François de Malherbe

[citation needed] Francois the poet was the eldest son of another François de Malherbe, conseiller du roi in the magistracy of Caen.

His patron died when Malherbe was on a visit in his native province, and for a time he had no particular employment, though by some servile verses he obtained a considerable gift of money from Henry III, whom he afterwards libelled.

He was presented by his countryman, the Cardinal Du Perron, to Henry IV; and, though that economical prince did not at first show any great eagerness to entertain the poet, he was at last summoned to court and endowed after one fashion or another.

Malherbe died before the suit was decided; it is said in consequence of disease caught at the siege of La Rochelle, where he had gone to petition the king.

[2] Malherbe's reforms helped to elaborate the kind of verse necessary for the classical tragedy, but his own poetical work is scanty in amount, and for the most part frigid and lacking inspiration.

It consists of some translations of Livy and Seneca, and of a very large number of interesting and admirably written letters, many of which are addressed to Peiresc, the man of science of whom Gassendi has left a delightful Latin life.

[2] Malherbe's two most important disciples were François Maynard and Racan; Claude Favre de Vaugelas is credited with having purified French diction at about the same time.

Close readings of major poems appear in David Lee Rubin, High Hidden Order: Design and Meaning in the Odes of Malherbe (1972), revisited in the appendix to the same author's The Knot of Artifice: A Poetic of the French Lyric in the Early 17th Century (1981); also see Chapter 1.