he storm of the nascent religious
reform left him stranded willy-nilly. He was present in 1525 at the
battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and taken prisoner with his king,
but soon released, since the Imperialists let go on easy terms gentlemen
of whom it was impossible to make a rich booty. From that time we do not
meet any more with Clement Marot in war or politics; to Marguerite de
Valois, to adventures of gallantry, and to success in his mundane line of
poesy his life was thenceforth devoted. The scandal of history has often
been directed against his relations with his royal patroness; but there
seems to be no real foundation for such a suspicion; the manners of the
sixteenth century admitted of intimacies in language, and sometimes even
of familiarities in procedure, contrasting strangely with demonstrations
of the greatest respect, nay, humility. Clement Marot was the king of
poesy and set the fashion of wit in his time; Marguerite had a generous
and a lively sympathy with wit, talent, success, renown; the princess and
the poet were mutually pleased with and flattered one another; and the
liberties allowed to sympathy and flattery were great at that time, but
far less significant than they would be in our day.

What were the cause, the degree, and the real value of this success and
this renown of which Clement Marot made so much parade, and for which his
contemporaries gave him credit? What change, what progress effected by
him, during his lifetime, in French literature and the French language
won for him the place he obtained and still holds in the opinion of the
learned?

A poet who no more than Clement Marot produced any great poetical work,
and was very different from him in their small way, Francis Villon, in
fact, preceded him by about three quarters of a century. The most
distinguished amongst the literary critics of our time have discussed the
question as to which of the two, Villon or Marot, should be regarded as
the last poet of the middle ages and the first of modern France.
M. Sainte-Beuve, without attempting to precisely solve that little
problem, has distinguished and characterized the two poets with so much
of truth and tact that there can be no hesitation about borrowing his
words: "Was Villon," is the question he puts to himself, "an originator?
Did he create a style of poesy? Had he any idea of a literary reaction,
as we should say nowadays? What is quite certain is, that he possessed