r's title; d'Alencon
from her first husband's; and de Navarre from that of her second. In
literature, to distinguish her from her great-niece, the first wife of
Henri IV., Marguerite d'Angouleme is the term most commonly used.

[186] Ed. La Borderie. Paris, 1878. The bibliography of this book is
very curious.

[187] Ed. Hippeau. 2 vols. Paris, 1875.

[188] Ed. Roybet. Paris. In course of publication.

[189] Ed. Tricotel. 2 vols. Paris, 1879.

[190] Ed. Ristelhuber. 2 vols. Paris, 1879.

[191] Ed. Jacob. Paris, 1868. It is possibly not Beroalde's.

CHAPTER IV.

THE PLEIADE.

[Sidenote: Character and Effects of the Pleiade Movement.]

Almost exactly at the middle of the sixteenth century a movement took
place in French literature which has no parallel in literary history,
except the similar movement which took place, also in France, three
centuries later. The movement and its chief promoters are indifferently
known in literature by the name of the _Pleiade_, a term applied by the
classical affectation of the time to the group of seven men[192],
Ronsard, Du Bellay, Belleau, Baif, Daurat, Jodelle, and Pontus de Tyard,
who were most active in promoting it, and who banded themselves together
in a strict league or _coterie_ for the attainment of their purposes.
These purposes were the reduction of the French language and French
literary forms to a state more comparable, as they thought, to that of
the two great classical tongues. They had no intention (though such an
intention has been falsely attributed to them both at the time and
since) of defacing or destroying their mother-tongue. On the contrary,
they were animated by the sincerest and, for the most part, the most
intelligent love for it. But the intense admiration of the severe
beauties of classical literature, which was the dominant literary note
of the Renaissance, translated itself in their active minds into a
determination to make, if it were possible, French itself more able to
emulate the triumphs of Greek and of Latin. This desire, even if it had
borne no fruit, would have honourably distinguished the French
Renaissance from the Italian and German forms of the movement. In Italy
the humanists, for the most part, contented themselves with practice in
the Latin tongue, and in Germany they did so almost wholly. But no
sooner had the literature of antiquity taken root in France than it was
made to bear _novas frondes et non sua poma_ of vernacular l