their reputation as "honnestes filles" ("chaste girls"). In his Epistres morales et familieres (1545), he reinforces the point by paraphrasing the old Testament: "Le sage dit que fornication / En femme on veoit a la prolation / Quand souvent parle, et hault et bas regarde / Et de travers, donnez vous en donc garde." ("The wise man says that fornication / Is revealed in a woman's talkativeness / When she speaks often and looks up and down / And to the side; so beware of doing so," 28.) An explicit defense against the analogy assumed to exist between the shamelessness of a woman on the street and the self-exposure of a woman in print is Louise Labe's appeal to Clemence de Bourges, in the dedicatory epistle to her Oeuvres, to act as her literary chaperone: "Et pource que les femmes ne se montrent volontiers en publiq seules, je vous ay choisie pour me servir de guide" ("And because women do not willingly appear alone in public, I have chosen you to act as my companion").(6) Etienne Pasquier, writing from Poitiers, praised Catherine Des Roches's quick wit, but in spite of his enthusiasm the wording of his letter signals the ambivalence with which most sixteenth-century readers viewed a woman whose person and poems circulated in public:

C'est une Roche inexpugnable que celle que je combats par mes vers. Car je ne la scaurois si bien assaillir qu'elle ne se defende trop mieux, d'une plume si hardie que je douteray desormais de luy escrire. . . . Je ne veis jamais esprit si prompt ny si rassis que le sien. C'est une dame qui ne manque point de response. Et neantmoins il ne sort d'elle aucun propos qui ne soit d'une sage fille.(7)

(She's an undefeatable rock, this woman with whom I do battle in my poems. For no matter how skillfully I might attack her, she defends herself all the better, with a pen so bold that I hardly dare to respond afterward. . . . I have never seen a wit as quick or as poised as hers. She is a lady who never lacks an answer. And yet no word ever comes from her that is unsuited to a proper young girl.)

The prevailing suspicion of female eloquence explains why the Des Roches insisted on their respectability as a family pair and as exceptionally learned women.(8) Their salon also took its tone from their status as the widow and daughter of lawyers; Madeleine had married two, both attached to the municipal court of Poitiers. Kin to prosperous professional men, neither woman could be suspected of loose living or ill-gotten gains. Their family ties to lawyers also explain their salon's centrality as a gathering place for men from the legal profession, whether from Poitiers or Paris. And the presence of the mother alongside the daughter further guaranteed the propriety of such meetings. To hold soirees in their own house was to protect themselves against charges of excessive public visibility from the inhabitants of Poitiers at the same time that it allowed them to form alliances with Parisian avocats de cour.

Another advantage upon which the Des Roches drew was that publishers in provincial cities were eager to sell local writers to local readers. In Lyon in the 1540s, Antoine de Moulin had introduced the Rymes of Pernette du Guillet as proof that the city's climate invigorated the spirits of "tous les sexes," and in the 1550s Jean de Tournes made a great point of presenting Louise Labe as a Lyonnaise to the Lyonnais.(9) Similarly, the Des Roches insistently identified themselves as townswomen of Poitiers. In their three books (Oeuvres, 1578; Secondes oeuvres, 1583; Missives, 1604), they praised local landmarks, wrote odes in defense of the city after it had been attacked by Protestants, and published letters of thanks to townspeople who had commissioned work from them. Their Poitiers publisher, Nicholas Courtoys, linked them to their town on the title-page of Les Secondes oeuvres by identifying them as "Mesdames des Roches de Poictiers." So did Abel Langelier, the Parisian publisher who brought out their first collection of Oeuvres as well as La Puce. The poets of the Puce anthology likewise celebrate the city where it was composed: many poems eulogize Catherine as the Muse of Poitou, the miracle of Poitiers, or the nymph of the local river, the Clain. To publicize the contest taking place locally was to appeal to a wider audience than readers from Paris or Poitiers alone.

In fact, a crisis linking Poitiers to Paris set the scene for Etienne Pasquier's sighting of the fabled flea. The month of special assizes, "Les Grands Jours de Poitiers," was set up because the wars of religion throughout Poitou had stalled the legal machinery of the capital city. It was to expedite law cases that had piled up for years that Henri III ordered Parisian lawyers down to Poitiers in 1579. Etienne Pasquier, identified throughout La Puce as "Avocat au Parlement de Paris," took this assignment as a chance to visit the Des Roches, and during one of his afternoons at their house, he proposed the flea on Catherine's bosom as the topic for poems by both of them. Their "contention mignarde" ("playful contest," a3), as it is called in the opening address to the reader, expanded into the much larger one eventually recorded in a 91-folio book.

La Puce is elegantly printed, a handsome humanists' volume. It is a quarto with wide margins, a variety of typefaces including classical Greek, and decorative borders in Fontainebleau style. It also employs several typographic devices to insist on its status as a group-authored text. The full title of the first and second editions is La Puce de Madame Des-Roches. Qui est un Recueil de Divers Poemes Grecs, Latins et Francois, Composez par plusieurs doctes Personnages aux Grans Jours tenus a Poitiers l'An MDLXXIX (The Flea of Madame Des Roches, which is a collection of diverse Greek, Latin and French poems, composed by several learned persons during the Special Assizes held in Poitiers in the year 1579). The genres adopted by its contributors include epigrams, odes, sonnets, madrigals, and a prose imitation of Lucian's disquisition in praise of a fly. Another persistent genre is the blason anatomique, the cap-a-pied catalogue of female body parts. This genre requires that the flea ("la puce") be regendered from female animal to male predator. The men writing compete with one another in representing Catherine's body as the terrain through which the flea voyages, envied for the erotic ingenuity they attribute to it as the explorer of virgin territory.

Many other poems are paradoxical encomia, a genre that allows the writers to call attention to their shared efforts by playing off the contrast between the tiny flea and the immense outpouring of writing it has generated. Annette Tomarken remarks on the self-conscious literariness of the flea's encomiasts as follows: "The contributors all wished to transform a mundane, even embarrassing incident into complimentary literary creations that would demonstrate both poetic skill and a desire to please a learned society lady. In expressing their thoughts in the playful form of the mock encomium, they remind us nonetheless of the comedy of the whole business. The lofty poetic fiction and the humble reality remain ultimately distinct from one another."(10) Yet the poems dramatize another complex reality: they re-enact the verbal rituals of the salon, its spectacle of rapidly devised compliments and training in repartee. Each writer responds to others in a cycle of mutual congratulation. Many poems praise Catherine; almost all of them praise the men writing about her. As Tomarken points out, there is profit for them in her flea: "It enabled them to show off their forensic skills in a playful context that demonstrated social flexibility and good breeding."(11)

A case in point is the sixth poem of the collection, a commentary on the preceding three. In the first of the three poems, Pasquier accuses Catherine of giving his verses life by singing them but of killing his heart with her chastity; in the next two poems she deflects his seductive complaint by recourse to classical myth, comparing him to the divinely transformed Glaucus and to Apollo. The writer of the next epigram, A.D.H. (probably Antoine de Harlay, another lawyer visiting Poitiers whom Pasquier praises as an "Achilles" of justice in a dedicatory sonnet), remarks slyly that however much Pasquier claims to be losing time and effort over "la puce," he is actually profiting both from consultant's fees in Poitiers and from his flirtation with Catherine: "Ne plain point le temps clue tu pers, / Puis qu'en perdant tu gaignes tant" ("Do not complain of the time you lose, / For in losing, you gain so much," b2.)

Homosocial congratulations of this kind also structure several long poems.(12) Rene Chopin names Lucian's fly and Virgil's gnat in order to argue that Pasquier and Claude Brisson, his predecessors in the anthology, have outdone the ancients in their entomological eulogies; Antoine Loisel, in Latin hexameters followed immediately by Pasquier's translation, compliments his fellow poets, including Chopin and Odet de Turnebe; Turnebe, after citing Catherine as proof "que les Muses sont Poitevines" ("that the Muses are from Poitiers," 3IV), produces a long set of stanzas naming nine other writers in the anthology whom he praises as "ces doctes maistres de France" ("these learned masters of France"); and Pasquier carries out an extraordinary punning performance in which he transforms the names of other salon members into the nouns and verbs of a pastoral idyll. In this anagram game, entitled "Voeu," the transition from salon repartee to published text is signaled by the marginal notes and capitalized names that identify each participant for readers outside the circle:

M. Brisson . . . Icy maint bon pasteur diversement voit on Graver dans le sainct Roch soul l'aBRY SON sainct nom,

Ant. Loisel Icy le bel OYSEL degoiser son ramage. . . .

De Saincte-Marthe Icy le forgeron sainctement MARTELER

Cl. Binet Icy pour bien BINER, les riches fruicts renaistre

R. Chopin Au dessous des CHAUX PINS, et le jeune berger

I. Mangot A la table des Dieux l'ambrosie MANGER Et du meilleur nectar souefement se paistre. (40V)

(Here one sees many a good shepherd / Carve in the holy rock in shade his holy name, / Here the lovely little bird pours forth his song. . . . / Here the smith hammers away in holy fashion / Here through good hoeing rich fruits grow anew / Under warm pines, and the young herdsman / At the table of the gods eats ambrosia / And feeds sweetly upon the finest nectar.)

In the anthology, as in the salon, male writers use Catherine as a medium through which they dramatize their bonds with each other: she (with her flea) is the shared topic that allows them to interweave a set of mutually laudatory mutually addressed texts. Carolyn Lougee argues that seventeenth-century salons were sites of upward mobility in which petty gentry and professional men set up networks that enabled them to rise professionally as well as socially.(13) The same sort of dynamic is visible in La Puce. Throughout it, humanists contribute implicitly and explicitly to each other's reputations as experts in the classics and as rivals in poetic gamesmanship.

The Neoplatonism shared by these writers works similarly as a social strategy. Official doctrines of female inferiority reigned on many levels of French society in the 1580s, but most of the poems in La Puce praise Catherine by setting her on a pedestal of intellectual and spiritual refinement. The men taking the Neoplatonic line in this anthology, as in salons elsewhere, were engaged in a new kind of self-promotion. United in print as members of an innovative kind of cultural group, they gained respectability and a shared romantic glamour by addressing poems in a lofty register to famous women. A typical case is Antoine Loisel's Latin ode (translated into French by Pasquier), in which he sets the celestial virtues of Catherine against a poet whom he represents as her rival: the impure Sappho. Loisel reads the flea as a demon sent by the poet of Lesbos to seduce the poet of Poitiers, a plot doomed to fail given Catherine's impermeable chastity:

Cette saffre Sapphon du monde l'impropere, Vilaine, infame, duite a tremousser son cors Ingenieusement en mil honteux accors, Jalouse des vertus qui logent en la belle, Qui les hommes en meurs et doctrine precelle, Non fille vrayement, mais un Dieu Poitevin, Envoya de Lesbos son Demon au Clin, Qui se voulut voiler d'une noire vesture, De la Puce empruntant l'habit et la figure, Pour d'elle pratiquer quelque folastre amour. (19V)

(This filthy Sappho, the shame of the whole world, Low-born, ill famed, used to fluttering her body Inventively in a thousand vile embraces, Jealous of the virtues dwelling in the beauty Who excels all men in her manners and learning, Not a mere maiden but a god from Poitiers, Sent her demon from Lesbos to the River Clain, And he tried to disguise himself by dressing in black, Adopting the costume and shape of the Flea In order through her to make wanton love.)

The members of the salon compensate for its class and gender heterogeneity, its social impurity, by uniting around the residual code of chivalry, celebrating bourgeois women as the sovereigns of a new urban "court."

But such cooperative fame-building was carried out in tension with other interactions that disturb the group portrait assembled in La Puce. Abel Langelier closes the volume by apologizing for his inability to preserve either the order in which the poems were composed or the hierarchy of rank among their composers:

Lecteurs debonnaires, je vous supplie ne prendre en mauvaise part si trouvez quelque faute a l'ordre des escrits de ceux qui sont inserez en ce livre, et s'ils ne sont selon leurs degrez: car l'ayant faict imprime (comme a la desrobee) je ne les ay ose advertir de mon entreprise, de crainte que j'avois qu'ils n'empechassent la poursuitte. (9IV)

(Gentle readers, I beg you not to be displeased if you discover some errors in the order of the writings of the people contained in this book, or if the writers are not arranged in proper rank; for, having had it printed more or less on the sly, I did not dare to inform them of my undertaking for fear that they would prevent it from being carried out.)

The contradictory mix of reverence for degree and unrepentant piracy in this statement is closer to the real workings of the anthology than the stable order Langelier claims he would have liked to maintain in printing it. Indeed, his inclusion of the bawdy ballad on "Le Capitaine Bourgoin," which he advertises as "une gentille Drollerie," transforms such solemnities into a frank appeal to popular taste. This final anonymous poem relates to the preceding collection through burlesque reversal. The speaker mockingly narrates the drunken captain's erotic triumphs after invading La Rochelle (probably inviting readers to recognize a pun on "La Roche," Catherine's nickname) and warns him, should he travel to Poitiers, to avoid venereal disease: "Gardez vous ce pendant d'apporter de Poitou / Au lieu d'un bon butin, ou un chancre ou un clou" ("Avoid, meantime, bringing back from Poitou / Instead of rich booty, a canker or corn," 93).

Professional hierarchy seems nonetheless to be firmly supported by the Latin titles of poems and poets printed in large Roman type above each text - for example, "CL. V. BARN BRISSONII in Sanctiori Praetorio Consilliarii, tunc Regii in Senatu Parisiensi Advocati, nunc vero in eodem Senatu Praesidis, PULEX" ("The FLEA of CL. V. Barn. BRISSON, Counsellor to the High Court, formerly Lawyer in the Royal Parliament of Paris, now President of that Parliament," 6v). In addition, the writers with the lengthiest professional titles are placed first in the volume. But the prestige accorded them by their job descriptions is radically undercut as later, less fulsomely labeled writers turn upon the conceits invented and elaborated by the first ten poets. P. de Lommeaud, for example, identified only as a native of Saumur, focuses his poem, "La Puce de Madame des Roches," on the anthology rather than the flea, refusing to add to praise for an insect which, after all, torments "cette Rochette" day and night. He calls for more direct action on the part of the reigning chorus, in a blunt pun on puce/pucelage (flea/hymen) that casts an ironic light on previous compliments to Catherine as cerebral goddess of purity. Tomarken remarks that puns on "puce/pucelage" would be "inappropriate to the social context of the des Roches anthology,"(14) but this is to underestimate the contestatory modes of the collection, as demonstrated earlier by Pasquier's first poem on "La Puce" and by Lommeaud's entry here:

Que d'entre vous quelque poete S'efforce sans nous le celer Cette dame depuceler (Cette dame toute divine Orne d'une rare doctrine) Si d'elle il a quelque pitie, Ou luy porte quelque amitie. (47V)

(Let some poet among your ranks Try, without hiding his attempt, To take this lady's maidenhead [This lady so entirely divine Endowed with such rare learning] If he has any pity for her, Or bears her any good will.)

An even sharper attack on the other poets' Neoplatonism is launched by Nicholas Rapin in his "La Contre-Puce," in which he burlesques the elevated tone of previous poems in general and specifically mocks Catherine's fanciful use of mythology in her first poem:

Puis qu'on faint que Pan t'ayma, Quand Jupiter te transforma En cette petitesse noire, Si Pan n'estoit qu'un vieil bouquin, Salle et ord, puant et faquin, Cela n'est pas fascheux a croire. (55)

(Since it's claimed that Pan loved you, At the moment when Jupiter changed you Into this black tininess, If Pan was just an old ram, Dirty and dungy, a stinking lout, The story's not hard to believe.)

Rapin ends with a farcical descent into practical hygiene, listing ways to escape such vermin rather than becoming infatuated with conceits about it:

Quant a moy je ne te crains rien: Car Dieu mercy j'ay le moyen D'eviter ta salle morsure: Je me scay tenir nettement Au linge et en l'accoustrement, C'est la recepte la plus seure.

(As for me, I have no fear of you; For, thank God, I have a way To avoid your dirty bites: I know how to stay neat and clean In my bedclothes and my apparel; That's the safest recipe.)

To attack his fellow poets, Rapin attacks Catherine, implying that her uncleanliness rather than her divine spirit has been the starting point of the anthology. Lommeaud and Rapin's toppling of the lofty registers established by the "doctes maistres," like Langelier's inclusion of the poem to the drunken soldier, disrupt the sequence through carnivalesque countermoves that multiply possible modes of engagement with the text.

In addition to the anthology's mix of self-aggrandizing humanist wit and satire of humanist conceits, the editors of La Puce present it in ways that allow it to be read as a conduct book - although it exemplifies diverse kinds of conduct. A second address "Au lecteur" assures the reader that the volume has been created only for laughter and pleasure, but it also suggests that Pasquier's role in it can be taken as a model of elegant social behavior: "Pour le moins tu m'en scauras gre: car outre le plaisir que tu en recevras, tu auras ce fruict d'aprendre combien peut un homme bien ne en toute chose ou il employe la dexterite de son esprit" ("At the least, you'll be grateful to me for the book; for beyond the pleasure it will bring you, you will profit from it by learning what a well-bred man is capable of doing in all matters to which he turns his mental dexterity," a3). In its last section, the volume takes a further turn; Langelier explains that he is printing poems written on the subject of Les Grands Jours to replace those on "La Puce" that he has been unable to obtain, and these "Divers Poemes . . . Par Plusieurs Auteurs" stand as examples of well written epistles. That is, he offers the last section of the book as a letter-writing manual. The epistles addressed to Pasquier by Francois de la Coudray provide formulas for writing praises to famous men. Coudray is quite open about his motive, which is to shine in Pasquier's reflected glory: "Et ne soyez fasche, si de vostre beau nom / J'honore mes escrits: a la perle de renom / S'enchasse bien souvent en moins riches matieres" ("And do not be angry, if with your fair name / I do honor to my own writings; the pearl of renown / Is often set in less rich materials," 71). Catherine likewise, in her epistle "A Messieurs qui font les Grans Jours a Poitiers," exemplifies polite compliment and memorial adieu, praising the lawyers as suns of justice and vowing that she hopes to return honey for their wax, that is, mellifluous verses in return for their stamped paperwork in her interests (77v).

But exemplary decorum breaks down here, too. A much less harmonious relationship between the young woman and the older man is fought out in La Puce. The exchanges between Catherine and Pasquier demonstrate an enormous gap in the gender roles each can properly play as reader and writer. In his introduction to the collection, Langelier at first denies any difference between the way each of them performed in the poetic contest. He insists that Catherine was Pasquier's "semblable": they completed their poems at the same moment, sent them to each other at the same moment, even used the same vocabulary, "tombans mesmement en quelques recontres de mots les plus segnales pour le subject" ("by chance at times even using the same words most relevant to the topic," a3). Yet he also admits that each of them played out a distinct gender role, she impeccably virtuous, he witty and alert:

Que si en cecy tu me permetois d'y apporter quelque chose du mien, je veus dire de mon jugement, En l'un tu y trouveras les discours d'une sage fille, en l'autre les discours d'un homme qui n'est pas trop fol: aiant chascun d'eux par une bien seance de leur sexe joue tel rolle qu'il devoit. (a3v)

(If you will allow me to add something of my own in this matter, that is, my own opinion, in one you will find the language of a clever girl, in the other the words of a man who is not too foolish; for each of them, according to what is suitable to their sex, played the role proper to them.)

This acknowledgment of asymmetrical social and poetic decorums is a more accurate description of Catherine's responses to her interlocutors than Langelier's earlier insistence that they wrote as "semblables." The woman poet persistently writes against the elaborately erotic poems dedicated to her.

One way she does this is by turning the anthology's classical vocabulary in new gender-inflected directions. A crucial example is her opening poem, set ahead of Pasquier's first apostrophe to the flea, although both composed their poems at the same time, not knowing what the other was writing. The two poems echo each other's rhymes and use similarly short seven- and eight-syllable lines (although Catherine's verses are less regular than Pasquier's). But even a quick look at their content reveals obvious contrasts. Pasquier identifies with the flea only briefly; he then apostrophizes it as a masculine rival, using a concrete language of the body to trace the flea's voyage down the woman's torso. He combines several classical models: the paradoxical encomium (Virgil's flea), the animal epigram (Catullus on Lesbia's sparrow), the exploits of Jupiter (Ovid). Catherine des Roches adopts a different model. She works out a variation of Ovidian metamorphosis to concoct a story not of male-female rape but of female escape: her flea, once a nymph pursued by Pan but now transformed by Diana, lives a life of flight and concealment. Pan, the only male figure in the poem, is read as a threat to "la puce," with whose nervous agility Catherine obviously identifies. In contrast to Pasquier's erotic fantasy, signaled by his shift from addressing the flea as a male creature to addressing Catherine as the female body that he, too, wants to explore, Catherine composes a sympathetic apostrophe to a female alter ego whom she addresses in affectionate diminutives.

Catherine des Roches

Petite Puce fretillarde, Qui d'une bouchette mignarde Succotes le sang incarnat Qui colore un sein delicat, . . . Pan voyant voz perfections, Sentit un feu d'affections, Desirant vostre mariage: Mais quoy? vostre vierge courage Aima mieux vous faire changer En Puce, a fin de l'etranger. . . Depuis fuyant tousjours ce Dieu Petite vous cherchez un lieu, Qui vous serve de sauvegarde, Et craignez que Pan vous regarde. Bien souvent la timidite Fait voir vostre dexterite. Vous sautelez a l'impourveue, Quand vous soupconnes d'etre veue, Et de vous ne reste, sinon La crainte, l'adresse, et le nom.

(1-2v)

(Little trembling flea, Who with a dainty mouth Sucks the scarlet blood That colors a tender breast. . . . Pan, seeing your perfection, Came ablaze with passion, Desiring you in marriage. But no! Your virgin heart Made you prefer being changed Into a flea to put him off. Ever since, fleeing the god, Little one, you seek a place Where you can count on safety, And yon fear that Pan might see you. Many times your timidity Reveals your dexterity; You jump about unexpectedly When you suspect that you're on view, And nothing of you remains behind except Your fear, your skill and name.)

Etienne Pasquier

Puce quite viens percher Dessus cette tendre chair Au milieu des deux mammelles De la plus belle des belles: Qui la piques, qui la poins, Qui la mors a tes bons poins . . . O que je porte d'envie A l'heur fatal de ta vie. . . . Pleust or a Dieu que je pusse Seulement devenir Puce: Tantost je prendrois mon vol Tout au plus beau de ton col Ou d'une douce rapine, Je succerois ta poitrine, Ou lentement pas a pas Je me glisserois plus bas, Et d'un muselin folastre, Je serois puce idolatre, Pincottant je ne scay quoy Que j'ayme trop plus que moy.

(3-5v)

(Flea, who comes to perch Upon this tender flesh Between the two breasts Of the fairest of the fair, You who sting and stab her And bite her where you will, . . . Oh, how much I envy the end fate gave your life! If only God permitted me, I'd myself become a flea. I'd take flight immediately To the best spot on your neck, Or else, in sweet larceny, I would suck upon your breast, . . . Or else, slowly, step by step, I would slide still further down, And with a wanton muzzle I'd commit flea idolatry, Nipping I will not say what, Which I love far more than myself.)

The shared theme generates radically gender-differentiated treatments. Most obviously, Pasquier's flea is male; Catherine's is female. To establish the virginal independence that decorum requires her to maintain amid a chorus of men writing as seducers, she goes on to attribute her own intellectual interests to the flea. She represents "la puce" as a mathematical and astrological prodigy: it bites in intricate geometric patterns (lines 41-45) and was co-sired by Jupiter with Orion in the heavenly map of the constellations (lines 53-58). Her flea disembodies and outleaps Pasquier's.

In other instances, Catherine responds to a man's poem by simply reading past it. One way she does this is to undercut a predict-able interpretation of her response by inventing an unexpected alternative. To Claude Binet, for example, who addresses the flea as a sort of Amazonian explorer expert in varied sexual techniques, she writes a short song acknowledging that his poem has made her blush. But she explains that the reason is her inability to thank him properly for such a flattering portrait. The blush, first offered as if it might be a sign of sexual shame, of complicity in the male poet's erotic game, is reclaimed as a symptom of purely social embarrassment at undeserved compliments: "Dy moy Rochette que fais tu?/Ha tu rougis, c'est de la honte / De voir un pourtraict qui surmonte / Ta foible et debile vertu." ("Tell me, Little Rock, what are you doing? / Aha, you're blushing! It's from shame / At seeing a portrait that so surpasses / Your frail and unpraiseworthy merit," 28v.) She reads against the grain in a similar way by matching a sonnet of Odet de Turnebe in which he claims via a rather sinister allusion to Medusa that Catherine's beauty can transfix and petrify men; in a "Response faite sur le champ" ("Answer improvised on the spot"), she turns his compliment back on him by explaining that he is attributing to her the intellectual beauty he contemplates in himself (37).

Only once in the anthology does Catherine respond in a wholeheartedly positive way to a poem written by a man: "Le Raisin," a long narrative poem by Pierre Le Loyer in which, imitating her Ovidian tale of the flea, he tells the story of Botrys, a heroine he adds to Ovid's story of Lycurgus, the king of Thrace who was punished by Dionysius for resisting his power (Metamorphoses 4:22-25). Le Loyer's virginal Botrys (Greek for "a bunch of grapes"), refusing to marry Lycurgus, commits suicide to avoid being raped; Dionysius then changes her into a grape vine, the source of fruit and wine. In "A la Botrys de P. Le Loyer" Catherine seizes upon this tale to claim Botrys as an alter ego, an ally and twin. She appropriates the maiden's chastity as a parallel to her own, celebrating the courage demonstrated in Botrys' suicide as an analogy to her own celibacy and punning on the name of the poet who has immortalized Botrys ("loyer" means "reward, recompense"): "Heureuse dont ce froid courage / Ne sceut a l'amour s'employer, / Puis que perdant ton mariage / Tu gaignes un riche Loyer." ("Lucky girl, whose cold heart / Could not be devoted to love, / For by losing out on marriage / You gain a rich reward," 87v.)

But in her next poem she invites Botrys into an enduring, exclusive bond with her. By identifying with Loyer's heroine and addressing Botrys rather than her inventor in her final quatrain, Catherine turns Le Loyer into an unnamed member of the chorus of poets who praise her:

Vivons donc desormais Demeurons pour jamais Toy en ma Rime basse, Et moy au bel escrit Dont m'honore un esprit Qui les Muses surpasse. (88)

(So let us live on, Let us last forever, You in my low verse, And I in the fair text By which honors me a mind That surpasses the Muses.)

Through this shift of focus from the male poet to the heroine he eternalizes, the woman poet claims a place outside the circulation of male-authored seduction lyric on which the anthology is based.

Marking out a distinct position in La Puce's system of self-presentation and metaphor, Catherine des Roches filters the men's texts and shifts their emphasis in order to resist their depictions of her as a body to be shared out as discursive terrain. In such counter-readings, she is indeed conforming to what Pasquier called "la bien seance des sexes," but she obeys social conventions about what could be said by an "honneste" woman for another reason, as well: her tactics of resisting the male poets' version of her allow her to claim the prestige of an intellectual rather than a bodily performer. Catherine makes herself a heroine of poetry and chastity alike, arm in arm with le Loyer's Botrys, occupying a pedestal for two above the male poets' exploitation of "la puce" as a ground for masculine self-display. Her maneuvers in this collaborative publication show its female contributor revising the language of male intellectuals in an ongoing campaign to control how she will be read. Francois Rigolot's summary of women writer's responses to male-defined literary norms is a good description of Catherine Des Roches's procedures in La Puce: "Writing in the feminine mode often means provoking anomalies, derailing the norm, setting up unexpected reversals that reveal a desire to diverge from the governing model. . . . Every [woman's] literary creation, then, tells the story of an appropriation and a displacement."(15) Catherine's figure of the agile, nervous flea signals that when women poets gained access to humanist discourse and rituals of fellowship, they used them differently - less outrageously, but perhaps more ingeniously - than the men who were co-readers with them.

La Puce, then, is not a unified text written by and for an elite, but a world of readings. In it, poets scan each other in the present and look to poets of the past while their critics within the text and their editors outside it set them up to be read in other ways. This plurality of authors and presenters poses a final question about such an anthology: Can any single writer be said to own it? The title itself is ambiguous. Does Catherine's name in La Puce de Madame Des-Roches refer to the woman as the body hosting the flea or as the poet who initiated the collection? The typographical presentation of the anthology assigns it yet another source: the assizes own the text. The subtitle printed at the top of every page, "La Puce des Grans Jours de Poitiers," shifts the focus from writers to historical event, to the urban, political context of the collaboration. It's possible to argue, on the other hand, that Madeleine and Catherine did own the text to the extent that they were the writers who most likely arranged for it to be published. Pasquier disclaimed the role of editor in a letter, saying that he did not know who had seen the poems to press but referring to Angelier's printshop as the "boutique" of the Des Roches.(16) Langelier claims in "Au Lecteur" that several contributors might have tried to stop the printing of the collection, yet his preface promises amusement and usefulness to a wide range of readers. Seeing so many people standing in such diverse relations to this collection, can we speak of any single reading of La Puce?

And this is not the end of the story. Given Langelier's high claims for what Pasquier's contributions to the anthology could offer its readers, it is not surprising that Pasquier eventually claimed it for himself. In 1610 the Parisian publisher Jean Petitpas reprinted the anthology entirely in the first edition of La Jeunesse d'Etienne Pasquier. Petitpas's introduction registers Pasquier's ambivalence toward being read as the circus master of La Puce, doubtless because his larger ambition was to be seen as an expert in law and a historian of France: the publisher invokes Pietro Bembo's Iuvenilia as a precedent for a collection of playful writing by an otherwise serious writer.(17) Whatever Pasquier's hesitations about his reputation may have been, however, the title this later edition gives to La Puce replaces Catherine des Roches with Pasquier as the initiator of the contest: La Puce, ou Jeus Poetiques Francois et Latins. Composez sur la Puce aux Grands Jours de Poictiers l'an MDLXXIX, dont Pasquier fut le'Premier Motif (The Flea, or poetic games in French and Latin, composed on the Flea during the Special Assizes of Poitiers in the year 1579, of which Pasquier was the initiator). The unsigned "Au Lecteur" of the 1582 edition is attributed to Pasquier,(18) and the order of the poems is shifted to centralize him: the ballad of the braggart soldier is omitted, and La Coudray's long elegy to Pasquier concludes the anthology. The Des Roches had died of the plague in Poitiers in 1587 and Langelier's ten-year copyright for La Puce had lapsed at the end of 1592. So Pasquier and his editor, by 1610, appear to have won possession of the group text through attrition.

La Puce as group performance suggests several ways that literary critics of the Renaissance can move toward a broader cultural history: by looking at cities and coteries, at social and linguistic environments, rather than focusing on isolated authors assumed to have been preserved through uniformly appreciative readings. La Puce, read as the self-portrait of the Poitiers coterie, establishes Etienne Pasquier as a skillful director of jeux poetiques who could take advantage of the passing of time to claim the collective text as his own invention - but also as a writer stimulated and challenged by other writers and by publishers competing in the group game. Whether La Puce appears in fragments, as it does in the Des Roches' Secondes oeuvres (1583), or in its entirety in a new publication, as in Pasquier's Jeunesse, it reveals writers and editors working to claim readers' attention in diverse, even incompatible ways. To focus on the rivalry as well as the collaboration in Renaissance anthologies calls into question Romantic assumptions that have anachronistically canonized the great writer as a solitary genius. More broadly, such collections suggest that all Renaissance texts might be read as gendered interventions into unequally empowering discourses. La Puce shifts its readers' attention from traditional institutions and elite literature to more mobile interplays of writing and reading, interplays that shift up and down the social ladder and shape both sexes' participation in public culture.

SMITH COLLEGE

1 For France, see Lougee and Read; Bolzoni, Quondam and Richards for Italy; Marotti and Ezell for England.

2 Keating, 94-110; Benouis, passim.

3 La Puce, dedication by Jacques de Sourdray, a2.

4 Cited in Hunt, 156.

5 Hunt, 156; cf. Risset, Quondam, Marotti, Ezell.

6 Labe, 43.

7 Lettres, cited in Diller, 67; italics mine.

8 Read, chap. 2; on women writers' prefaces in general, see Larsen, 1990.

9 Jones, Eros, 82-83, 158; Read, 58-76.

10 Tomarken, 225.

11 Ibid., 228.

12 For "homosocial," used to describe man-to-man relationships involving power and eroticism, often through the medium of a woman, see Sedgwick.

13 Lougee, passim and final appendixes.

14 Tomarken, 311, n. 46.

15 Rigolot, 7-8 (my translation).

16 Diller, 56, n. 115.

17 Pasquier, 1610, a3.

18 Ibid., 565-67.

Bibliography

Benouis, Mustapha. Le Dialogue philosophique dans la litterature francaise du seizieme siecle. Paris, 1976.

Bolzoni, Lina. "L'Accademia veneziana: splendore e decadenza di una utopia enciclopedica." In Universita, accademie e societa in Italia e Germania dal Cinquecento al Settecento, ed. Laetitia Boehm and Ezio Raimondi, 118-42. Bologna, 1981.

Bouchet, Jean. Epistres morales et familieres du traverseur. Ed. Jennifer Beard. The Hague, 1969.

Chartier, Roger. The Cultural Uses of Print in Early Modern France. Trans. Lydia Cochrane. Princeton, 1987. Orig. pub. Les Usages de l'imprime (Paris, 1987).

-----. "Texts, Printings, Readings. "In The New Cultural History, ed. Lynn Hunt, 154-75. Berkeley, 1989.

Des Roches, Madeleine and Catherine. Les Oeuvres de Mes-dames des Roches de Poitiers, mere et fille. Paris, 1578.

Diller, George. Les Dames des Roches: etude sur la vie litteraire a Poitiers dans la deuxieme moitie du XVIe siecle. Paris, 1936.

Ezell, Margaret. "Women Writers: Patterns of Manuscript Circulation and Publication," chap. 3 in The Patriarch's Wife: Literary Evidence and the History of the Family. Chapel Hill, 1987.

Greggio, Elisa Innocenti. "In Difesa di Gaspara Stampa." L'Ateneo veneto 38 (1915): 5-149.

Jones, Ann Rosalind. The Currency of Eros: Women's Love Lyric in Europe, 1540-1620. Bloomington, 1990.

Keating, [Louis] Clark. Studies on the Literary Salon in France, 1550-1615. Cambridge, 1941.

Labe, Louise. Oeuvres completes. Ed. Francois Rigolot. Paris, 1986.

Larsen, Anne R. "The French Humanist Scholars: Les Dames des Roches." In Women Writers of the Renaissance and Reformation, ed. Katharina Wilson, 232-59. Athens, GA, 1987.

-----. "Unhonneste passetemps: Strategies of Legitimation in French Renaissance Women's Prefaces." L'Esprit createur 30 (1990): 11-22.

Lougee, Carolyn. Le Paradis des femmes: Women, Salons and Social Stratification in Seventeenth-Century France. Princeton, 1976.

Marotti, Arthur. John Donne, Coterie Poet. Madison, 1986.

Pasquier, Etienne, ed. La Puce de Madame Des-Roches. Paris, 1583.

-----. La Jeunesse d'Etienne Pasquier. Et sa Suite. Paris, 1610.

Quondam, Amedeo. Petrarchismo mediato: per una critica della forma anthologia. Rome, 1974.

Read, Kirk Dorrance. "French Renaissance Women Writers in Search of Community: Literary Constructions of Female Companionship in City, Family and Convent." Ph. D. diss., Princeton University, 1991.

Rigolot, Francois. "Ecrire au feminin a la Renaissance: problemes et perspectives." L'Esprit createur 30 (1990): 3-10.

Risset, Jacqueline. L'Anagramme du desir: essai sur "La Delie" de Maurice Steve. Rome, 1971.

Samuels, Richard. "Benedetto Varchi, the Accademia degli Infiammati, and the Origins of the Italian Academic Movement." Renaissance Quarterly 29 (1976): 599-634.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. Between Men: English Literature and Male Homosocial Desire. New York, 1985.

Tomarken, Annette H. The Smile of Truth: The French Satirical Eulogy and Its Antecedents. Princeton, 1990.

Yandell, Cathy. "Of Lice and Women: Rhetoric and Gender in La Puce de Madame des Roches. "Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies 20 (1990): 123-35.