François Mainard

Mainard, François or François Maynard (1582-1646), ‘L'homme de France qui savait le mieux faire des vers’ (according to Malherbe, whose poetry seminars he attended) was secretary to Marguerite de Valois (1605-7), president of the presidial court at Aurillac (1612-28), and one of the original members of the Académie Française, but he never acquired the wealth or status he thought were his due, and from 1633 spent most of his time on his estate at Saint-Céré, regretting the more generous patronage of the Valois princes. Stricter on some points than Malherbe himself, he argued for a division of the sizain at the third line and, against Racan, for a break at the seventh as well as the fourth in the dizain; on the other hand he defended the ‘irregular’ sonnet, with variant rhymes in the quatrains. He tends to make each line as self-contained as possible and, though he wrote some heroic odes in the manner of Malherbe, is happier in shorter forms, considering himself to be ‘l'épigrammatiste de France’. His elegant wit, caustic or playful, is balanced by his sense of the world's vanity and the end of all things, impressively conveyed in his ode ‘Alcippe, reviens dans nos bois’.

— Alan Steele