Amphion Orator. Michael Taormina

clients to do their bidding; with fewer clients they would be less dangerous to the king” (Major, “Henri IV and Guyenne,” 364). Henri’s intention “to transform the Renaissance monarchypolitymonarchy into a more absolute state” (Major, “Henri IV and Guyenne,” 363) goes hand in hand with the ideological efforts of propagandists and political theorists to revise the traditional images of the monarchyimageof the monarchy in France.9 Specifically, the superhuman proportions that magnanimitymagnanimity assumes in Malherbe’s royal odes remodel the traditional image of the king as “the eldest and most favored son of the church” (Keohane 55). Given Henri’s confessional flip-flopping and the still smoldering resentments of France’s sectarian conflict, this traditional image urgently needed revision. Henri’s necessary appeal to the Salic Law deemphasized the traditional reliance on the sacral aura of the monarchy “to reconstruct a sense of national communitynationnational community” (HoltHolt, Mack P., Renaissance 204).10 “Henry realized that his royal person was still the only acceptable focus for national unitynationnational unity” (HoltHolt, Mack P., Renaissance 204). This shift of emphasis accords with Malherbe’s use of supercharged attributes to transform Henri into a “super-man, gifted with all the attributes of an anthropomorphic God” (Keohane 56-57).

      It should be noted, however, that the conception of absolutismabsolutism which these attributes represent is qualitatively different from the sort of absolutismabsolutism that took hold after the Fronde. Mark Bannister, having charted this ideological transformation, distinguishes the later absolutismabsolutism by its “new relationship between monarch and subject, in which all gloire [glory] was vested in the king and in which systems of patronage and fidélité [loyalty] could work only in the same direction as the interests of the centralized state” (Bannister, Condé 155). By contrast, in the early seventeenth century, the class myth of the sword nobilitynobilityof the sword, with its emphasis on the moral autonomy and personal glory of the individual noble, still dominated the French imagination. The royal odes project this myth on the new monarch, so that Henri, a former great noble, appears to have won the crown thanks to his superhuman virtuevirtue, working the will of God for the sake of the nationnation. If the image of a superhuman, great-souled monarch exemplifies the class myth of the sword nobilitynobilityof the sword, it at the same time closes off any legitimate challenge to the new monarch’s authority, redirecting all noble aspirations pro rege et patriapro rege et patria. To the extent, moreover, that the royal odes fashion a new image of the French monarch, underscoring the capacity of Henri to see and to represent the goodcommonwealththe good of all (Keohane 54), the superhuman monarch thus “incarnates and represents all the interests of the patrienationla patrie [fatherland]” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 317). “He is a king who symbolizes not only the greatness of France but also the love which must henceforth unite all the members of the French nationnation” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 329).

      In the limited sense of the term “consent,” moreover, Malherbe’s praise for superlative, quasi-divine, and heroic magnanimitymagnanimity seeks recognition from the universal audienceuniversal audience of great soulmagnanimitygreat souls, in this instance, the civic community or body politicbody politic of the nationnation. As Mark Bannister notes, the heroic class myth of the sword nobilitynobilityof the sword portrayed the nobles as “the defense and bulwark of the state” (Bannister, Privileged Mortals 26). In the royal odes, the Bourbons take over this role. The nationnation’s other great soulmagnanimitygreat souls are invited to recognize the preeminence of their monarch, to follow his (or her) exampleexample, and to win glory pro rege et patriapro rege et patria. By means of this patriotic ethospatriotismpatriotic ethos, based on the virtuevirtue of magnanimitymagnanimity, the royal odes merge the class myth of the sword nobilitynobilityof the sword with the nationnational myth of the sequence. In the overarching conceitconceit of the sequence (where the ship of stateship of state navigates the troubled waters of political discord and conducts the nationnation to a new Golden AgeGolden Age), the Bourbons play the role of captain and/or pilot, while the other great soulmagnanimitygreat souls of the civic community play the role of supporting heroes and crew. Though not entirely apparent at the beginning of the sequence, the myth of the ArgoArgo becomes the primary intertext supporting Malherbe’s poetic sequence.

      Thus the conception of virtuevirtue informing Malherbe’s royal odes—magnanimitymagnanimity that is superlative, quasi-divine, and heroic—stands on one side of an ideological fault line. The fact that ideas of virtuevirtue similar to Malherbe’s were finding vigorous expression in novels and theater of the 1630s and 40s suggests that such aspirations had already begun to migrate from the realm of political reality to the symbolic world of nostalgic reminiscence. The heyday of the heroic novel and theatre was an expression of the nobilitynobility’s ideological consciousness, allowing members of the caste to continue to define themselves in traditional ways while adapting to the social and economic realities encroaching on the caste as a whole. Lyriclyric poetry poetry, which by the third decade was for the most part composed in the salonsalons milieu, traveled a separate path, eschewing the heroic in favor of the honnêtehonnête hommehonnêteté [honorable] and the galant [flirtatious]. The ideological ground shifted right under Malherbe’s feet, so rapidly and significantly did the definition of nobilitynobilitydefinition and the caste’s relationship to the monarchy evolve in the first three decades of the seventeenth century.