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Although, technically speaking, Malherbe was the client of Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de (1562-1646), Grand Écuyer de France [Master of the Horse], in whose service the poet received a cash stipend, table and board, horse and valet (Adam, Poésies 263), it was understood that Malherbe was the king’s “man.” In addition to “écuyer du roi” [equerry of the king], Malherbe was named “gentilhomme ordinaire de la chambre” [official gentleman of the royal bedchamber] (Adam, Poésies 223). BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de, a great lord from a powerful military family, was himself a loyal client of Henri IV. When the mortally-wounded Henri III recognized Henri of Navarre as his successor in 1589, BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de without hesitation transferred his allegiances to the new king and valiantly fought by his side to help him secure control of the monarchy. After the death of Henri IV, the queen regent declared Malherbe the recipient of a royal pension in 1611, and Louis XIII reaffirmed this patron-client relationship in 1622 and again in 1624. The difficulty that Malherbe experienced in getting the royal treasury to honor these financial commitments may have led to the interruption of his work on the sequence in 1613, and it may explain the self-interested praise and solicitation of later odes.

The personal ties between Henri IV and Malherbe, mediated by BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de, belong to the diffuse and particularistic network of personal relationships known as patronage. One of those unfamiliar but essential practices of early modern France, patronage needs some explanation if a twenty-first-century reader is to appreciate how its assumptions and conventions inform the composition of the royal odes. Fortunately, Peter W. Shoemaker’s important book, Powerful Connections: The Poetics of Patronage in the Age of Louis XIII, offers a compelling and nuanced analysis of this fundamental cultural practice which may be adapted, with small changes, to Malherbe’s royal odes, half of which were composed during the reign of Henri IV. The most important adaptation concerns the particularistic “audience of one,” which Shoemaker sees at work in all patronage texts. While this notion is certainly determinative for the royal odes (their patrons are Henri, Marie, and Louis, with one long ode addressed to BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de), one must recall that a monarch constitutes a special kind of patron, since he or she embodies an audience of more-than-one: this is because a monarch cannot in principle be limited to a single body but always includes the body politicbody politic of the nationnation.1 The royal odes written for the king, or the queen, frequently address him or her directly, but they are also addressed through the monarch to the nationnation and, often, are aimed at the great nobilitynobility in particular, a key constituency of the nationnation. The ode to BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de is an indirect appeal to the latter. Starting from the historical practice of patronage, this chapter shows how the monarch’s person (one of the three particulars of decorum: time, place, and persons) implies an imagined community of addressees.

The broad outlines of patronage described by Shoemaker apply without reservation to the royal odes. “Representations were produced, and power was exerted,” he writes, “through networks of interpersonal relationships that bridged the public and the nonpublic. Writers, historians, artists, architects, and other cultural creators specialized in the business of publicizing—and illustrating—their protectors’ influence. In return, patrons provided publicity for artistic works and gave artists and writers access to social elites where the latter could promote their works” (Shoemaker 17). “This highly personalized and hierarchical system inevitably exerted an influence on literary practice, shaping the exchanges that defined the economic, social, and political value of literature and favoring certain genres and modes of expression. The promise of social advancement created a gradient of desire that generated representations and put them into circulation. In their attempts to win over patrons, writers were drawn into an elitist mode of cultural production and consumption that promoted a hierarchy of literary value based on aristocratic canons of taste” (Shoemaker 19). While the informal arrangements of patronage were governed by verbal contracts based on antiquated feudal ideals, and the relationships were often charged with powerful emotionemotions, it is nevertheless true that self-interest and political calculation inevitably dictated the terms of both sides of the agreement and led to the frequent re-negotiation of loyalties.

The relationship of poet and monarch in the early seventeenth century fits comfortably within Shoemaker’s broad paradigm. “The royal family recruited literary talent both for official propaganda and to provide the scripts for ballets, tournaments, and other courtcourt (royal) festivities” (Shoemaker 30). In theory, a monarch was supposed to be the most distinguished member of the nobilitynobility. Because this was not always the case in fact, monarchs used belles-lettres for self-aggrandizement, reinforcing their social and political elevation over the nobles at courtcourt (royal), especially the great lords, but also shoring up their authority over clergy and magistrates, the other powerful members of the body politicbody politic. Furthermore, given the voluminous and wide diffusion of pamphlet literature, which “sought to reach not only the most reasonable part of the populace, but to interest the masses” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 44), there is no reason to assume that the impact of belles-lettres was limited to the first two orders of the kingdom. Various poetry anthologies, “the mirrors of their epoch,” edited and published by entrepreneurs with “sharply distinguished literary and esthetic conceptions” (Lafay, “Recueils collectifs” 15), disseminated Malherbe’s royal odes to different sectors of the reading public. Both literary venues, elite and popular, paid homage to the monarch’s preeminence and authority. As Shoemaker notes, this French literature, whether pamphlets or lyriclyric poetry poems, represented an elitist point of view in an elitist mode of expression. Public values were indistinguishable from the elitist values expressed at courtcourt (royal) or in aristocratic circles thanks to the hegemony over cultural production that the monarchy and the nobility exerted through patronage (Shoemaker 17).

Although Shoemaker examines the flourishing of patronage primarily after the reign of Henri IV, he traces the practice’s “contingent rhetorical strategies” and its “personal or particularistic rhetoric” to a foundational text, Budé’s De l’institution du prince [On the Education of the Prince], published in 1547 (Shoemaker 19). “The treatise devotes an extended discussion to courtcourt (royal) oratory and lays particular emphasis on the man of letters’ potential role as counselor” (Shoemaker 20). In Shoemaker’s view, the significance of Budé’s treatise derives from its prescient anticipation of a “shift from oratory to counsel” (Shoemaker 20), of “a move away from the traditional public scope of rhetoric” (Shoemaker 20-21). However, this shift would have to wait more than half a century to come about. The contentious political environment that accompanied the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion not only fostered oratory of the sort practiced by Demosthenes and CiceroCicero, but also subsumed the traditional patronage ties of poets under the banner of one sectarian camp or the other. Polemic abounded, and this includes militant poems like Ronsard’s Les Discours (1560-1584) or Agrippa d’Aubigné’s Les Tragiques (1572-1616). Indeed, had it not been for the religious warsWars of Religionreligious warsreligious wars, Catherine de Médicis (1519-1589), “imbued with her ancestors’ ideal that governments and powerful persons should patronize artists and humanists,” would probably have dispensed more royal pensions and commissions (Baumgartner 293). With the return of peace in 1598, the crown and political elites could contemplate a return to the traditional arrangements of literary patronage.

What was unusual, therefore, about Henri IV’s accession was that it marked the end-game to a long and devastating civil war. In the early years of the seventeenth century, Henri IV enjoyed, if not a monopoly over literary patronage, then an unusually broad outpouring of goodwill. Despite isolated Huguenot and LeagueLeaguer opposition, “a kind of unanimity had formed around the idea of celebrating the return to order and peace symbolized by Henri IV” (Chauveau 67). Such strong support for the crown would not be seen again until after the Fronde. If the public and political thrust of the royal odes makes them outliers in the undeniable march toward “the expansion of two parallel realms of personalized discourse: private conversation and secret political counsel” (Shoemaker 22), it is almost certainly because Malherbe was a contemporary of Henri IV and grew up under the same dark clouds of civil conflict. In addition, placed in the clientele of BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de, he was invited to stay at courtcourt (royal) when literary patronage had only just recovered and encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry speech-making had only just supplanted politicalpolitical oratory. While the outward form of the royal odes—the encomiumencomium—is adapted to the epideicticeloquenceepideictic rhetorical climate instituted by Henri IV in 1603, their impassioned patriotismpatriotism recalls the stirring pleas of royalist pamphlets published in the 1580s and 1590s. Indeed, the eventual divergence of discourse into two personalized realms, reinforced by the vigorous rebirth of patronage culture, may well have doomed the odes to a reception not on their own terms.

Shoemaker rightly insists that all patronage texts—and this includes Malherbe’s royal odes—exhibit a particularistic rhetoric. “This rhetoric was necessarily ad hominem in that the success or failure of a given performance was not a function of swaying the opinions of a broad public, but rather of seducing a single individual” (Shoemaker 23). This observation, while true on its face, requires some qualification in Malherbe’s case. For instance, Malherbe’s first ode, “À la Reine sur sa bienvenue en France” (1600; 1601), which he read aloud at Marie’s reception in Aix, seems to have gone unnoticed by both Marie and Henri. It was Henri’s de facto poet laureate and close friend, Cardinal Du PerronDu Perron, who noticed and recommended Malherbe to the king in 1601, calling him “the best poet in the kingdom” (Adam, Histoire 27). In 1605, Malherbe travelled to Paris in the entourage of his mentor, the Président Du VairDu Vair, and quite unexpectedly received a commission from Henri to compose an ode on the occasion of his imminent campaign in the Limousin—which Malherbe accepted and, upon the king’s return, presented him with “Prière pour le Roi allant en Limousin” (1605; 1607). Clearly, if Malherbe had not succeeded in fitting the ode to his prospective patron, and if the ode had not made a favorable impression on the soldier-king—despite his alleged untutored tastes and loathing for scholars (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc L’Âge 522)—Henri would not have placed Malherbe in the clientele of BellegardeBellegarde, Roger de Saint-Lary de Termes, seigneur de. But it was the educated humanists at courtcourt (royal), Du PerronDu Perron and Du VairDu Vair, who had a high opinion of Malherbe’s poetry and who prepared the poet’s positive reception by the king.

With respect to Malherbe’s royal odes, therefore, several caveats must qualify Shoemaker’s “audience of one.” First, Henri IV was in no way qualified to make critical judgments about the quality of Malherbe’s poetry. This was not unusual. The Valois kings were known for their generous patronage of literature and the arts, but neither François I nor Henri II were educated beyond what one would expect of a nobleman of the time. Henri III, it is true, tutored by Pontus de Tyard and Budé, had a broad and deep foundation in classical learning. He created the Académie du Palais, a coterie of poets and scholars devoted to cultivating French eloquenceeloquence, and did not hesitate to harangue ParlementParlement in 1586 (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 494). The arrival of Henri IV at the Louvre, however, did not bode well for belles-lettres, destroying the “literary bridges” that had been erected between “the elite of the erudite Robenobilityof the robe” and “the high nobilitynobility orbiting around the king” (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 521). Du VairDu Vair and Du PerronDu Perron (and Malherbe, too) lamented “the pretentious and courtly taste of belated rhetoriqueurs” which the Gascons had brought to the Louvre from the courtcourt (royal) of Nérac (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 521). Add to this the fashionable Italian and Spanish influences in poetry, courtcourt (royal) spectacle, and humanist scholarship that arrived with Marie de Médicis, and the French courtcourt (royal) in the early years of the seventeenth century became a veritable “dialectical crossroads” without its own language or style (FumaroliFumaroli, Marc, L’Âge 522). In such circumstances, how much could a poet really expect from a patron like Henri IV? Even if the monarch had the last word about engaging the services of writers and poets, his opinion and taste were bound to be influenced by such “experts” as Du VairDu Vair and Du PerronDu Perron—who indeed intervened on Malherbe’s behalf. To Henri’s credit, he listened, and hired Malherbe to shore up his public imageimagepublic image.

The second caveat is that, even if “the ideal of the orator necessarily became entangled with royal patronage” (Shoemaker 20), the royal courtroyal court was not the only, nor even the most important, social space where eloquenceeloquence was practiced. As Marc FumaroliFumaroli, Marc shows in L’Âge de l’éloquence, the vying of orators to outdo one another in praise of Henri IV was more than a personal competition. It was a competition of caste to determine whether the pulpitpulpit, the ParlementParlement, or the courtcourt (royal) would constitute the epicenter of royaleloquenceroyal eloquenceeloquence. The markedly different rhetorical practices, social and political values, esthetic preferences, and levels of education that characterized these social spaces created a complex dynamic in which distinct conceptions of eloquenceeloquence competed for dominance. To compose, and then to publish, an encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry ode for the monarch was to take up the gauntlet in this fierce contest and to challenge all other claimants to the mantle of royaleloquenceroyal eloquenceeloquence. Malherbe’s bid for Henri’s patronage was personal, certainly, as it concerned Malherbe’s employment and it was Henri’s decision to make, but it was public to the extent that the ode as finished product implied the endorsement or the negation of rhetorical positions staked out by other contenders in the nascent French Republic of Letters.

Third, all rhetoric is particularistic. Whether in public oratory or private conversation, the principle of decorum says that the speaker must adapt himself and his discourse to the particulars of the occasion: time, place, and persons (EdenEden, Kathy, Hermeneutics 26; AristotleAristotle, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 3.7.1-11; CiceroCicero, De Or.CiceroDe Oratore 3.210-211, OratorCiceroOrator 70-71, 123; QuintilianQuintilian 8.3.11-13). In rhetorical theory, a speech is not less particularistic for being addressed to a broad public. Its arguments and style are more skiagraphic, that is, less polished, rougher (AristotleAristotle, Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 3.12.5; ShugerShuger, Debora K. 15). To be effective, however, it must still succeed in presenting the speaker in terms familiar to the audience. He must appear to be one of them, which is achieved by adapting himself and his discourse to their concerns and values (Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 1.2.4 & 1.8.5). This close familiarity is the function of ethosethos, characterethoscharacter portrayed in and through discourse. Ethosethos is the sort of rhetorical tool that allows a speaker to adapt his own characterethoscharacter to a composite audience or to an individual.

A rather vague concept in modern parlance, ethosethos is a word of Greek origin, with a long and complex history in politics, ethics, and rhetoric.2 In these pages its primary meaning is “characterethoscharacter” or “kind of person,” with the understanding that the group always already informs the individual. That is to say, an individual’s distinguishing habits, attitudes, beliefs, values, and tastes are to a large extent determined by the social group (or groups) to which he or she belongs (or would like to belong). According to AristotleAristotle, the causal link between discursive characterethoscharacter and moral characterethoscharacter is deliberate choice, since it ultimately determines both action and speaking. In the Nicomachean EthicsAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE), AristotleAristotle asserts that different kinds of persons aim at different ends (NE 3.2 111b5). Similarly, the kind of things one chooses to say, and the way one chooses to say them, suggest something about the kind of person one is (Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 3.16.8)—and this explains ethosethos’s potential for abuse, that is, the politician’s deception: using words to obscure moral characterethoscharacter. In Aristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’: An Art of Character, Eugene GarverGarver, Eugene argues that ethosethos is the most important of the three “means of persuasion” (pisteis: logos, ēthos, pathospistis, pisteislogos, ēthos, pathos) because in AristotleAristotle’s hands it transforms rhetoric from an instrumental activity, a technēcrafttechnē, into a civic activity, a function of the virtuevirtue of citizencommonwealthcitizens (GarverGarver, Eugene 6-8). In practical terms, it makes a speaker appear worthy of credence to an audience (Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 1.2.4). But AristotleAristotle cautions that ethosethos is not the reputation a speaker already has. Rather, it is the kind of person that one appears to be in the act of speaking (Rhet.AristotleRhetoric 1.2.4).

In Malherbe’s case, the first ode “À la Reine sur sa bienvenue en France” (1600; 1601) praises Marie de Médicis, both her great virtuevirtues and the critical role that she will play in the new regime. The praise of Henri IV and the indirect plea to him in the ode’s last section make it clear that the ode is addressed to both monarchs. The second ode “Prière pour le Roi allant en Limousin” (1605; 1607) is trying to please and to move Henri in particular. In each ode, success means that the royal patron admires or approves of the ode as appropriate to himself (or herself) in some way. Ethosethos, or characterethoscharacter, is the artistic means to that end. It gives the speaker something to aim at. It determines how the speaker of the ode portrays the subject of praise, shaping the choice of argument and style. It influences, for instance, whether he chooses arguments that stress legitimacy by divine right or emphasizes personal merit due to virtuevirtue, and it selects what sorts of tropes and figures he uses to represent royal majesty—hyperbole, for example, being appropriate to great virtuevirtue as well as to passionate advocacy. The act of presenting such arguments and values is meant to reflect the speaker’s own characterethoscharacter, lending credibility and sincerity to the ode’s praise and political advocacy. There is room for the speaker to assert his individuality, and this emerges from particular, even singular choices. But an ethosethos cannot be totally idiosyncratic. It must encompass the monarch’s two bodies, and it must reflect the values and the ideals which the monarch has absorbed from his or her social group.

Addressing a monarch is not like addressing a private person. A monarch has a “mystical bodymystical body (of the king)”—a political abstraction informed by theology—and this notion is broad and flexible enough to include the commonwealthcommonwealth, the state apparatus, the territorial kingdom, and the patrienationla patrie [nationnation] (KantorowiczKantorowicz, Ernst H. 208, 211, 232, 236, 247). Addressing a king in writing is the equivalent of what we would call an open letter, so that one was addressing at the very least the entire courtcourt (royal) and royal bureaucracy, and potentially all members of the body politicbody politic. If characterethoscharacter, or ethosethos, is not an idiosyncratic affair, it is certainly a type, the fusion of personality with social function. To cite Alasdair MacIntyre in After Virtue: “The requirements of a characterethoscharacter are imposed from the outside, from the way in which others regard and use characterethoscharacters to understand and evaluate themselves. [ ] A characterethoscharacter is an object of regard by the members of the culture generally or by some significant segment of them. He furnishes them with a cultural and moral ideal. Hence the demand is that, in this type of case, role and personality be fused. Social type and psychological type are required to coincide. The characterethoscharacter morally legitimates a mode of social existence” (MacIntyre 29, his italics). Such observations hold true a fortiori in the case of a monarch. Ethosethos, in the moral connotation of the term, thus refers to a social type, and more narrowly, to the moral constitution of a particular individual. It signifies in fact that zone where type and individual mingle. Consequently, the royal patron targeted in Malherbe’s odes, while particular, even a particular (indeed the controlling particular), is neither a unity nor a private entity, but rather individual and collective, personal and public. A reader should therefore expect the royal patron’s characterethoscharacter to shape the composition of Malherbe’s encomiasticencomiumencomiastic poetry odes in both ways: the ode represents something particular about the monarch, for instance, personal attributes for which he or she is known or would like to be known, but such a representation is already shaped by the collective, embodying the ideals of a caste—and of a nationnation.

The final caveat is that the patron-client relation between monarch and poet may be represented as personal, even exclusive, but also, and on the contrary, as exemplary, illustrating the proper relationship of monarch and subject. Malherbe’s eloquenceeloquence may distinguish him from other subjects and uniquely qualify him to praise the monarch, but the argument and style of any one of his odes, because they are adapted to the monarch’s characterethoscharacter, model the proper thoughts and feelings which they seek to produce in the reading subject. Thus an ode aimed at the monarch, and modeled on him, at the same time targets the monarch’s subjects. This is what I mean when I claim that the actual persons being addressed in Malherbe’s royal odes go beyond the individual monarch. Every ode’s argument and style are calculated to affect the reader cognitively and emotionemotionally. This multi-directional relationship—monarch and poet, poet and reader, reader and monarch—requires a rhetorical tool broad and flexible enough to establish and to encompass these binaries. Ethosethos is such a tool, always already collective, guiding the choice of argument and style, which are calculated to reflect the values and ideals of an individual and/or a social group. For this reason, small differences in diction, exampleexamples, imagery, and intertexual sources from one ode to the next point to the composite nature of Malherbe’s audience: Catholics and ProtestantProtestants, nobles and commoners, great nobles and governors etc. However, the long-standing convention of decorum—where the orator so reliably and completely adapts himself and his discourse to the ideals and beliefs of the audience, that one may infer the characterethoscharacter of the audience from the arguments and style of the speech3—should not blind the reader to the creative possibility of Malherbe constructing, from the multi-directional relations of ethosethos, a whole greater than its parts. Malherbe’s principal task is to craft an ethosethos capacious enough to encompass diverse constituencies and inspiring enough to unify them in an imagined community. Put another way, the rhetorical ethosethos of the royal odes constructs a civic relation between monarch and subject, but also between poet and reader.

Since the monarch is the unifying focus of the various constituencies addressed in the odes, Malherbe would have wanted to choose an ethosethos appropriate to Henri IV which at the same time had broad appeal. The aristocratic ideal for the generation of nobles that had lived, fought, and survived the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion was the Aristotelian megalopsychosmagnanimitymegalopsychos, or great soulmagnanimitygreat soul, and, in Henri’s particular case, such an ethosethos happened to be a fitting characterization. Most French subjects, including leading great nobles, expressed genuine admiration for his valor. Even enemies and critics had to admit that the scrappy king of Navarre had proven himself time and again in key military conflicts. Not only was he recognized as a master tactician of cavalry, but like CaesarCaesar and AlexanderAlexander (the Great), the greatest heroes of antiquity, Henri often fought alongside his men. Once during the siege of Amiens (1597), from which the Spanish had sallied to disable French artillery, Henri’s infantry was in danger of being routed. “Henri, alerted to the danger, dismounted, seized a pike, and charged forward to rally the troops” (Pitts 202). Almost fifty years before the duke of Enghien, the future Grand CondéGrand Condé (also duke of Enghien), distinguished himself at Rocroi (1643), unleashing a torrent of hyperbolic praise comparing the young noble to AlexanderAlexander (the Great) (Bannister, Condé 17), Henri IV incarnated the ideal of the classical hero. In the words of Pierre de L’Étoile, he was “king, captain, and soldier all together” (ctd. in Pitts 200).

A characterethoscharacter type described in the Nicomachean EthicsAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE), the megalopsychosmagnanimitymegalopsychos denotes someone of great merit, with the right concern for honor: “he thinks himself worthy of great things and is really worthy of them” (NEAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE) 4.3 1123b), and “what he thinks he is worthy of reflects his real worth” (NEAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE) 4.3 1123b15). AristotleAristotle’s notion does not exactly coincide with the definition of magnanimitymagnanimity as it is used in English and French today: the generous forgiveness of insult or injury—a characterethoscharacter trait, by the way, frequently displayed by Henri IV. But such readiness to pardon should be understood as a secondary consequence of the great soulmagnanimitygreat soul’s proper understanding of honor. The moral disposition to perform great acts of heroism puts him above retribution for small slights. Only the greatest dangers have the power to motivate him: “he faces them in a great cause, and [ ] is unsparing of his life” (NEAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE) 4.3 1124b8). “His actions are few, but great and renowned” (NEAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE) 4.3 1124b25). In addition, the megalopsychosmagnanimitymegalopsychos is said to possess all the other virtuevirtues in the highest degree: “Magnanimitymagnanimity, then, looks like a sort of adornment of the virtuevirtues; for it makes them greater, and it does not arise without them” (NE 4.3 1124a). Such characterethoscharacter traits, as well as the translated term “magnanime” [magnanimous], its paraphrase “grande âme” [great soulmagnanimitygreat soul], and their synonym “générosité” [magnanimitymagnanimity], frequently occur in the royal odes. If not every characterethoscharacter trait mentioned in Book 4 of the Nicomachean EthicsAristotleNicomachean Ethics (NE) is found in the royal odes, it is because the Greek ethosethos is filtered through the past chivalric ideals of the French nobilitynobility.4 Generally speaking, then, Malherbe’s great soulmagnanimitygreat soul is defined by great acts of valor, the right concern with honor, the thirst for glory, and the perfect devotion to love. The three other important qualities that distinguish Malherbe’s conception of magnanimitymagnanimity—the superlative, the quasi-divine, and the heroic—will be examined in Chapter 2.

Underlying Henri’s honor and valor is an impassioned patriotismpatriotism—at least that is how Henri portrayed himself and how his ProtestantProtestant supporters and, later, the royalist Politiques, liked to think of him. In the “Lettre du Roi de Navarre aux Trois États” [Letter of the King of Navarre to the Three Estates], Henri writes: “Never will I put myself before my country [pays]: its interests will always take precedence over my own: and always my own pain, my own loss, my own sufferings will be endured before those of my fatherland [patrienationla patrie]” (ctd. in YardeniYardeni, Myriam 195). Apart from hardline LeagueLeaguers who viewed such a declaration as a self-interested ruse, the majority of Frenchmen responded positively to this rhetoric of self-sacrifice in the name of the fatherland. “Beyond his unquestionable right to the succession, Henri of Navarre knew, perhaps from the start, how to embody the interests of France, how to be not only a partisan leader, but also how to see the interests of the whole nationnation [patrienationla patrie]. There can be no doubt that this quality served, no less than his right to the crown, to attract to his side, after his accession, ‘all good Catholics and true Frenchmen’ who desired to preserve their country” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 196). “The patriotismpatriotism of Henri IV was made of such material that it could reunite, seamlessly, the most diverse threads of his own party with those, no less diverse, of the adverse party” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 196). Henri presented himself as the restorer of the France which was “the communis patrianationpatria of all Frenchmen” (KantorowiczKantorowicz, Ernst H. 247), only recently submerged by the bloody deluge of sectarian violence, and mercilessly attacked by antinationnationalist LeagueLeaguer demagogues (e.g. “Who would not rather be Spanish than Huguenot?” ctd. in YardeniYardeni, Myriam 210).

The royal odes use this coincidence of magnanimitymagnanimity and patriotismpatriotism, modeled after Henri IV, to create the ethosethos of the new patrienationla patrie [nationnation] reborn from the ashes of civil war. Though expressed in the terms of chivalric nobilitynobility, this patriotic ethospatriotismpatriotic ethos had “nothing feudal about it” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 196). It excluded “no order or individual” and transcended “the narrow loyalism owed to the king” by transforming personal loyalty into “loyalism toward the patrienationla patrie [nationnation], since the bond that united the diverse members of the patrienationla patrie [nationnation] was the fact that all are French” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 197). The choice, however fortuitous, of Henri IV as the initial patron for Malherbe’s royal odes, therefore, determines their representation of the subject of the new nationnation. Henri is the model of the new patriotismpatriotism, and the ethosethos of magnanimitymagnanimity is its form and vehicle. While such an ethosethos portrays the monarch a quasi-divine hero who defends the interests of the nationnation, it also makes possible an ethic of emulation and self-sacrifice in the service of king and country, pro rege et patriapro rege et patria (KantorowiczKantorowicz, Ernst H. 259).

The ethosethos of magnanimitymagnanimity presents yet another advantage. Henri, a one-time peer of the blood who abjured his ProtestantProtestant faith to rule France, would have wanted to show that he was above mere political expediency. Such an implication is inherent to magnanimitymagnanimity. The royal odes maintain that Henri possesses the right of legitimate succession, based on the Salic Law, but they stress that he has earned that right. His devotion to the nationnation and his achievements on the battlefield were rich premises from which to argue that he deserved the throne. After Henri was assassinated in 1610, Malherbe extended this logic of magnanimitymagnanimity—the logic of intrinsic merit—to Marie de Médicis, whom the Paris ParlementParlement had confirmed as regent. The odes celebrating the magnanimitymagnanimity of the queen regent may be the most interesting of all the royal encomia, not least because, as we will see in Part II, Malherbe uses this traditionally masculine ethosethos to praise a powerful woman, arguing that her sagacious piloting of the ship of stateship of state proves her superlative merit.5 Some years later, after Louis XIII had snatched the reins of power from his mother, Malherbe would use the same ethosethos and apply its implicit logic to a young king whose military campaigns in the south of France were designed to remove any doubt about his readiness to impose his will.

The royal odes also extend this logic of intrinsic merit to the new patriotic subjectpatriotismpatriotic subject. By arguing that the Bourbons deserve to rule because of their commitment to the nationnation, Malherbe is appealing to the nationnation’s sense of honor, that is, both what the subjects owe to their monarch and what they owe to themselves. As Myriam YardeniYardeni, Myriam explains, during the Wars of ReligionWars of Religion, the embryonic patriotismpatriotism of the diverse constituencies of the nationnation (and this includes the democratic-minded monarchomachs) remained colored by noble ideology, which associated the greatness of France with the chivalric ideals of a caste that had traditionally defended the nationnation and, under the leadership of the king, had enforced God’s will (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 243-244). The logic of magnanimitymagnanimity redirects the desire of the nationnation’s greatest subjects for social distinction away from resentment toward emulation. This is because the sound judgment required to estimate correctly one’s own greatness is the same necessary for recognizing greatness in others (NE 4.3.1123b 1-5, 10-15; 1124a 5-10, 25-30; 1124b 1-5, 10-15 & 20). To recognize Henri IV as a great soulmagnanimitygreat soul is not to lose face but to demonstrate one’s own magnanimitymagnanimity. It takes a great soulmagnanimitygreat soul to know a great soul. In principle, but also as a practical matter, this condition of reciprocal recognition allows the ethosethos of magnanimitymagnanimity to reach through the monarch to address the great nobilitynobilitygreat nobles as a privileged constituency of the new nationnation. “Henri IV understood very well that he must win over the great nobles, first because they were the easiest, but also because the great nobilitynobilitygreat nobles encouraged the less brave to come along” (YardeniYardeni, Myriam 252-253). As the form and vehicle of the new patriotismpatriotism, the ethosethos of magnanimitymagnanimity targets the great nobles in particular, but their exampleexample potentially relays it to all the other subjects of the new national communitynationnational community.

To sum up, the practice of literary patronage in the early seventeenth century supplied an external goal—the characterethoscharacter of the monarch—to which Malherbe adapted himself and his poetic discourse. The perceived magnanimitymagnanimity of Henri IV determines the ethosethos of the royal odes, and this ethosethos in turn selects appropriate arguments and style. Its logic of intrinsic merit helped advance Henri’s political agenda and reinforced Bourbon political authority after Henri’s death. In presenting the monarch’s magnanimitymagnanimity as a patriotic idealpatriotismpatriotic ideal that transcends sectarian loyalties, Malherbe exploits the collective identity of ethosethos to appeal to noble elites and, through them, to the nationnation as a whole. Henri IV may not have taken a strong interest in poetry, but he could not have failed to notice that Malherbe’s “Prière pour le Roi allant en Limousin” (1605; 1607)—the ode which earned the poet a position at courtcourt (royal)—advocates the healing of the wounds inflicted on the French nationnation. The patronage of Malherbe was a practical tool for the dissemination of an ideological public imageimagepublic image which reaffirmed the authority of the monarchy and modeled the patriotismpatriotism of the new nationnation.