Abstract
The exceptionally diverse and extensive literary output of the Jesuit poet Pierre Le Moyne is full of apparent paradoxes and ambiguities which have always proved a challenge to commentators, from his own contemporaries to the present day. This article takes as its starting point the recent recovery of a detailed account of Le Moyne’s first known creation, a spectacular dramatic production put on by the Jesuit college in Reims, to consider a pervasive, but relatively unstudied, feature of his works: the poet’s frequent allusions to the theatre, and, beyond this, the relationship between his strikingly original imagination and the creative techniques of dramatists and actors. It is argued that these are crucial to the ways in which he sets out to engage his worldly readers, and to encourage a receptive response to the moral and spiritual ideals which he seeks to transmit.
Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671) was the most celebrated, versatile and commercially successful Jesuit poet writing in French of the early modern period. His œuvre is unique in the seventeenth century in its extent and its astonishing diversity; no doubt for this reason, it has always proved exceptionally difficult to provide a convincing Gesamtübersicht of his achievement.Footnote1
His intentions are consistent: to celebrate the glory of the monarchy, and above all to encourage his readers to take seriously what he regarded as the truest interpretation of the Christian religion and its moral prescriptions. To achieve these aims, it seems as though he could turn his pen to any form that was currently finding readers: devotional, controversial and moralising works, panegyrics, devises, and treatises on poetry in general, epic theory, the ideal financier, l’art des devises, the writing of history, and a massive folio of advice to the young king, De l’art de régner. In verse, his output ranged from epigrams and light society badinage to an epic poem (in two contrasting versions), and included four brilliantly successful and moving mystical hymns, ekphrastic works, and by far the most substantial collection of serious verse letters of the century.Footnote2
His contemporaries found that he eluded any easy characterisation, and, when discussing his work, frequently have recourse to paradox. As early as 1639, Balzac read Le Moyne’s two hymns on La Sagesse divine,Footnote3 and wrote to Chapelain with typically hyperbolic enthusiasm (‘Quelle hardiesse d’esprit! Quelle magnifique expression! De quelenthousiasme est-il possédé!’Footnote4). But Le Moyne’s enthousiasme was not at all to Chapelain’s taste; in reply, he assured Balzac that ‘ce grand homme, cet excellent Père de la Sagesse, est un des plus foux personnages … que nous connoissons’, and called it ‘un paradoxe des moins probables que les Stoïques ayent jamais mis en avant’.Footnote5 Later in the century, a frequently repeated anecdote seems to sum up a widespread judgement: when asked why there is no mention of Le Moyne in his Art poétique or satires, Boileau is reported to have replied with a parody of Corneille’s celebrated epigram on Richelieu:
The Gallerie, similarly, with its 20 widely different principal subjects, each accompanied with a ‘question morale’, and its 22 ‘exemples’ of more modern heroines of all kinds, seems expressly designed to argue as wide a range as possible of generalities about the capabilities of women (strong, independent, equal to, or better than, men at almost everything), and their obligations (subservience, obedience and faithfulness to their husbands, who must always come first).
In both of these works, Le Moyne seems to have no qualms about skating on what, to purists of all kinds, might seem very thin ice: the stern unbending moralists of Port-Royal might have found more telling examples even than those quoted by Pascal and Barbier d’Aucour.Footnote8 For example, in the Gallerie, in repeatedly dwelling on how extraordinarily difficult, indeed heroic, it is for a woman to remain chaste, his intention is no doubt to flatter his virtuous female readers while not alienating those with a more flexible morality; and yet, as with Laïs in the Peintures, he comes perilously close to providing a religiously sanctioned excuse for sexual licence. Thus in the Question morale to ‘La Judith françoise’ (a sixth-century Christian woman who killed a lustful duke) he writes of: ‘La Volupté, qui est une Ennemie opiniastre et pressante: et qui ne peut estre presque vaincue, ny à force ouverte, ny par diversion, ny par stratagéme’.Footnote9 His readers might well reflect that since, as Le Moyne also insists, true heroism is granted to but few, then humanum est errare, and they can hardly be blamed if they fail to resist the wiles of la volupté.
The great epic Saint Louis includes an almost inexhaustible variety of contrasting characters, adventures, ideals and moral choices, while even Le Moyne’s plan for the whole work is shaped by an unacknowledged paradox. When Louis is transported to Heaven in Book 8, he is given a choice of three crowns: Rome, Byzantium or the Crown of Thorns. He naturally chooses the Crown of Thorns, and is promised a life of suffering but a heavenly reward. This more or less fits the repeated failures of the king’s real crusades. In Le Moyne’s epic, though, all of this is abandoned by the end: in a wildly unhistorical climax, Louis routs the Saracen army in a final great battle, kills all its leaders, wins the Crown of Thorns, and emerges triumphant.Footnote10
It might, though, be possible to find a common factor in Le Moyne’s works that helps to reconcile such paradoxes. When one surveys the scholarship devoted to him over the past 150 years, it is curious to note that, of the 130 books, articles and editions that I am aware of, with one recent exception (discussed below) none take as their principal focus one of the most immediately striking aspects of his poetry: the theatricality and dramatic imagination which animate so much of it, and which are crucial to understanding the techniques through which he sets out to achieve his serious moral purpose.Footnote11
Such a characteristic should come as no surprise. The dramatic imagination was central to every aspect of Jesuit formation, from the Spiritual Exercises to the Ratio Studiorum, and found its most celebrated expression in the spectacular performances put on by the Jesuit colleges; Le Moyne spent half his career as a régent, in the colleges at Reims, Dijon and Langres, and finally at the Collège de Clermont in Paris, and will have been closely involved in their dramatic productions.
Indeed, the latest addition to the canon of Le Moyne’s works, and the first of which we have a record, is precisely the invention of such a production. Rosa de Marco has recovered the detailed account of a spectacle that he wrote in 1628 for the Jesuit college in Reims, where he was a young régent: La Conquête du char de la Gloire par le grand Théandre. Représentée en cinq ballets par les Pensionnaires du Collège de la Compagnie de Jésus de Reims. En rejouissance de la reduction de la Rochelle, à l’obeissance du Roy (Reims: Nicolas Constant, 1628, in-4°, 5 pp.).Footnote12 The event was clearly a notable success; the outline of the production was later described by Claude-François Menestrier,Footnote13 but the pamphlet account provides invaluable new details.
This publication antedates Le Moyne’s first collection of poetry, Les Triomphes de Louys le Juste en la reduction des Rochelois et des autres rebelles de son royaume (Reims: Nicolas Constant, 1629), and is intimately connected to it. Not only was Le Moyne responsible for the creation of the spectacle, but two of his earliest surviving poems were specifically written to be declaimed in the course of the performance: ‘Recit de l’Ombre de Cloridan pour la rejouyssance qui fut faite au College de Reims, sur la prise de la Rochelle’Footnote14 and ‘Recit de Bergers pour la mesme rejouyssance’.Footnote15
Thereafter, throughout his career, Le Moyne seems to have written many of his poems in the anticipation that they would initially be heard rather than read on the page; many are written in a declamatory and highly imaged style that is ideally suited to oral performance, and are especially effective in this way. More than 30 years after his first publication, a large number of his Entretiens et lettres poétiques were clearly written on the assumption that they would be read to, rather than by, the dedicatee; in one case, a lighter piece addressed to the duc de Saint-Aignan (‘Gazette du Parnasse’), the poet is explicit about how he expects his work to be presented:
The word ‘théâtre’ itself is used abundantly in both literal and figurative senses, as a playhouse and the works acted there, a locus of action, and a spectacle of any kind; in all these senses, it is generally found in a moralising context, and even the most banal commonplaces of the Theatrum mundi are reinvigorated by the force of the poet’s imagination. One of the longest of the Entretiens, ‘Le Théâtre du sage’, addressed to the Président de Mesmes, opens with a play on the meanings of théâtre and scène:
A further example of the figurative use of spectacle and théâtre is worth quoting at length for the dynamic imagination with which the poet visualises a universal Dance of Death:
This is his method, for example, in La Dévotion aisée,Footnote24 whose title alone was enough to arouse the wrath of the austere. Through this attractive work the author begins by writing indulgently of worldly pleasures, to engage his imagined (female) reader; then he leads this reader sympathetically to a practice of religion that is neither relâchée nor especially aisée. Where Pascal attacks ‘la manière si profane et si coquette dont votre Père Le Moine a parlé de la piété dans sa Dévotion aisée’, a modern critic, Didier Course, writes perspicaciously: ‘Le raisonnement élégant, l’image empruntée à la mode des cabinets de curiosités ou à l’alcôve précieuse, qui tous savent séduire un public habitué aux grâces de la mondanité, sont aussi et surtout des outils précieux dans l’avancée de l’introspection et de la révélation’.Footnote25
So also, in the Entretiens, the poet adjusts his language, register and range of reference to suit the person to whom a poem is addressed: he might sprinkle a poem with financial or legal terms as appropriate, while he adopts a vigorous style and military vocabulary for a soldier like Condé (I, 3, 4), and philosophical allusions and ruminations for Habert de Montmort (I, 12); when staying on the estate of the old maréchal d’Estrées he adopts the persona of a country gentleman (I, 10), and so on. The poems of Book II of the Entretiens are entirely addressed to ladies of the court and aristocratic society, and full of worldly allusions in a manner reminiscent of some of Le Moyne’s earlier poems. Yet by now he very largely escapes the pitfalls of adopting a tone of excessive galanterie, and his moralising intentions are clear and firmly expressed; in fact he prided – and perhaps flattered – himself that one of these verse letters was influential in bringing about the conversion of an aristocratic young Protestant woman.Footnote26
From the evident success of his first engagement with a theatrical production, right through his literary career to his final poems, Le Moyne remained keenly aware of the varied ways in which his essentially dramatic imagination could serve his moral purpose. His aim is precisely to be all things to all people, as in St Paul’s injunction to the Corinthians, and with the same intention: ‘that I might by all means save some’. It is this intention that reconciles the paradoxes of his work. One could, in fact, apply to the poet himself the words that he attributes to Divine Wisdom: ‘[Je] conduis par degrez … les Hommes à Dieu’.Footnote27
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Notes on contributors
Richard Maber
Richard Maber is Emeritus Professor of French at Durham University. He is currently working on seventeenth-century French poetry, and on the international networks of learned correspondence across Europe: he is preparing a 5-volume edition of the complete correspondence of Gilles Ménage (16i3-1692). He is the founder (1985) and General Editor of the interdisciplinary journal The Seventeenth Century.
Notes
1 The most comprehensive study of Le Moyne’s life and work is still Henri Chérot, SJ, Étude sur la vie et les œuvres du Père Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671) (Paris: Alphonse Picard, 1887); the only complete study of his poetry is Richard Maber, The Poetry of Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671) (Bern and Frankfurt/Main: University of Durham Publications, 1982). All other scholarship has focused on individual works or single themes in his vast œuvre. There has been no complete edition of the poetry since 1671/2: Les Œuvres poétiques du P. Le Moyne (Paris: Louis Billaine/Simon Benard/Thomas Jolly, 1671/2). However, there have been two modern critical editions of individual works: Hymnes de la sagesse divine et de l’amour divin, ed. by Anne Mantero (Paris: Le Miroir volant, 1986), and Entretiens et lettres poétiques, ed. by Richard Maber (Paris: Classiques Garnier, 2012); an edition of Saint Louis is currently in preparation, edited by Anne Mantero and Francine Wild.
2 The most complete bibliographies to date of Le Moyne’s works are to be found in Chérot, Étude, pp. 503–47, augmented in his À propos du troisième centenaire du Père Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671). La « Carte nouvelle de la Cour » (1663) (Paris: Henri Leclerc, 1902) (reprinted from the Bulletin du bibliophile, 1902, pp. 353–88), and in Maber, The Poetry, pp. 279–85, augmented in Entretiens, ed. by Maber, pp. 455–68; see also the list drawn up by Anne-Élisabeth Spica, detailed in note 11 below, pp. 103–05.
3 La Sagesse divine. A Monseigneur le Cardinal Duc de Richelieu (Paris: S. Cramoisy, 1639).
4 Les Œuvres de Monsieur de Balzac (Paris: Thomas Jolly, 1665), I, 794.
5 Lettres de Jean Chapelain, ed. by Ph. Tamizey de Larroque (Paris: Imprimerie Nationale, 1880–1883), I, 428–30. The exchange is printed in extenso in Maber, The Poetry, pp. 35–37; see also Chérot, Étude, pp. 65–79.
6 Chérot, Étude, pp. 423–24, and É. Magne, Bibliographie générale des œuvres de Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux et de Gilles et Jacques Boileau (Paris: L. Giraud-Badin, 1929), I. 39.
7 The poems are included in the Œuvres poétiques, pp. 405–09 (‘L’isle de pureté’), 409–12 (‘Les fidèles morts’) and 412–15 (‘Laïs déchirée’).
8 The most well-known attacks on Le Moyne’s ‘morale relâchée’ are contained in the ninth and eleventh Lettres provinciales, where Pascal refers only to the Peintures morales and, to a much lesser extent, La Dévotion aisée. Following Pascal, Barbier d’Aucour devotes a whole poem of his Onguent à la brûlure (no place or printer, 1670) to Le Moyne (‘Du Feu d’Impureté allumé par les Jesuites’), referencing the Peintures and La Dévotion aisée, and also adding a reference to one of the Entretiens (pp. 59–63). This section of the work does not appear in the first edition of the Onguent (no place, printer, or date, probably 1664).
9 La Gallerie des femmes fortes, 4th edn (Paris: J. Cochart, 1663), vol. 2, p. 80.
10 Historically, and less heroically, Louis IX was defeated and captured. The Crown of Thorns was given by, or bought from, the Latin Emperor Baldwin II of Constantinople.
11 These figures are based on Anne-Élisabeth Spica, ‘Pierre Le Moyne (1602–1671): essai de bibliographie critique’, in the special issue of Œuvres et Critiques devoted to Le Moyne, 35:2 (2010), pp. 103–11. To the 105 works listed there can be added the nine essays in that issue of Œuvres et Critiques, and a further 15 articles and one edition that have been published since. A special issue of Revue Bossuet is intended to be devoted to Le Moyne (Numéro 13, 2022), but has not yet appeared at the time of writing. The sense of theatre in Le Moyne’s poetry is inescapable, and touched on in a number of scholarly studies (including Maber, The Poetry, pp. 187–88), but without pursuing its full implications.
12 Rosa de Marco, ‘Un incunable de l’imagination : La Conquête du Char de la Gloire du père jésuite chaumontais Pierre Le Moyne (1628)’, in Art et artistes en Haute-Marne, XVe-XIXe siècle : actes du 1er Colloque biennal des “Cahiers haut-marnais”, Chaumont, 17–19 octobre 2014, ed. by Patrick Corbet, Alain Morgat and Samuel Mourin (Chaumont: Le Pythagore), 2016, pp. 128–37. As de Marco describes it, ‘L’exemplaire est relié dans un recueil factice contenant dans un ordre chronologique d’autres programmes de ballets; ex-libris des Jésuites de Lyon (Lyon, Bibliothèque Part-Dieu, Rés 360234)’.
13 Des Ballets Anciens Et Modernes Selon Les Regles Du Theatre (Paris: René Guignard, 1682), pp. 62–64. See also the account in Chérot, Étude, pp. 48–51.
14 pp. 181–83.
15 Printed only in the second edition of the collection: Les Triomphes de Louis le Juste. Nouvelle edition reveüe et augmentee de plusieurs pieces (Reims: Nicolas Constant, 1630, 24o). Neither Chérot nor de Marco was aware of this edition, or of the second poem.
16 Entretiens, ed. by Maber, Lettre I, 13, p. 228. All subsequent references are to this edition.
17 Œuvres poétiques, pp. 413–14.
18 Œuvres poétiques, pp. 426–35.
19 For some examples, see Maber, The Poetry, pp. 187–88.
20 Entretiens, I, 11, pp. 192–93.
21 Psalm 18.
22 ‘’Miroir fidèle’, Entretiens, to the comtesse de La Suze, II, 1, pp. 266–67.
23 ‘La Carte de Paris’, to the Chancelier, Pierre Séguier, Entretiens I, 7, p. 131.
24 Paris: A. de Sommaville, 1652.
25 Pascal, Œuvres complètes, ed. by Jacques Chevalier (Paris: Bibliothèque de la Pléiade, 1954), p. 788; Didier Course, ‘Le dévotion honnête du Père Le Moyne’, Œuvres et Critiques, 35:2, 2010, 33–42 (p. 36).
26 Entretiens, II, 8, pp. 354–57, ‘De la vraie foi. À mesdemoiselles de Haucourt’. The two young ladies were Jeanne and Suzanne d’Aumale, who both feature prominently in Somaize’s Dictionnaire des précieuses. At the head of the poem, Le Moyne wrote: ‘Il a plu à Dieu que l’Aînée de ces deux illustres personnes ouvrît les yeux à la Vérité, et se fit enfin Catholique’. Jeanne d’Aumale, who remained unmarried, did indeed become Catholic; but Suzanne, who married the celebrated Frédéric-Armand de Schomberg, maréchal de France, rather disobligingly remained a staunch Protestant.
27 ‘La Sagesse divine. Hymne second’, Œuvres, p. 359.
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