Anne Malet de Graville:
Born, in Rouen in 1480, into the French aristocracy, she would likely have achieved absolutely nothing of any merit in her life, beyond boredom and babies, had she done what her parents, indeed her society, expected and required of her. It would no doubt have been a pleasant enough life, growing up at the ludicrously Gothic Chateau de Marcoussis, at Rambouillet, just outside Paris, and no doubt something equivalently lavish when she married. Her father, after all, was Louis Malet de Graville, the admiral of France, key figure at the court of Anne of France and Pierre de Beaujeu, and still so when Louis XII succeeded to the throne. What more should a girl want?
But, sadly, her parents made a terrible mistake: they educated her. Gave her free access to her father's extensive collection of manuscripts and printed books, one of the richest libraries of the time, and failed set up sensible obstacles when she decided to teach herself both Latin and Italian. How very silly! And they should have foreseen the problem coming when she made faces over several suggested marriage-suitors, and started putting emotionally charged mottos on her letters - musas natura, lacrymas fortuna would recur throughout her life (“The Muses come from Nature, Tears from Fate”). And then - surely no one could fail to understand this - making clever-clever anagrams of her name, and signing poems she had written with them: "J'en garde un léal" and "Garni d'un léal": “loyal in my loyalties” and “steadfast in my steadfastness” are the best I can offer for a translation. Spends far too much time discussing the books of that dreadful man Boccaccio with her cousin, was her mother’s take.
And so the inevitable happened. Somewhere between 1506 and 1510, she secretly married that maternal cousin, Pierre de Balsac, Baron d'Entraigues - and forgive me if I digress for a brief moment, but I cannot help wondering if Monsieur Balssa didn’t just choose his pen-name by chance, but made it seem like he was a descendant of a distinguished literary pedigree - see May 20 and the Pseudonyms page on Feb 8 (you can also read more about her mother here).
Secretly married, as I have said, which denotes family disapproval, on one or probably both sides, though whether it was because the relationship was regarded as incestuous, or for some other reason, is not recorded by history. But disapprove they did. So much so, her father immediately disinherited her, and then successfully petitioned to have the husband’s properties and revenues seized as well. The couple were reduced to absolute poverty, and left homeless, until dad’s chaplain intervened, arranging a reconciliation by means of Anne renouncing her inheritance (she sued after daddy died, and got it all back) in exchange for a one-off payment and an annual stipend. More importantly, the chaplain knew the chaplain at the royal court as well, and got Anne hired as a lady-in-waiting to Queen Claude, wife of king Francis I, another woman with a brain who was utterly determined she would use it.
Somewhere between 1515 and 1524, when the lady-in-waiting was not also the lady-expecting (she had eleven children), the Queen commissioned at least two works from her (worth comparing them with Sei Shōnagon and the Empress Teishi! see my essay in "Travels in Familiar Lands") - there were probably many more, but these are the two that have survived.
The first was a “mise en rondeaux”, a “setting in rondeau form”, with musical accompaniment - Anne was also famous for her beautiful singing voice - of Alain Chartier’s “La belle dame sans mercy”; and this being “J'en garde un léal” she didn’t just translate, but used the need to find ways to resolve the complexities of form as an opportunity to engage in serious debate with Chartier on the subject of female virtue which was the piece’s principal focus, and a matter of much relevance to herself given the scandal of her marriage.
Such was the success of this rendering-cum-disputation, she won what every translator of her day longed to receive, which was the commission to translate Boccaccio’s “Teseida delle nozze d'Emilia”. This she did by rendering it “de vieil langaige et prose en nouveau et rime”, which is to say updated from prose into rhymed verse, but also rejecting the conventional "olde Franchois" and using instead the "nouvelle Français" of her day - Chaucer did exactly the same with his English version. She called hers “Le beau romant des deux amans Palamon et Arcita et de la belle et saige Emylia”, “the fine romance of the two lovers Palamon and Arcita, and of the beautiful and wise Emylia”.
When Claude died in 1524, and Anne could finally stop waiting, she became part of the intellectual circle that surrounded Marguerite de Navarre (or Marguerite of Angoulême if you prefer, the “mother of the renaissance” - more on her on the Mediaeval page of "Woman-Blindness") which meant engaging with matters of religion rather more than those of love or literature; she even provided shelters for several exiled Protestants. But not books, alas, for whatever outcomes of her thinking.
She died in Rouen, aged just 45, today in 1540
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