name was famous. The three Du Bellays, the councillor, the soldier,
the great Cardinal, were in the first rank of the early sixteenth
century. Rabelais had loved them. Francis I had leaned upon and rewarded
their service. His father (their first-cousin and Governor of Brest) was
a poor noble, who, as is the fashion of nobles, had married a wife to
consolidate a fortune. This wife, the mother of Joachim, was heiress to
the house of Tourmeliere in Lire, just by the Loire on the brow that
looks northward over the river to the bridge and Ancenis. In this house
he was born. On his parents' early death he inherited the place, not to
enjoy it, but to wander. An early illness had made him forsake the
career of arms for that of the Church; but Orders were hardly so much as
a cloak to him; it is difficult to remember, as one reads the few
evidences of his life, that he wore the cloth at all: in his verse all
trace of it is entirely absent. He lived still in that lineage which the
reform had not touched. The passionate defence of the Catholic Faith,
the Assault converging on the church throughout Europe, the raising of
the Siege, the Triumph which developed, at last, on the political side
the League, and on the literary the final rigidity of Malherbe, the
noise of all these had not reached his circle, kind, or family.

Of that family the Cardinal seems to have regarded him as the principal
survivor. He had determined to make of the young poet the heir of its
glory. It came to nothing. He accompanied his relative to Rome: but the
diplomacy of the mission ill-suited him. Of the Royal ladies at court
who befriended him, the marriage of one, the death of another,
increased his insecurity. He had inherited, to his bane, another
estate--Gonor--from his elder brother. It was encumbered, the cause
litigious, and he had inherited with it the tutelage of a sickly child.
He never shook off the burden. A tragic error marked his end. He died,
certainly broken-hearted, just when his powerful cousin, by a conversion
perhaps unknown to the poet himself, had rejected calumnies, and had
determined to resign to him the great Archbishopric of Bordeaux.

Eustache Du Bellay, yet another cousin, was Bishop of Paris. He had made
Joachim, on his return from Rome, a Canon of Notre Dame, and in that
capacity the poet, dying in Paris, was buried in the cathedral. The
action of the Chapter in the eighteenth century, when they replaced the
old tombstones by th