Théophile de Viau

Théophile de Viau (Clairac, near Agen in the Lot-et-Garonne, 1590 - Paris, 25 September 1626) was a French baroque poet and dramatist.

In 1612^[1]the twenty two year old Viau joined up with Jean-Louis Guez de Balzac, around fifteen at the time,^[2] whom he met in Angoulême.^[3] The two became lovers and traveled together the following year in the United Provinces, eventually ending up at the Leiden University, where they enrolled as students in May of 1615. In Holland, Balzac was attacked and beaten with a stick, an affront avenged by Viau with a sword. Balzac behavior, debauched and ungrateful, was to lead later to bitter recriminations.^[4] Prefiguring the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud, they brawled upon their return, an event which marked the end of their affair.^[5][6]

Raised as a Huguenot, Théóphile de Viau participated in the Protestant wars in Guyenne from 1615-1616 in the service of the Comte de Candale. After the war, he was pardoned and became a brilliant young poet in the royal court. Théophile came into contact with the epicurian ideas of the Italian philosopher Lucilio Vanini (who was accused of heresy and of practicing magic, and was burned alive in Toulouse in 1619) which questioned the immortality of the soul.

Because of his religion, his libertine ideas and his homosexuality,^[7] de Viau was banished from France in 1619 and traveled in England, though he returned to the court in 1620. In 1622, a collection of licentious poems, "Le Parnasse satyrique", was published under his name, although many of the poems were written by others, and de Viau was denounced by the Jesuits in 1623 and sentenced to appear barefoot before Notre Dame in Paris and to be burned alive.

While de Viau was in hiding, the sentence was carried out in effigy, but the poet was eventually caught in flight toward England and put in the Conciergerie prison in Paris for almost two years. The trial lead to debates among scholars and writers, and 55 pamphlets were published both for and against de Viau. His sentence was changed to permanent banishment and de Viau spent the remaining months of his life in Chantilly under the protection of the Duke of Montmorency before dying in Paris in 1626.

During his imprisonment in 1623-1625, de Viau addressed a poem to his lover, Jacques Vallée, Sieur Des Barreaux, entitled "The Complaint of Théophile to his friend Tircis," reproaching Des Barreaux for doing little to help him.^[7] After de Viau's death in 1626, a contemporary biographer of high society, Tallement des Réaux, referred to Des Barreaux as de Viau's widow, "thus indicating that their physical relationship was common knowledge at the time."^[7]

De Viau's works includes one play, "Les Amours tragiques de Pyrame et Thisbé" (performed in 1621), which is the story of Pyramus and Thisbe. He also wrote satirical poems, sonnets, odes and elegies.

De Viau's poetic style refused the logical and classicist constraints of François de Malherbe and remained attached to the emotional and the baroque images of the late Renaissance, such as in his ode "Un corbeau devant moi croasse" ("A crow before me caws"), which paints a fantastic scene of thunder, serpents and fire (much like a painting by Salvator Rosa). Two of his poems are melancholy pleas to the king on the subject of his incarceration or exile, and this tone of sadness is also present in his ode "On Solitide" which mixes classical motifs with an elegy about the poet in the midst of a forest.

Théophile de Viau was rediscovered by the French Romantics in the 19th century.

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