Simon Belyard’s Le Guysien Michael Meere

VIOLENCE, REVENGE, AND THE STAKES OF WRITING DURING THE FRENCH CIVIL WARS: SIMON BELYARD’S LE GUYSIEN

hen Henri III had the Guise brothers killed, mutilated, and cremated and Wthen disposed of their ashes in the River Loire, the factional violence of the French Civil Wars reached new heights. After the brothers’ deaths, one a duke and the other a cardinal, the ultra- was particularly vocal, calling for the king’s excommunication and even assassination.1 This hostile and frantic environment not only fueled violence and revenge between all echelons of society, but also inspired polemicists to use the pen and graphic images as weapons to fght against one another. One representative example is Le Guysien by the vallegeois Leaguer and schoolteacher Simon Belyard (dates unknown).2 This play stages the duke’s assassination in an extremely explicit manner, placing the bloodshed on stage for all the spectators to see in a very graphic way.3 The physicality of the murder scene is especially important since,

1. Much invaluable historical research exists on the complex history of the League and the circulation of pamphlets during the French civil wars. See in particular Frederic J. Baumgartner, Radical Reactionaries: The Political Thought of the French Catholic League (Geneva: Droz, 1975); Jean-Marie Constant, La Ligue (: Fayard, 1996); Denis Crouzet, Les Guerriers de Dieu. La Violence au temps des troubles de religion (vers 1525–vers 1610) (Seyssel: Champ Vallon, 1994); and Nicolas Le Roux, Un régi- cide au nom de Dieu: L’assassinat d’Henri III (Paris: Gallimard, 2006). 2. Le Guysien, ou Perfdie tyrannique commise par Henri de Valois es personnes des il- lustriss. Reverediss. et tresgenereux Princes Louys de Loraine Cardinal, et Archevesque de Rheims, et Henri de Loraine Duc de Guyse, grand Maistre de (Troyes: Jean Moreau, 1592). No modern editions exist, and very few original copies are extant. The play can be found at the Bibliothèque Municipale d’Aix-en-Provence Méjanes, the Bibliothèque Municipale de Chalons-en-Champagne, and the British Library. It could have been there were not many copies printed, the play was not widely circulated, or, perhaps more likely still, they were destroyed during Henri IV’s attempts to eliminate evidence of texts related to the promotion of the League. On Belyard’s biography, see Bouteille-Meister, “Représenter le présent” 487. 3. While the better-known La Guisiade (, 1589) by recounts the duke’s assassination, Belyard’s “tragédie nationale d’actualité” stages the duke’s death.

The Romanic Review Volume 104 Numbers 1–2 © The Trustees of Columbia University 46 Michael Meere although no trace of performance has (yet) been found, Belyard claims that a certain Monsieur Pajot “a fait représenter [la tragédie], pour encourager le peuple bien affectionné de toujours persister de bien en mieux à maintenir l’Église, et la patrie contre l’hérétique” (Dedicatory Letter, A ii rº). The actors were probably students from Belyard’s collège,4 and, though it is unknown when M. Pajot had the play performed, the play was likely put on before Henri III’s death, and the staging of the duke’s death would have inspired the audience to take revenge against their “heretical” king.5 In this article, then, the frst step is to consider the performance aspect of the assassination as a cultural artifact of this turbulent time and to place this violent scene in the iconographical context after the duke’s death. In this way, the play serves as a prism to interpret the proper dynamics of the live spectacle and measure what theater can do, as well as its (intended) impact on spectators and readers. From there, the article reads the fnal act of the play between the king and the duke’s mother alongside and against the various political discourses about regicide that circulated in the late . The fnal section interprets the stakes of writing polemical theater. All three sections suggest how this play would have encouraged a sixteenth-century (Leaguer) spectator or reader to avenge her or his leader. I argue that the three parts are intricately linked, for the performance of the assassination and calls to avenge the duke’s death mirror the self-performative aspect of writing this polemical tragedy. The act of taking up the pen, for Belyard, is a militant act, analogous to the act of taking up the sword, which his readers and spectators would (ideally) have done to avenge their leader’s unjust death.

The expression “tragédie nationale d’actualité” comes from Postert (107). However, she only mentions Belyard’s tragedy in passing. We could also call Belyard’s play a “tragédie d’actualité,” following Chocheyras’s nomenclature. Richard Hill- man has convincingly argued that Marlowe may have imitated Belyard’s murder scene in his Massacre at Paris. 4. The theater historian Théophile Boutiot has found that, on 2 June 1593, some “joueurs de comédie” asked to enter the city, but the Counsel decided that “n’étant la saison opportune pour se réjouir, il refuse la permission d’entrer en ville pour y jouer la comédie ou autre jeu” (Histoire de la ville de Troyes 4.229). 5. Jacques Clément would kill the king in August 1589, just less than one year after the duke’s death. After Henri III’s assassination, tensions and violence intensifed as Henri de Navarre was in line to become the next king. His succession to the throne was particularly diffcult, for the League adamantly opposed having a Huguenot as the King of France. Henri de Navarre, the future Henri IV, would not be recognized as king until after his conversion to Catholicism in 1593, though his coronation did not take place until 27 February 1594 in Chartres (instead of ). Simon Belyard’s LE GUYSIEN 47

Staging the Assassination It will be helpful to briefy summarize the plot up to the assassination scene in act four. The play opens with the fury of Alecto’s eight-page monologue in which she graphically recounts the horrors of civil wars and sets up the action that will ensue; Madame de Nemours, the duke’s mother, foresees her son’s demise in act two; the king and his counselors devise a plan to assassinate the duke in act three. In this act, Henri is radically demonized, along with his right-hand man the duc d’Épernon, and they devise the plan to kill the duke. Guise, a perfect foil for the king, arrives on stage in act four with his mother. This scene is capital, for it is the frst time the duke appears. His ethos is one of innocence and loyalty in stark contrast to the king’s tyrannical nature, a character dynamic that Belyard’s polemical text necessitates. The duke and his mother speak in stichomythic dialogue, exchanging moral commonplaces and debating whether the duke should follow the king’s orders and meet him in his chambers. The use of stichomythia between a worried mother and her naive son also gives Guise a more human character than Henri III, for the latter has only spoken in relentless tirades. During this exchange between the duke and his mother, the former reassures the latter that there is nothing to fear. He must answer the king’s wish to see him; moreover, the duke must arrive without arms so as not to offend the king or show any hostility toward him. Here we come to the scene that stages the duke’s assassination.6 Once the duke arrives in the Blois castle, he has a strangely dark premonition, recalling Thyestes’s bizarre feeling upon returning to his homeland (Seneca ll. 404–20). He then meets L’Archant, the captain of the guards, who speaks ambiguously while leading the duke to the king’s chambers. Guise is about to take leave (“Je ne veux ses bons voeux retarder. Je m’en . . .”) when the Chorus (the Quarante- cinq) jump out from behind the curtain and stab him, followed by an ironic insult, shifting from the formal “vous” to a condescending “tu”: “Voilà ce que tu mérites, / Roi Parisien.”7 On the ground, or held up by the Chorus, the duke tries to speak on several occasions, even to say his last prayers to God (“O Dieu, je vous . . .”), but his attackers consistently interrupt him by stabbing him, as indicated and underscored by truncated verse. The Chorus declares the duke dead, but L’Archant orders that they start again: “Redoublez!” His dead

6. See the Appendix for a transcription of the entire death scene. 7. This insult refers to the Day of the Barricades (12 May 1588), when the duc de Guise entered Paris despite a royal interdict, and Henri III fed to Chartres. On 13 May, the city offered Guise the crown but he refused it. See Stuart Carroll, “The Revolt of Paris, 1588: Aristocratic Insurgency and the Mobilization of Popular Support,” French Historical Studies 23.2 (2000), 301–37. 48 Michael Meere body is then mocked twice: “Ha! Cap de Dieux, je pense / Qu’il ne nous veut pas mordre”; “Nous lui avons fait faire un tres beau sobre-saut.” The duke’s body has become immobile, inert, before the spectators’ eyes: he is frozen still and silenced. The guards fnally remove the corpse from the stage (“Trainez-le là-dedans”), and L’Archant’s last words emphasize the immoral inhumanity of the king and his men: “C’est bien chose assurée, / notre recompense est deja préparée” (4.51–52).8 I will return to this scene in a moment, but frst I would like to compare it with the many images that circulated after Guise’s and his brother’s deaths, images that acquired “un intense réinvestissement symbolique et fantasmatique dans la littérature ligueuse” (Bouteille-Meister, “Représenter le présent” 449). The fgures that I have chosen to examine closely (Figures 1–3) are just a sample of the multitude of images that circulated after the duke’s assassination. In Figures 1 and 2, which are identical, he has been stabbed with six daggers; in Figure 3, fve daggers. They are all in his upper body: one in his head, one in his neck, two in his torso (one of which is in his heart), one in his shoulder, and, in Figures 1 and 2, one in his arm. Besides being the most effcient way to kill a man, the placement of the daggers is symbolic: his head (chef )

Figure 1. “Le Vray Pourtraict de ce Grand et Magnanime Duc de Guise Pillier de l’Eglise cruellement assassiné par Henry de Valois, en la ville de Bloys” (Woodcut, BNF)

8. The quotations from the play refer to the act, followed by page numbers, not line numbers, in the Aix-en-Provence edition (RES. D 0039). Modern editions are currently in progress by Jean-Claude Ternaux as well as Christian Biet and Marie-Madeleine Fragonard’s research group. Simon Belyard’s LE GUYSIEN 49

Figure 2. “Representation de la cruelle et barbare recompence, pour tant de bons offces qu’ont fait ce magnanime prince et ses predecesseurs à la Couronne de France, par un Henry de Valois” (Boucher 75). The caption for Boucher’s engraving, contrary to Figure 1, amplifes Henri’s tyranny.

Figure 3. “Le faux muffe du grand hipocrite de France descouvert” (in l’Estoile 3:236–37). This engraving gives an extended narrative of the events at Blois, including the Duke of Guise on the ground and the cardinal being assassinated above him. The image of the duke is nearly identical to Figures 1 and 2. 50 Michael Meere represents the head of the Sainte Union (or the League), his heart symbolizes his courage (cœur), and his arms represent his military valor. It would not be surprising if, in the staging of Belyard’s play, the duke was stabbed in the same places (though it is impossible to know for sure). In Figures 1 and 2, we also notice a large sword in the top-right corner of the image, behind a curtain. This arm, with the feur-de-lis embroidered on the sleeve, seems to reference metonymically the cowardly king, whose “glaive de la justice” peaks out from behind a curtain while the king remains hidden.9 The presence of the king’s sword also gestures toward the imminent mutilation of the duke’s body, the sword about to strike. The curtains, on each side of the image, not only make the scene more theatrical but also refer to the historicity of the duke’s assassination: as we have seen in Belyard’s play, upon entering the king’s chambers, the duke is attacked by guards who jump out from behind the curtains.10 Finally, in Figures 1 and 2,11 Guise is carrying a sword, contrary to Belyard’s version, yet he is not carrying one in Figure 3, unless it is not visible since he is lying on his left side instead of his right like in Figures 1 and 2. Nonetheless, his sword has not done him any good as it remains in its sheath in the frst two images, which also indicates that he has not drawn it and thus has not shown aggression toward the king’s men. This fact would confrm his innocence. Visually depicting the murder in both the play and iconography underlines Henri III’s crime, a murder that violates natural and divine order, and the repeated stabbing and the defamation of the “sacrosanct” duke’s body serve to amplify the horror and cruelty of the assassination. Hence, three levels of interpretation are necessary to understand the staged assassination, at least from the League’s perspective. The frst is literal: the gruesome assassination of the duke, which would fll the spectator with

9. In Boucher’s La Vie et faits notables, another image shows the king’s arm coming from outside the frame of the image. This time, it refers to an accusation of rape: “Figure de la vierge, religieuse, violee à Poissi, par Henry de Valois” (43–44). We see a woman praying at an altar and the mimetic arm, again with the feur-de-lis embroi- dered on the sleeve, reaching for the woman from behind her. The same image appears in L’Estoile 3: 226. 10. Pierre de l’Estoile writes, “Soudain, par dix ou douze des Quarante-cinq, là dispo- sés en embuscade derrière une tapisserie, fut saisie aux bras et aux jambes, et par eux poignardé et massacré, jettant, entre autres paroles et cris, ce dernier fust clairement entendu: Mon Dieu, je suis mort! Aiez pitié de moi! Ce sont mes pecchés qui en sont cause. Sur ce pauvre corps mort fut jetté un meschant tapis, et là laissé quelque temps gisant et exposé aux opprobres et moqueries des courtizans, qui l’apeloient le beau Roy de Paris (nom que Sa Majesté lui avoit donné)” (3: 199). Belyard’s version closely resembles L’Estoile’s account, from the guards jumping out from behind the curtains to the duke’s prayers to the mocking of the corpse. 11. They are identical save the captions. Simon Belyard’s LE GUYSIEN 51

horror and pity. The second is moral: never trust a tyrant. The third is the most important, for it gestures toward the allegorical and religious: the sacrosanct duke becomes a martyr who has sacrifced himself as an innocent soldier for the . In fact, in nearly all the depictions of the duke’s corpse, we see that he is smiling, as if he were happy to die for France, thus contributing to his martyr status.12 In both these engravings and in the play, one cannot help but think of Saint Sebastian, Diocletian’s loyal soldier who, after confessing his faith during the persecution of Christians in the fourth century, was transpierced with multiple arrows. It is thus in the light of (political and religious) martyrdom that we must interpret both the structure of the play and the role of the duke’s body in the logic of martyr plays of the sixteenth century. That the duke is killed before the spectators’ eyes is in accordance with the ideological and aesthetic underpinnings of the martyr play, for it is precisely through the iniquitous violence and the physical pain that the duke suffers on stage that he acquires, for the spectators, his martyr status. Furthermore, the visibility of the image of Guise’s murder in both this engraving and in Belyard’s tragedy is meant to be a simple, plain, and direct representation of a martyr who dies for his faith at the hands of the heretical king. Henri III, however, in the libels that circulated and in this tragedy, is depicted as a hypocrite whose exterior actions are, as Hélène Merlin states, “le signe visible de sa dissimulation, et révèle[nt] que tout le visible chez Henri III est masque. Tout le visible, c’est-à-dire aussi bien tout l’intelligible: Henri III est un masque, un Roi-masque” (62). Belyard’s tragedy thus unmasks the king and, like in Figure 3, depicts him as a demonic entity. In Belyard’s tragedy, Henri places himself above everything and everyone, dissimulating his true nature behind a Machiavellian mask.13 His dissimulation is depicted in this scene as sacrilegious even, as L’Archant claims that Henri has

12. Numerous pamphlets circulated after the deaths of the duke and the cardinal, directly referring to them as martyrs. See, for example, the anonymous Le Martire des deux freres and Les Cruautez Sanguinaires (3–11). Bouteille-Meister has also re- produced a telling woodcut regarding the purported martyrdom of the duke and his brother, in Les effgies de feux Monsieur de Guise & Monsieur le Cardinal son frere massacrez a Bloys, Pour soutenir l’Eglise Catholique & la loy de nostre sauveur Iesu- christ, s.d., Paris, Jacques Lalouette, Bibliothèque nationale de France, in color (Ap- pendix, “Les Cadavres fantasmés”). 13. Machiavelli’s name only appears once in the text, in a marginal note explaining one of Épernon’s lines: “Sainteté, Pieté, Foy, Justice, Clemence / Doivent estre en un Roy sans plus en apparence: / Il ne luy est besoin que le nom en avoir, / Pour tenir par douceur le peuple en son devoir” (35). The marginal note reads: “Precepte abominable de l’Atheiste Machivel pour les Roys contre le people.” See later discussion on the use of these marginalia. 52 Michael Meere left to “payer son vœu,” meaning he has gone to pray to God. Ironically, and blasphemously, Henri’s “vœu” is a secular one, a perverse wish, to have Guise murdered. Thus, on the one hand, Henri III is the tyrant who unjustly and in a cowardly fashion kills an innocent and revered victim. On the other, Belyard depicts Guise as a martyr of the French kingdom, stabbed by a multitude of swords and daggers, killed by a vicious, bloodthirsty tyrant who has respect neither for his people nor for his nobles.

Legitimizing “Henricide”14 In contrast to Pierre Matthieu’s La Guisiade (Lyon, 1589),15 Belyard does not hide the death scene from the spectators. In effect, as I hope to show, the circulation of the images that depict the assassinated duke and Belyard’s Guysien “suggère une orientation aux actions futures” (MacGowan 303) by arousing feelings of disdain, mistrust, and hatred toward their king. By watching this bloody spectacle, the (Leaguer) spectators should purge their grief through tears, and the cathartic moment arrives in the real world when they take up arms and run the risk of death in order to avenge their leader, the duc de Guise.16 The ffth act crystallizes the ethics of revenge that the play appears to promulgate. In this act, the soldier/messenger relates the duke’s murder to his mother, Madame de Nemours, and her ladies in waiting. The duke’s mother decides to confront the king and to plead for her other son’s freedom (the cardinal de Guise).17 Henri, still under the effects of his transcendent rage, rejoices in the duke’s death and hurries to torture and kill the cardinal: “Ton cardinal pourpré n’aura que mille coups / Des fers longs, et querrés des grandes hallebardes, / Que porte devant moi la troupe de mes gardes” (66). He even expresses an Atrean wish, to feed her own son to her without her knowing,18

14. According to Jouhanna, we must “distinguer entre ce qu’on pourrait appeler le ‘Henricide’ et le tyrannicide en general qui est, lui, bien abordé dans les traits; les lecteurs n’ont sans doute eu aucun mal à faire le lien entre les deux” (352). 15. Three editions of Matthieu’s play exist and he reworked the third edition as it ap- peared after Henri’s assassination (Ernst 369). 16. The ideal spectator is, of course, a Catholic. And only “true” Catholics, in the League’s sense of the term—meaning followers of the duke and his dissident party— would be moved by this play. Moderate Catholics, or the Politiques (pejoratively called thus because they put politics—i.e., keeping the country united—above religion) and especially Protestants were clearly not the intended audience. 17. See the [R]emonstrance faicte au Roy, par Madame la Duchesse de Nemours, sur le massacre de ses enfans (in Les Cruautez Sanguinaires 11–14). 18. “O! qu’il me fache encor que t’en est advertie. / Je t’eusse fait manger leur charogne rotie, / Afn que ce tien ventre, ou ils furent concus, / Fût tombeau des enfants qui de Simon Belyard’s LE GUYSIEN 53 after which he abruptly takes leave of Madame de Nemours. She ends the play with her ladies in waiting, lamenting the death of her sons and her misery. At the very end of the play, Madame de Nemours, with her ladies, prays to Jupiter [God]:

Jupiter, qui en vain les hauts rochers poudroie, Darde sur ce méchant ton souffre, et le foudroie. O juste lance-foudre acravante le chef Du barbare tyran, pour venger ce méchef. (67)

Only the wicked have a voice and agency at the end of the play, and Madame de Nemours does not call on any man or woman to take revenge, but rather God alone. Indeed, the striking down of a tyrant by lightning is another reference to Diocletian, one of the most notorious Roman tyrants, infamous for his persecution of Christians, including Sebastian. Ending the play with Madame de Nemours’s prayer to God to kill Henri III may indicate that the play was written and performed before his assassination, although it was not printed until 1592, for nowhere in the play or in the paratext does Belyard make reference to Henri III’s death. Nonetheless, the play also incites the “virtuous” spectator to take action against the crimes of the tyrant, and to silence those who have silenced their leader. Belyard depicts a king-turned-tyrant who thinks he is above the law and who will continue his ravenous and blasphemous acts until he is stopped, or killed. In this, Belyard clearly aligns himself with the League, and his tragedy thus sustains a very politically and polemically charged poetic, as well as one that penetrates the realm of ethics. Belyard is implying that it would be immoral for the spectator not to grieve and not to rebel against the king. There is an ethical obligation to feel certain emotions, and the non-appreciative spectator is immoral and sinful. As we read in the sestet of the sonnet to a “Lecteur Catholique, En forme de Prologue”:

Vienne voir les Guysards massacrés à outrance Sanglanter dedans Blois l’échafaud de la France: N’ayant point encor vu si grande cruauté,

S’il n’a le cœur d’acier il se fondra en larmes, Etant près de mourir au milieu des alarmes Combattant pour venger telle déloyauté. (B i rº)

lui sont issus” (66–67). 54 Michael Meere

For Belyard, then, it is the moral duty of the righteous to feel sad when seeing the duke murdered on stage, fake or not, to feel anger and fear toward an impious tyrant, and, subsequently, to be inspired to kill the tyrant for the good of the people. The violence that the duke endures is thus perhaps due less to the time lapse between the historical event (1588) and the publication date (1592), as Bouteille-Meister has suggested (“Représenter le présent” 499–510), and more to the martyrological narrative that necessitates physical violence on the one hand and the diabolization of the king on the other (Ternaux), which would revolt spectators and incite them to take up arms against the king. In this, Belyard is aligning himself with the League’s arguments about whether it was just to depose and kill the king after Guise’s death. This question—whether it is just to commit tyrannicide—puzzled political theorists for centuries.19 The infuential medieval political theorist John of Salisbury, whose Policraticus was reprinted throughout the sixteenth century, claims that it is lawful to kill a tyrant, for the tyrant is a public enemy (190). , a moderate Catholic, does not condone the assassination of a legitimate prince-turned-tyrant, though he does suggest that a prince who abuses his powers be judged (Six Livres de la République, book 2, chapter 5; see also Turchetti 458–60). Protestant monarchomachs, literally “killers of kings,” such as Théodore de Bèze, François Hotman, and Philippe Duplessis-Mornay, also wrote on the problem of tyranny and what to do about it, especially after the Saint Bartholomew’s Day Massacre (Giesey 57–66). And the League would draw on their theories as well.20 Boucher and his Leaguer allies, as would be expected, adopt an extreme position. Nearly all political theorists, including the Leaguers, considered the relationship between the king and the people to

19. The discussion that follows aims to demonstrate how Belyard’s tragedy borrows from, contributes to, and interacts with the various polemical discourses surrounding the deaths of kings and princes. I am revisiting the politico-religious context neither from an historian’s point of view nor from a political scientist’s, but rather I approach these texts with a literary, even cultural perspective. Thus, their function here is to provide a contextual and co-textual framework in which to interpret the play. 20. It is essential to note that, for the Protestants, if one side breaches the contract, tyrannicide by the hand of the people is not promoted, although Bèze gives special powers to a magistrate and Duplessis-Mornay to a particular group of individuals who contain coercive power to resist, even to assassinate, a king-turned-tyrant (Giesey 54). The Reformers, however, were (arguably) less extreme in their political philosophy than the Leaguers, with complicated systems that relegate power to different branches and sectors of the population, not just to the peuple. The Huguenot monarchomachs called for resistance, whereas the Leaguers called for death by any member of the body politic as an emancipating act. Simon Belyard’s LE GUYSIEN 55 be a contract by which both sides must abide. Thus, as the historian Mark Greengrass recalls:

Since Henri III had broken the implied contract (“pact”) between the people [. . .] and God, the king had forfeited the summum imperium which had been vested in him. He could be “justly” deposed, and an army could be raised against him, even before the papacy had deposed him. (183)

In turn, if the tyrant oppresses religion and forbids the people’s salvation because of heresy, Boucher gives the power of deposition to the Church on the one hand, and on the other to the people (senators, nobles). For the people have the right, in Boucher’s system, to elect kings, and elected monarchy is superior to hereditary monarchy (Turchetti 463). Here it is important to note that the League’s stance on hereditary and elected monarchy changed after the death of Henri III’s brother, the duc d’Alençon, in 1584, when Henri de Navarre, a Protestant, became the legitimate heir to the throne, and Henri III’s marriage was childless. The Reformers were less vocal after the death of the king’s brother and began to support the law of hereditary succession, as the next king would theoretically be a Protestant. In their political pamphlets, the Leaguers inverted the temporal and spiritual orders and hence asserted that the ultimate end of the State is to ensure the salvation of the loyal Catholics, and that the king’s religion is more important than Salic Law or masculine hereditary succession (Baumgartner 75–80).21 Moreover, according to Kantorowicz’s theory of the king’s two bodies, the king is the literal and symbolic representative of the “head” of the body politic, yet the tyrant, or the heretic who destroys the state’s religion, contaminated the rest of the body (the clergy, the aristocracy, and the peuple).22 In effect, Henri III was sometimes considered literally diseased, since his royal marriage was unable to produce an heir. Hence, the League wanted to rid France of this contaminated body, literally, morally, and allegorically, for the reassurance and betterment of the Catholic state. The League, in the printing press, it has been argued, only directly promoted or approved of “Henricide” retroactively, after the murder of Henri III on 1

21. To put it another way, to quote Le Roux, “Les catholiques zélés ne feront que don- ner un tour plus radical à ces réfexions [des Protestants] sur le gouvernement de la monarchie et sur la légitimité du régicide. Ils les intégrerront à un esprit d’exclusivisme religieux qui était absent chez les théoriciens protestants” (94). 22. For a reading of Le Guysien using Kantorowicz’s paradigm, see Bouteille-Meister, “Les Cadavres fantasmés” 298–300. 56 Michael Meere

August 1589 (Le Roux 99). Denis Crouzet has shown, for example, that only six or seven extant documents seem to call for human revenge against Henri’s crime before his assassination, since most Catholic polemicists and preachers preferred to call on God’s divine violence to avenge Henri III’s cruel and unforgivable crime (482). Still, Pierre de l’Estoile relates that Henri III called Boucher and other theologians and priests to court as early as 30 December 1587, one year before the duke’s assassination, to reprimand them, particularly Boucher, “en la présence de la Cour, sur leur insolente et effrénée licence de prescher contre lui [le roi] et contre toutes ses actions, mesmes touchant les affaires de son Estat” (3:79). With the king out of Paris after the assassination, one can easily imagine the kind of sermons that were being preached. In fact, on 1 January 1589, l’Estoile reports that the priest Lincestre,

après le sermon qu’il fst à Saint-Barthelemi, exigea de tous les assistants le serment (en leur faisant lever la main pour signe de consentement) d’emploier jusques au dernier denier de leur bourse, et jusques à la dernière goutte de leur sang, pour venger la mort des deux princes Lorrains Catholiques, à sçavoir le duc de Guise et le Cardinal son frère, massacrés par le tiran, dans le chasteau de Blois. (3:230)

Lincestre is rallying Parisians to fnance and to take up arms, to avenge the deaths of the Guise brothers. The call for regicide is clearly implied. In Belyard’s specifc case, it is also necessary to take into account where he was writing, Troyes, for this city was strongly aligned with the League. Just after the duke’s assassination in early January 1589, a pamphlet appeared that declares:

Les habitants de la ville de Troyes ayant jurés l’Union, avec, et en présence de Monseigneur le Duc de Mayenne . . . se sont resoluz de prendre les armes pour la manutention de la Religion catholique, Apostolique, et Romaine, se deliberant d’y exposer leurs corps et leurs biens. A quoy ils excitent tous et chacuns les bons gentils-hommes . . . de cette Province . . . Declarant ceux qui prendront party contraire, ennemis, et traistres à Dieu et à la patrie. (Declaration, et resolution)

Therefore, it is probable that even if Boucher’s and his fellow Leaguers’ texts were seldom printed until after the death of Henri III, their messages and calls for regicide were likely heard, discussed, and preached before the assassination of the king, especially in places like Paris and in Belyard’s backyard. Belyard, too, directly calls for revenge and implicitly promotes regicide, yet it remains unclear when Belyard actually wrote and when Pajot had the Simon Belyard’s LE GUYSIEN 57

tragedy performed. Thus, speculation on the dating of the play’s composition and performance is crucial. Bouteille-Meister is certainly correct to assert that Belyard’s tragedy uses “toutes les techniques sanglantes empruntées aux pamphlets et aux gravures de 1589 pour émouvoir son public et le galvaniser dans la lutte contre celui qui est encore ‘l’hérétique’: Henri IV” (“Les Cadavres fantasmés” 300). However, even though the tragedy did not appear in print until 1592, the play may have been performed soon after the Guises’ assassinations and before Henri III’s death.23 Indeed, the “hérétique” mentioned in the dedicatory letter to Nicolas Dehault could very well be Henri III, as the opening poem to Dehault states:

Tu y verras un Guisard trop fdèle (Piteux spectacle) en toute cruauté Assassiné par la déloyauté De ce meurtrier, et perfde hérétique. (A v rº)

Belyard may have originally intended to inspire the audience to fght against Henri III; still, printing this play in 1592 clearly gestures toward the battle against Henri de Navarre, and the reenactment of the duke’s assassination on stage must be interpreted in the light of both historical moments: before and after Henri III’s assassination. Besides claiming authorship of the play that others have been plagiarizing or performing without his consent, Belyard has also printed his play to remove it from the ephemeral world of the spoken word (e.g., theater, sermons), “pour toujours enfammer davantage le peuple à la conservation et défense de la Foi, et Religion Chrétienne” (A i vº). It is thus likely that Belyard had the play performed well before 1592, perhaps even while Henri III was still alive, and his militant message of vengeance was even more urgent at the time of publication due to the real threat of a Protestant becoming king.

The Stakes of Writing In the previous pages, I have hoped to show how Belyard’s tragedy uses spectacle to enfame an audience into violent action against the king, but Belyard does not stop there. In fact, to be absolutely sure that the reader

23. Bouteille-Meister attributes the staged violence, in part, to the time gap between the duke’s assassination and the printing of the play in 1592, insinuating that the play was not written/performed until three years after the event (“Représenter le présent” 516–17; “Les Cadavres fantasmés” 293–94). I have much appreciated our lively debate in person on this aspect of Belyard’s play! 58 Michael Meere understands, the playwright attempts to condition him or her to think a certain way, or more likely to reinforce what he or she already believes, using a total of seventy-six explanatory notes throughout the play. For example, in act four, when the duke and his mother debate whether he should meet the king with his sword, the duke claims, “Mais armes luy donroient mauvaise opinion” (42). Belyard adds in a marginal note: “Le vertueux non seulement ne nuit à personne mais encore il craint de donner quelque occasion qui puisse offenser quelqu’un” (42). Later, Belyard explicitly establishes that the is honorable: “La maison ja été toujours contraire du tout à l’hérésie” (52). In act fve, when Madame de Nemours encounters the king, Henri enters and exclaims, “Aux astres clairs égal je marche triomphant” (63). Belyard accumulates accusations against Henri’s character, with notes such as “L’impie s’éjouit d’avoir mal fait” (63), “Acte plus que tyrannique” (58), and “Voix d’un Tyran furieux” (37). The play is riddled with these notes, and they all aim to underscore the duke’s virtue and innocence in the face of Henri’s hypocrisy, atheism, cruelty, and tyranny. Belyard constantly and consistently reveals that Henri III is an evil, demonic force to fear and perhaps to destroy. In the end, then, the king’s unethical violence justifes the ethical violence of revenge: to rid, or rather to free, France of this dangerous tyrant who has destroyed the country’s religion and murdered the Church’s righteous leader. Forsyth fnds these marginalia amusing for a modern reader (198), but they should not be taken lightly. They attest to Belyard’s consciousness of the power not only of live spectacle but also of the written word, as his play would be distributed, sold, exchanged, and read by an audience beyond a playhouse, a collège, or M. Pajot’s private home. And to have Jean Moreau print his play is more than symbolic, for Moreau, “le principal artisant de la ‘presse’ troyenne à l’époque,” was the most notorious and important printer of Leaguer material in Troyes, with a monopoly from 1588 to 1590 (Morin 6–7). Writing and printing this tragedy is in itself, for Belyard, a politically militant act. In the dedicatory letter to Nicolas Dehault, who was known to be a relentless Leaguer and one of the Duke of Guise’s favoris,24 Belyard compares writing this tragedy to the cynic Diogenes, who, during war, and seeing all the men running around frantically, decided to roll his tub up and down the hill in order to be active.25 Belyard writes, seemingly without any irony whatever:

24. According to Morin, “Nicolas Dehault, qui fut maire de 1582 à 1592, était né à Sommevoire (Marne) en 1529. Seigneur de Lignol, receveur des décimes du diocèse, contrôleur général des fortifcations de Champagne, trésorier et favori du duc de Guise, il aida puissamment à l’entrée et au séjour des Ligueurs à Troyes: aussi en fut-il banni lors de la réduction en 1594” (109). Belyard’s political leanings, if they were not al- ready clear, are without a doubt on the League’s side. 25. The Diogenes anecdote is a popular one during the Renaissance, used by Rabelais in the preface to the Tiers Livre, for example (346–48): “Auquel respondit le philosophe Simon Belyard’s LE GUYSIEN 59

J’ai plusieurs fois pensé en moi-même qu’il me valait mieux, pour ne demeurer ocieux, imiter ce que les Grecs nous ont laissé par écrit de ce vrai Philosophe Diogène. . . . De même, afn de n’être vu du tout oisif entre tant d’hommes très laborieux, et soigneux des affaires en un accident presque semblable, j’ai fait cette tragédie. (A ii vº)

For Belyard, writing and re-creating this real, tragic event is a way to speak out, to contest that which the Leaguers considered a persecution of true Catholics. Belyard claims authorship of the play, expressing himself through the eyes of others in order to establish his own self-image. Belyard puts himself fguratively on stage by having his play printed just as the tragedy is a literal staged performance. The playwright un-silences himself, hence taking a clear political stance, especially in the turbulent times of the late 1580s and early . The term “ocieux” (“oisif”) is key in this passage: thirty years before Le Guysien appeared in print, at the Etats généraux in 1560, the city of Troyes forbade “bastelleurs, histrions et aultres gens faisant profession de jouer publicquement” on the grounds that they are “gens oysifs, divertissant le peuple de ses negoces et affaires populaires (article 54, Boutiot 69). Belyard, however, turns this idea upside down because, for him, writing this tragedy is not a useless activity for mere entertainment. On the contrary, Belyard’s play acts as a politico-religious stance against a criminal king and against a potential heretic on the throne. Belyard’s tragedy is hence a politically militant act to combat the injustices of Henri III, to support the efforts of the League to rid France of its heretical king, and to dismiss the possibility of crowning the Huguenot Henri of Navarre after Henri III’s death. More poignant still, Belyard writes in the preface to the reader that “je n’eusse fait mettre sur la presse cette Tragédie, connaissant qu’elle ne le mérite pas: n’eût été que plusieurs honnêtes hommes m’en ont demandé la copie: et que quelques ignorants, ou plutôt qui malicieusement le feignent être, sont allés me traduire calomnieusement, et m’imposer le crime, à l’encontre duquel je proteste l’avoir composée” (A i vº). Belyard does not give a timeline between the original performance and the 1592 publication, but it is clear that enough time has passed for some “honnêtes hommes” to receive a copy of his play, and for other feigning “ignorants” to ridicule him publicly and accuse him of a crime (traduire, from the Latin traducere, here means to dishonor, to disgrace publicly); which crime remains unknown, but it very well may be, as Hillman suggests (158), that others slandered and accused him of not being completely

[Diogenes], qu’à aultre offce n’estant pour la republicque employé, il en ceste façon son tonneau tempestoit, pour entre ce people tant fervent et occupé, n’estre veu suel cessateur et ocieux” (348, emphasis added). 60 Michael Meere loyal to the Guise cause.26 Belyard is depicting himself, then, as a sort of poète assassiné who has been publicly persecuted, and a victim of unjust slander, just as the king’s men attacked and killed the duke. In conclusion, Belyard’s tragedy contributes to the polemical discourse and symbolic imagery that demonized the king and praised the duke, his brother, and the king’s assassin Jacques Clément as political and religious martyrs of the nation.27 The staging of the duke’s assassination, I have argued, is vital in maintaining this politico-religious message, which, in turn, both crystallizes the duke’s martyr status and inspires outraged Leaguers to take up arms against tyrants: the king, his allies, and particularly Henri IV. Despite the League’s efforts to control the state after Henri III’s death, history has taught us that Henri of Navarre managed to take charge of the state in 1594. The League was dissolved, offcially at least, following the Edict of in 1598, an edict that attempted to establish and confrm Henri IV as the king of a peaceful France, until his very own assassination in 1610.

Kings College, London

Appendix Guise. Que fait la majesté? Est-il déjà levé? L’Archant. Il y a plus d’une heure. Guise. Trouve-t-il point mauvais que longtemps je demeure? L’Archant. Non certes, monseigneur. Guise. Mais où veut-il aller? L’Archant. Payer son vœu. Guise. Quel vœu? je n’ai ouï parler Qu’il ait fait quelque vœu. L’Archant. Je ne saurais que dire: Voilà ce que j’en sais. Mais je sais qu’il désire Parler un mot à vous paravant.

26. Slanderous accusations that questioned Belyard’s loyalty to the League could very well explain the plethora of marginalia that insist on Henri’s tyranny and the duke’s innocence, but the notes could simply be a result of Belyard’s profession as a school- teacher. In fact, we fnd similar uses of marginalia in Nicolas Soret’s La Céciliade (Paris, 1606), performed by the students and teachers of Notre Dame. See the Notice to the edition in Biet, Théâtre de martyres et récits bibliques. 27. Indeed, after the regicide, many Leaguer polemicists justifed and praised Clément’s act. See Anonymous [Charles Pinselet], Le Martire de Frère Jacques Clément (repr. in Biet, Tragédies de martyres). Simon Belyard’s Le Guysien 61

Guise. Je ne veux Ses bons vœux retarder. Je m’en . . . L’Archant. Voilà ses vœux. Guise. Ha mon Dieu. Je . . . Le Chœur. Voilà ce que bien tu mérites. Roi parisien. Guise. Las! est-ce pour mes mérites? Le Chœur. Nous avons notre tour. Guise. O! Le Chœur. Tu as eu le tien. Guise. Mon Dieu merci. L’Archant. Guisard, ore te voilà bien. Le Chœur. Crie merci au roi. Guise. Au roi? L’Archant. Ton arrogance Est or’ bien rabattue. Guise. O Dieu, je vous . . . L’Archant. La France N’a maintenant qu’un roi. Le Chœur. Tu voulais commander. L’Archant. Il te fallait vraiment des états demander A ton roi, t’égalant à sa grande puissance. Le Chœur. Il est mort. L’Archant. Redoublez. Le Chœur. Ha! Cap de Dieux, je pense Qu’il ne nous veut pas mordre. L’Archant. Il a ce qu’il lui faut. Le Chœur. Nous lui avons fait faire un très beau sobre-saut. L’Archant. Enfn il faut toujours que le déloyal meure, Qui offense son roi. Impuni ne demeure Jamais aucun malfait ou du faible ou du fort. Le Chœur. Il ne respire plus. Il pâlit. Il est mort. L’Archant. Je vais le dire au roi pour le tirer de peine. Le Chœur. Quelle peine? Que craint-il? L’Archant. La fortune incertaine, Qui lui a tant de fois ci-devant rit en vain. Le Chœur. De ce qu’entreprenons l’effet est tout certain. L’Archant. Traînez-le là-dedans. C’est bien chose assurée, Que notre récompense est déjà préparée. (Belyard 4.51–52) 62 Michael Meere

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