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 did more mischief and thwarted more schemes than all the French together.

Guillaume du Bellay was the devoted protector of freedom of thought; without actually joining the reformers, he defended the innovators against their fanatical opponents. In 1534–1535 he even tried, unsuccessfully, to bring about a meeting between Francis I. and Melanchthon; and in 1541 he intervened in favour of the Vaudois. Rabelais was the most famous of his clients, and followed him to Piedmont from 1540 to 1542. Guillaume was himself a valuable historian, and a clear and precise writer. He imitated Livy in his Ogdoades, a history of the rivalry between Francis I. and the emperor from 1521, of which, though he had no time to finish it, important fragments remain, inserted by his brother Martin du Bellay (d. 1559) in his Mémoires (1569). The celebrated Instructions, reprinted as Traité de la discipline militaire in 1554 and 1592, was formerly attributed to him, but it has been proved that he could not have written it (see Bayle, Dict. Hist. i. 502, and Jähns, Geschichte der Kriegswissenschaften, i. 498 seq.); this work, however, is of the highest value for the study of the military art of the 16th century; in 1550 an Italian, in 1567 a Spanish, and in 1594 and 1619 German translations were published.

 DU BELLAY, JEAN (c. 1493–1560), French cardinal and diplomat, younger brother of Guillaume du Bellay, appears as bishop of Bayonne in 1526, member of the privy council in 1530, and bishop of Paris in 1532. Supple and clever, he was well fitted for a diplomatic career, and carried out several missions in England (1527–1534) and Rome (1534–1536). In 1535 he received his cardinal’s hat; in 1536–1537 he was nominated “lieutenant-general” to the king at Paris and in the Île de France, and was entrusted with the organization of the defence against the imperialists. When Guillaume du Bellay went to Piedmont, Jean was put in charge of the negotiations with the German Protestants, principally through the humanist Johann Sturm and the historian Johann Sleidan. In the last years of the reign of Francis I., cardinal du Bellay was in favour with the duchesse d’Étampes, and received a number of benefices—the bishopric of Limoges (1541), archbishopric of Bordeaux (1544), bishopric of Le Mans (1546); but his influence in the council was supplanted by that of Cardinal de Tournon. Under Henry II., being involved in the disgrace of all the servants of Francis I., he was sent to Rome (1547), and he obtained eight votes in the conclave which followed the death of Pope Paul III. After three quiet years passed in retirement in France (1550–1553), he was charged with a new mission to Pope Julius III. and took with him to Rome his young cousin the poet (q.v.). He lived in Rome thenceforth in great state. In 1555 he was nominated bishop of Ostia and dean of the Sacred College, an appointment which was disapproved of by Henry II. and brought him into fresh disgrace, lasting till his death in Rome on the 16th of February 1560. Less resolute and reliable than his brother Guillaume, the cardinal had brilliant qualities, and an open and free mind. He was on the side of toleration and protected the reformers. Budaeus was his friend, Rabelais his faithful secretary and doctor; men of letters, like Étienne Dolet, and the poet Salmon Macrin, were indebted to him for assistance. An orator and writer of Latin verse, he left three books of graceful Latin poems (printed with Salmon Macrin’s Odes, 1546, by R. Estienne), and some other compositions, including Francisci Francorum regis epistola apologetica (1542). His voluminous correspondence, mostly in MS., is remarkable for its verve and picturesque quality.

 DU BELLAY, JOACHIM (c. 1522–1560), French poet and critic, member of the Pléiade, was born at the château of La Turmelière, not far from Liré, near Angers, being the son of Jean du Bellay, seigneur de Gonnor, cousin-german of the cardinal Jean du Bellay and of Guillaume du Bellay. Both his parents died while he was still a child, and he was left to the guardianship of his elder brother, René du Bellay, who neglected his education, leaving him to run wild at La Turmelière. When he was twenty-three, however, he received permission to go to Poitiers to study law, no doubt with a view to his obtaining preferment through his kinsman the Cardinal Jean du Bellay. At Poitiers he came in contact with the humanist Marc Antoine Muret, and with Jean Salmon Macrin (1490–1557), a Latin poet famous in his day. There too he probably met Jacques Peletier du Mans, who had published a translation of the Ars poëtica of Horace, with a preface in which much of the programme advocated later by the Pléiade is to be found in outline.

It was probably in 1547 that du Bellay met Ronsard in an inn on the way to Poitiers, an event which may justly be regarded as the starting-point of the French school of Renaissance poetry. The two had much in common, and immediately became fast friends. Du Bellay returned with Ronsard to Paris to join the circle of students of the humanities attached to (q.v.) at the Collège de Coqueret. While Ronsard and Antoine de Baïf were most influenced by Greek models, du Bellay was more especially a Latinist, and perhaps his preference for a language so nearly connected with his own had some part in determining the more national and familiar note of his poetry. In 1548 appeared the Art poétique of Thomas Sibilet, who enunciated many of the ideas that Ronsard and his followers had at heart, though with essential differences in the point of view, since he held up as models Clément Marot and his disciples. Ronsard and his friends dissented violently from Sibilet on this and other points, and they doubtless felt a natural resentment at finding their ideas forestalled and, moreover, inadequately presented. The famous manifesto of the Pléiade, the Deffence et illustration de la langue françoyse (1549), was at once a complement and a refutation of Sibilet’s treatise. This book was the expression of the literary principles of the Pléiade as a whole, but although Ronsard was the chosen leader, its redaction was entrusted to du Bellay. To obtain a clear view of the reforms aimed at by the Pléiade, the Deffence should be further considered in connexion with Ronsard’s Abrégé d’art poétique and his preface to the Franciade. Du Bellay maintained that the French language as it was then constituted was too poor to serve as a medium for the higher forms of poetry, but he contended that by proper cultivation it might be brought on a level with the classical tongues. He condemned those who despaired of their mother tongue, and used Latin for their more serious and ambitious work. For translations from the ancients he would substitute imitations. Not only were the forms of classical poetry to be imitated, but a separate poetic language and style, distinct from those employed in prose, were to be used. The French language was to be enriched by a development of its internal resources and by discreet borrowing from the Latin and Greek. Both du Bellay and Ronsard laid stress on the necessity of prudence in these borrowings, and both repudiated the charge of wishing to latinize their mother tongue. The book was a spirited defence of poetry and of the possibilities of the French language; it was also a declaration of war on those writers who held less heroic views.

The violent attacks made by du Bellay on Marot and his followers, and on Sibilet, did not go unanswered. Sibilet replied in the preface to his translation (1549) of the Iphigenia of Euripides; Guillaume des Autels, a Lyonnese poet, reproached du Bellay with ingratitude to his predecessors, and showed the weakness of his argument for imitation as opposed to translation in a digression in his Réplique aux furieuses défenses de Louis Meigret (Lyons, 1550); Barthélemy Aneau, regent of the