Biography
Some biographical highlights
Clément Marot was born in
Cahors (probably in 1496 and perhaps on 23rd of November (because the
patron saint of that day is Clemens)); he died in Turin on 12
September 1544 and was buried in the crypt of the Turin Cathedral.
LIFE
Son of the court poet Jean Marot, Clément sought to follow in his
father's footsteps. Although he often refers to his birthplace (Clément
Marot de Cahors en Quercy—savour the sound and the rhythm!), he
probably did not live there for long.
In 1518 he secured a post as
secrétaire at the court of Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Francis I,
King of France. This court was a centre of culture and, in the 1520s, became
a hotbed of ecclesiastical reform. Marguerite corresponded intensely with
the Bishop of Meaux, who was organizing in his diocese one of the most
promising experiments in church renewal (Meaux lies just north of Paris).
She was its sponsor and certainly its protector, if not its
behind-the-scenes coordinator. Her personal scholar, Lefèvre d'Étaples (the
French counterpart of the Dutch Erasmus), supervised the experiment. She
was, besides, a learned woman and a gifted poet—and, posthumously, a
storyteller and playwright as well. Marot's religiously inspired poetry,
such as his first Psalm versification and his simple prayers in French,
found its natural habitat in her sphere. His first Psalm (no. 6) was
appended to a reprint of Marguerite's Miroir de l'âme pécheresse
(1533), and the prayers appeared in a closely related pamphlet on the reform
of orthography.
In 1527 Marot had become valet de chambre du roi (court poet, an
honorary office), and his fame grew. All of Paris knew him through the poems
that circulated and were occasionally printed. He scored a huge success with
his chansons, published by Attaingnant.
In 1534 he was forced to
leave the country because of the Affaire des Placards: fierce
broadsheets attacking the "popish Mass" were posted everywhere in and around
Paris, and anyone suspected of sympathy for "Lutheranism," as it was then
called, was in acute danger. After finding shelter in Navarre (with—who
else?—Marguerite, now married to the King of Navarre), he travelled to
Ferrara, where the king's cousin, Renée de France, held court, not only
entertaining the French in Italy but at the same time actively fostering
intellectual, moral, and ecclesiastical renewal.
After two years of exile,
Marot was able to return to France only because he publicly abjured his
"errors" and explicitly reaffirmed his allegiance to the Roman Catholic
Church (December 1536, in Lyon). He was restored to his position and became
the greatest poet of his time. From then on he kept silent about his
innermost convictions. But his name remained linked to the Reform movement:
his Psalm versifications circulated in manuscript and have been associated
with Calvinism ever since John Calvin used thirteen of them in his first
hymnbook (Strasbourg, 1539).
In 1542 a new wave of prosecutions led him to
leave France. This time he departed for Geneva, where he was warmly received
by Calvin, who actively supported him as he expanded his versification of
the Psalter. Marot left the city late in 1543, intending to return to
France. He died on 12 September 1544, at the age of forty-seven, in Turin,
where the French troops had their headquarters. On his death, an epigram was
carved in marble and placed in Turin Cathedral, from which it was removed
thirty years later by the explicit command of the Bishop of Turin.
WORKS
As was normal procedure in those days, poems circulated in manuscript, and
only those made for special occasions were printed. The texts of his songs (chansons)
appeared in music editions (music by Claudin de Sermisy and Clément
Janequin, both court musicians; editor: Pierre Attaingnant). Precisely
because of their enormous popularity, Marot felt compelled to publish an
anthology of his poems, both to distinguish authentic texts from spurious
ones and to provide correct (or improved) versions. He titled this anthology
"Clément's Youth," Adolescence Clémentine (1532; preface 1530). In
it he gathered the harvest of his first thirty years as a poet. Many older
forms (ballades, rondeaux) are present, but new types appear as well, such
as the chanson (new as an art form). Also characteristic is the
presence of translations (or imitations, re-creations) of the classical
poets—Virgil, Horace, Ovid—in which Humanist influence may be surmised.
Marot proved well versed in the epistolary art, giving this classical form a
highly personal touch. Famous are his Épître au roy pour le délivrer de
prison (1527) and his Au roy pour avoir été dérobé (1532).
During his exile he perfected the form, its summit being the Épître au
roy, du temps de son exil à Ferrare (1535), in which he pleads to be
allowed to return. Before he was forced to flee, he had published La
Suite de l'Adolescence Clémentine, bringing together further poetry
from his first period. A series of translations of Ovid's Metamorphoses
also appeared in print around the same time—as always, "dedicated to the
King."
When Marot returned from exile, he published a new version of his
Œuvres (1538), suppressing some of the more religiously risky
poems. He is often regarded as the poet who closed the Middle Ages (the
Rhétoriqueurs) and ushered in a new era: the French Renaissance. In
later years he specialized in epigrams, in the manner of Martial. While
still in exile he reinvented the old genre of the blason,
challenging his fellow poets to describe a (small) part of the female body
as charmingly as possible; his own Blason du beau tétin was the
model to follow. The combination of craftsmanship and a witty mind made him
the "prince of the French poets of his day," loved and admired by many,
feared by others. As a satirist, he dispatched his arch-enemy Sagon with
L'Épître de Frippelippes (1537).
His poems reformulating the text of
the Hebrew psalms in sixteenth-century strophic form earned him a name in
scholarly and religious circles. He translated après la vérité hébraïque—that
is, from the original language (albeit by way of intermediary translations).
This purely Humanist idea (ad fontes, back to the sources), applied
to the poetry of the Psalter, became an unexpected success in evangelical
circles. The poems, initially made for private use (the Court), circulated
among Reform-minded readers. In 1539 John Calvin gathered
13 of
them and had them set to music, together with some of his own (and others')
efforts. This publication (Aulcuns Pseaulmes, Strasbourg, 1539)
marked the beginning of the practice of singing psalms in the Reformed
liturgy. In 1541 Marot himself published a first collection (Trente
Pseaumes), and in 1543 the definitive one: Cinquante Pseaumes
(Geneva/Paris). In Geneva, Lausanne, and Lyon, composers were eager to set
these texts to music (whether in the manner of a motet or of a chanson).
The Cinquante Pseaumes (forty-nine psalms and the Canticle of
Simeon), plus a few other texts, became the core of the Huguenot Psalter.
APPRECIATION
The new generation of French poets around the middle of the sixteenth century—the young wolves of the Pléiade, such as Ronsard and De Baïf—dismissed Marot's poetry as old-fashioned, chiefly, of course, to promote themselves as the alternative. This criticism gave his poetry a bad name for centuries. Only in the late twentieth century did a reappraisal of the Prince des poètes françaises take place. He is now regarded as the first Renaissance poet in French literature and—on the strength of his preference for translation—as a Humanist who sought to offer the texts of classical and biblical antiquity to the modern reader in his mother tongue.
a
table with a chronology of Marot's life, works and main events (in
Dutch)
References
Edition:
Clément Marot, Oeuvres Poétiques, two volumes,
Ed. G. Defaux, Classiques Garnier, 1990/1993
Biography:
C.A. Mayer, Clément Marot, Paris 1972 (the introduction of the
abovementioned edition can be used as an update and in some parts a
counter-balance)