DU BELLAY (Joachim). Lot n° 60

Ɵ Docte et singulier discours sur les quatre estats du Royaume de France, déploration & calamité du temps présent. Lyon, Benoît Rigaud, 1567. Booklet in-8, orange morocco, Jansenist, gilt title on spine, interior lace, gilt edges (M. Godillot). First edition in Lyon of this piece which appeared in 1566 in Paris at Fédéric Morel under the title Discours au Roy, contenant une briefve instruction pour bien régner (cf. Dumoulin, n°120). Occasional poem in verse composed by Du Bellay a few days before his death on January 1, 1560, in which the poet recommends to François II to maintain a salutary balance between the four "estates", i.e. the people, the nobility, justice and the Church. The work is a translation and poetic transposition of the De sacra Francisci II Galliarum regis initiatione written by Michel de L'Hospital in 1559 on the occasion of the coronation of the young Francis II: If it is divine, [...] sovereignty is no less dependent on an education through which the king receives knowledge. [The institution of the prince, presented in the form of a speech offered to the king [...], is thought of in the mode of an initiatio, perhaps inspired by Xenophon's Cyropedia. [...] It fell to the poet Joachim du Bellay, as he approached his end and as the fashion for the Erasmian Institution remained very strong, to translate it into French and to versify his translation, which was not printed until 1566 (Denis Crouzet, La Sagesse et le malheur..., p. 370). J. P. Barbier-Mueller, III, n°38. - Baudrier, t. III, p. 246. - Diane Barbier-Mueller, Inventaire..., n°284.