Encomium and particularities
In a passage following his laudatory portrait of Elizabeth of Valois, Queen of Spain, daughter of Henri II and Catherine de Medicis, Brantome pauses to justify his copious use of particularities.
I know that in this discourse and others preceding it, I can be criticized for putting in many small particularities that are totally superfluous. True, but I know that if they annoy some, others appreciate them. It seems to me that it isn’t enough when we praise people to say that they are beautiful, wise, virtuous, worthy, valiant, magnanimous, open, generous, splendid, and absolutely perfect. These are general accolades and descriptions, commonplaces that everyone uses. It is important to be specific about the whole and, in particular, describe perfections in such a way as to bring them to life...[376]
For Brantome, particularities are the personal details that he adds to a more general description, or type, of a person; as Robert D. Cottrell has noted, Brantome uses particularities to support his encomia, which effectively “level distinction.”[377] If it is true, as John Pope-Hennessy has written, that “portraiture, like other forms of art, is an expression of conviction, and in the Renaissance it reflects the reawakening interest in human motives and the human character, the resurgent 114 | Queens, Regents, Mistresses: Reflections on Extracting recognition of those factors which make human beings individual,” Brantome’s particularities individualize his biographical sketches.11
Brantome admits only to the use of positive particularities. For some women, the memoirist has only praise. Amidst his general comments about Marguerite of Navarre, sister of Franpois I, the particularities are all flattering: for example, he notes she was adept at worming information from ambassadors, which the king greatly appreciated.[378] [379] Nonetheless, many of the individualizing details that he recounts about women are unkind, to say the least, at times biting, even scurrilous. In addition, Brantome sometimes lavishly praises and undermines the same woman. The combined effect of such extremes creates the impression of a narrator oscillating, Cottrell writes, from “appearance to the exposure of hidden truth,” simultaneously idealizing and undermining.[380] True, such ambivalence is not always jarring. One example is his 70-page encomium of Catherine de Medicis paired with the anecdote, which he recounts much later, of the queen boring holes in the ceiling to spy on her husband, Henri II, trysting with Diane de Poitiers.[381] Brantome turns the anecdote into an occasion for ribald laughter, noting that the queen, initially demoralized, soon made a pastime of the spying and turned it into a joke. The effect of the anecdote is to reveal the very human jealousy of this magnificent queen, but, more important, to show her coping in a sort of blackly humorous way with a painful situation. More generally, laudatory passages and undermining particularities often occur at a distance from each other within the text; moreover, as far as most modern readers are concerned, they occur in different genres, the memoirist singing his most fulsome praise in the Vie des dames illustres and saving his nasty remarks for the Vie des dames galantes. It is important to keep in mind, however, as Claude La Charite explains, that Brantome himself conceived of his work as a single volume. The two parts represented a whole in his mind, each side containing seven sections, which suggests Unpacking Brantome’s “Particularitez” ∣ 115 that he intended the halves in some sense to mirror each other. If the discordant notes are deliberately placed, they cannot easily be ignored.[382] Emily Butterworth’s recent examination of Brantome as a gossip offers a plausible way of reconciling the conflicting images: gossip was a form of currency at court, and those who circulated it grew their social capital. From this perspective, Brantome slips in particularities in the way a gossip inserts small pieces of slander into mostly positive discourse about a third party to create a bond with the listener: like a secret, sharing a negative particularity creates a sense of intimate complicity. Against the backdrop of generalized, stereotypical praise, Brantome’s mean details have often seemed to historians to ring true, precisely because they are unflattering. But just as gossip often represents a partially accurate assessment warped by antagonism or jealousy, Brantome’s particularities often seem to be distortions crying out for re-processing. I would like in what follows to examine Brantome’s at-times-scathing personal remarks as pieces of gossip that contain some truth but, filtered through a temporally unfriendly or jealous observer, demand alternate interpretations. By applying a more positive template than Brantome’s to unflattering particularities and testing the result against other contemporary documents, I attempt to reclaim some of Brantome’s questionable observations.