Anne Malet de Graville

Entry by Mawy Bouchard, 2003/2005

Anne de Graville was born about 1490 into a rich and noble family, in the castle of Marcoussis. Her father, Louis Malet de Graville, admiral of France, exerted a great deal of influence under Anne of France and Pierre de Beaujeu, an influence which would continue under Louis XII. Anne de Graville was highly educated. She had access to her father's extensive collection of manuscripts and printed books, one of the richest libraries of the time; she probably knew Latin and Italian. Her mottos are found on several of her manuscripts: musas natura, lacrymas fortuna [nature gives me the muses, fortune tears], "J'en garde un leal" et "Garni d'un leal", the last two being anagrams of her name. Between the years 1506-1510, she secretly married her maternal cousin, Pierre de Balsac d'Entraigues. Her father immediately disinherited her, and the property and revenues of Pierre de Balsac were seized on the petition of the admiral. The couple rapidly slid into poverty. Her writing initiatives are perhaps attributable to her precarious financial situation. Anne de Graville gave birth to eleven children. One of her daughters, Jeanne, would marry a prominent gentleman of the Renaissance, Claude d'Urfé (heir to the vast publishing business), who would be the ambassador for France at the Council of Trento and grandfather to Honoré d'Urfé, the celebrated author of L'Astrée. Anne de Graville evolved in the circle of Queen Claude, the first wife of king Francis I, as her lady in waiting. It was the queen who, between 1515 and 1524, would commission the two known works of Anne de Graville. Later, around 1530, Anne de Graville entered the entourage of Marguerite de Navarre and, following her example, became interested in religious questions; she even sheltered several exiled Protestants. In all likelihood, Anne de Graville's first work was a collection of seventy one rondos inspired by Alain Chartier's La belle dame sans mercy (1424). It was the biographer Carl Wahlund who discovered these rondos and identified them as Anne's work, as she had signed them not with her name but with her now familiar motto: "Ien garde un leal". These rondos are the result of a reworking aimed at rendering more explicit and less ambiguous the position of Alain Chartier in the pro and contra debate on the subject of women. In fact, he caused a controversy with his poem, interpreted just as easily a defense as a condemnation of the virtuous woman. The manuscript of Anne de Graville's Rondos (BNF fr. 2253) presents a text in two columns, with Alain Chartier's version on the left, Anne de Graville's on the right. Maxime de Montmorand, another of her biographers, surmises that the success of this first work earned her the commission to translate Boccaccio's epic romance, written around 1340 and entitled Teseida delle nozze d'Emilia. The Italian poet, who was in turn inspired by the Thébaïde of Statius and the Roman de Thèbes (12th century), claimed to have been the first to make the epic muse speak in common Italian. Anne de Graville's adaptation was not the first; Chaucer had already written a three thousand line English version. Le beau romant des deux amans Palamon et Arcita et de la belle et saige Emilia dates from around 1521. Today, there are six different manuscript copies (Arsenal, 5166; BNF fr. 1397 et 25441; BNF n.a.f., 6513; Bibliothèque royale de Stockholm, 719 et Musée Condé, 1570). This epic romance tells of how two valiant friends, Palamon and Arcita, turn against each other for the love of a virtuous woman, Emylia. Montmorand, basing his argument on a genealogy of the Balsac family in which it is stated that one of the older sons of Anne de Graville inherited part of her estate in 1540, presumed the writer died, at the latest, in 1540 and disputes the assertions of other historians who prefer the dates 1543 and 1544. Anne achieved a certain celebrity in her lifetime, mostly at court. Yet she was soon forgotten, until the end of the 19th century. At the turn of the century, the work of the Swedish philologist Carl Wahlund occasioned several works on the writer's historical importance; in the 20th century, translation and feminist studies have allowed new readers to discover her work.

(translated by Hannah Fournier)

Works

- 1515? : La belle dame sans mercy, d'Alain Chartier, mise en rondeaux. Éd. Carl Wahlund, Upsala, 1897.
- 1521? : Le beau romant des deux amans Palamon et Arcita et de la belle et saige Emylia translaté de vieil langaige et prose en nouveau et rime; Stockholm, M. Algernon de Börtzell, 1892 (reproduction photographique du manuscrit BNF n.a.f. 719) -- Éd. Yves Le Hir, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1965.

Selected bibliography

- Bianci, Anne-Marie. «Le Théseide de Boccace en moyen français». Revue des études italiennes, XXI (1975), p.304-329. - Bouchard, Mawy. «Les belles [in]fidèles: traduire l'ambiguïté masculine. Les Rondeaux d'Anne de Graville». Neophilologus, 88, 2004, p.189-202.
- Montmorand, Maxime de. Une femme poète du XVIe siècle. Anne de Graville. Sa famille. Sa vie. Son oeuvre. Sa postérité. Paris, Picard, 1917.
- Müller, Catherine. «Le rôle de l'intellectuel et l'écriture poétique des femmes dans les cours princières au passage du XVe au XVIe siècle», in Christoph Huber et Henrike Lähnemann (dir.), Courtly Literature and Clerical Culture, selected papers from the Triennial Congress of the International Courtly Literature Society. Tübingen, Attempto Verlag, 2002, p.221-230. - Reno, Christine, «Anne Malet de Graville: A Sixteenth Century Collector Reads (and Writes) Christine», Misericordia International, «The Profane Arts/Les arts profanes», VII, 2,1998, p.170-182.

Reception

- «Je suis dans le château de la très généreuse dame Dentraigues, l'"appui des exilés du Christ"» (lettre en latin datée de 1526 de Pierre Toussaint, ancien chanoine de Metz, traduite en français par Maxime de Montmorand, dans Une femme poète du XVIe siècle, voir supra, p.93-95).
- «Et pour monstrer que nostre dict langage françois a grace quant il est bien ordonné, j'en allegueray icy en passant un rondeau que une femme d'excellence en vertus, ma dame d'Entraigues, a faict et composé» (Geofroy Tory, Champ fleury, éd. J.W. Joliffe, Paris, La Haye, Mouton Éditeur, 1970 [réimpression de l'édition de 1529], fol.4r).
- «Le remaniement poétique d'Anne de Graville enlevait à la Teseide ce caractère épique et classique dont Boccace était si fier, et la transformait, sans grand effort d'ailleurs, en un roman destiné à charmer les loisirs des dames sentimentales» (Henri Hauvette, «Les plus anciennes traductions françaises de Boccace», Bulletin italien, VIII, 3,1908, p.203-204).
- «J'ai choisi ces rondeaux parmi les moins mauvais du recueil. [Ils] sont en effet bien pénibles et rocailleux. Mais au commencement du XVIe siècle, alors que la langue, en pleine formation, n'avait pas encore précipité ses scories, l'on ne faisait guère mieux» (M. de Montmorand, Une femme poète du XVIe siècle, voir supra, p.134).