Mots Français
Sixteenth Century

François Rabelais (1494?-c1553)
Like Villon, Rabelais was obsessed with paradoxes of desire and death. These are supposed to have been his dying words:

Je vais quérir un grand peut-être
I go to seek the Great Perhaps

Meanwhile, there is civilization's Great Diversion. Modernizing nations are always astonished at how costly war is. Rabelais takes it in stride:

Les nerfs des batailles sont les pécunes (Gargantua 1, 1532)
The sinews of war is money

This line has become proverbial in French, but in a slightly different form.

Marguerite de Navarre (1492-1549)
Marguerite, the sister of François I (who founded the Collège de France) was the Queen of Navarre, and in that role a patroness of literature, and a producer as well as recipient of poems. From her Heptameron, a collection of tales, it is refreshing to record this astringent opinion on the amour question:

La malade d'amour ne tue que ceux qui doivent mourir dans l'année
The disease of love carries off only those already fated to die within that year

Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (1533-1592)
If asked to explain his penchant for traveling, Montaigne was wont to reply

je sais bien ce que je fuis, mais non pas ce que je cherche
I know well enough what I flee, but not what I seek

and when pressed to explain why he had loved a particular friend (Étienne de la Boétie), he could only answer

Parce que c'était lui; parce que c'était moi
Because it was him; because it was me

. . . harking back to Marie de France. This interconnectedness of French literary expression is one of its sovereign and distinctive qualities.

Guillaume Bouchet (1513-1594)
Here is a modern anticipation from Les Sérées III (1584):

La vraie noblesse s'aquiert en vivant, et non pas en naissant
True nobility is acquired by living, and not by birth

Henri Estienne (1531-1598)
Estienne is already a scholar in the modern manner, who established the editio princeps of the Anacreonta as early as 1554, and produced the Thesaurus Graecae Linguae in 1572. He formed a working partnership on several projects with the redoubtable Scaliger. This was the period when France led the Western world in classical scholarship, and what is almost the same thing, scholarly publishing. Here, in a twilight mood, Estienne offers a wistful but also witty thought about life and the passage of time:

Si jeunesse savoit; si vieillesse pouvoit (Épigramme CXCI, 1594 )
If youth but knew; if age but could

 

25 Dec 2005 / Contact The Project / Exit to French Index Page