Claude de Malleville explained

Claude Malleville, born in Paris probably between 1594 and 1596^[1] and died in the same city in 1647, was a French poet. He became one of the first members of the Académie Française in 1634.

His life

Knowledge about Claude Malleville's life was for a long time reduced to the following notice by his contemporary Paul Pellisson:

This succinct and partly erroneous notice must now be replaced by a work by Maurice Cauchie, published in 1923, and corrected on certain points by R. Ortali.^[2]

The works

In his youth, Malleville was a member of the cenacle of the , a circle of Catholic ronsardian poets and scholars, in which he was identified with Damon.^[3]

A member of the circles of Valentin Conrart and of Marie de Gournay, a regular at the Hôtel de Rambouillet, Malleville contributed a dozen poems to the Guirlande de Julie. His most famous sonnet,^[4] La Belle Matineuse, was composed on the occasion of a poetic joust with Vincent Voiture on a theme that goes back to the Latin poet Catullus and was taken up successively by Clément Marot, Joachim du Bellay, Francis I of France, Annibale Caro and François Tristan l'Hermite.^[5] Like other French poets of the time, he wrote sonnets on the themes of La Belle More, La Belle Gueuse and La Belle Baigneuse, borrowed from Giambattista Marino.^[6] The name of Malleville has long been known to the general educated public only by this appreciation of Nicolas Boileau: "A sonnet without faults alone is worth a long poem. / But in vain a thousand authors think they can do it; / And that happy phoenix is yet to be found. / Barely in Gombaut, Maynard and Malleville, / Can you admire two or three out of a thousand. »^[7]

In addition to his sonnets imitated from the Italian mentioned above (and of which he also treats certain themes in Stances), praised poems of Malleville are his elegy on the death of the Princess of Conti, lover of Bassompierre and perhaps secretly married to him,^[8] his paraphrase of Psalm XXX Exaltabo Te Domine^[9] and a heroic priapaea on the famous Ethiopian Zaga Christ, which, according to several critics,^[10] is his masterpiece.

Publications

• L'Almerinde (1646) and La Stratonice (1649). Translated from the Italian of Luca Assarino by Pierre d'Audiguier le jeune et Claude de Malleville.
• Poésies du sieur de Malleville (1649), online.
• Diverses poésies de l'Académie. Divers sonnets, stances, élégies, chansons, madrigaux, épigrammes & rondeaux (1664), online.
• Mémoires du maréchal de Bassompierre, contenans l'histoire de sa vie (4 volumes, 1723).
• Œuvres poétiques, critical edition by Raymond Ortali, Didier, Paris, 1976.

Notes and References

1. R. Ortali, "Œuvres poétiques" by Claude Malleville, t. 1, Paris, Didier, 1976, p. XV.
2. Maurice Cauchie, “L'Académicien Claude Malleville”, Review of libraries, 1923, pp. 129-132, taken up in Documents to serve the literary history of the seventeenth century, 1924, pp. 53-76; Raymond Ortali, in "Œuvres poétiques"' by Claude Malleville, t. 1, Paris, Didier, p. XIII-XXVII.
3. Antoine Adam, Histoire de la littérature française au XVIIe siècle, vol. 1, L'époque d'Henri IV et de Louis XIII, éd. Albin Michel, 2014, p. 297-298.
4. He actually treated the same subject in three sonnets of similar quality. See Claude Malleville, Œuvres poétiques, critical edition published by Raymond Ortali, Didier, Paris, 1976, t. 1, p. 40-44. “(...) all three are so good that the worst seems to me better than the two Italians together” Gilles Ménage, quoted by R. Ortali, ib. p. 41.
5. History of the question in Émile Faguet, Histoire de la poésie française de la Renaissance au Romantisme, vol. III, pp. 206-211.
6. See R. Ortali, Œuvres poétiques by Claude Malleville, t. 1, Paris, Didier, 1976, p. 45-48, which refers to Valery Larbaud, "Trois belles mendiantes", in Technique, Œuvres complètes, VIII, 1953, pp. 323-380.
7. Nicolas Boileau, Art poétique, II, v. 94-98.
8. Armide à Daphnis, in Claude Malleville, Œuvres poétiques, critical edition published by Raymond Ortali, Didier, Paris, 1976, t. 2, p. 264-283. "This elegy is the longest written by Malleville. It is also the most touching and the most beautiful, despite quite a few negligence in the writing of the verses." (R. Ortali, ib., p. 286.)
9. According to Thierry Maulnier, Poètes précieux et baroques du XVIIe siècle, 1941, p. 48, this paraphrase contains "stanzas of a quality hardly surpassable". (Quoted by R. Ortali, Œuvres poétiques de Claude Malleville, Paris, 1976, t. 2, p. 504.)
10. Notably Faguet and Cauchie, quoted by R. Ortali, Œuvres poétiques by Claude Malleville, Paris, 1976, t. 2, p. 553-554.