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Jean Le Maire de Belges

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'JEAN LE MAIRE DE BELGES (1473 - c. 1525), French poet and historiographer, was born at Bavai in Hainault. He was a nephew of Jean Molinet, and spent some time with him at Valenciennes, where the elder writer held a kind of academy of poetry. Le Maire in his first poems calls himself a disciple of Molinet. In certain aspects he does belong to the school of the grands rhetoriqueurs, but his great merit as a poet is that he emancipated himself from the affectations and puerilities of his masters. This independence of the Flemish school he owed in part perhaps to his studies at the university of Paris and to the study of the Italian poets at Lyons, a centre of the French renascence. In 1503 he was attached to the court of Margaret of Austria, duchess of Savoy, afterwards regent of the Netherlands. For this princess he undertook more than one mission to Rome;. he became her librarian and a canon of Valenciennes. To her were addressed his most original poems, Epistres de l'amand verd, the arrant vent being a green parrot belonging to his patroness. Le Maire gradually became more French in his sympathies, eventually entering the service of Anne of Brittany. His prose Illustrations des Gaules et singularitez de Troye (1510-1512), largely adapted from Benoit de Sainte More, connects the Burgundian royal house with Hector. Le Maire probably died before 1525. Etienne Pasquier, Ronsard and Du Bellay all acknowledged their indebtedness to him. In his love for antiquity, his sense of rhythm, and even the peculiarities of his vocabulary he anticipated the Pleiade. His works were edited in1882-1885by J. Stecher, who wrote the article on him in the Biographie nationale de Belgique. 'Lemaitre, Francois Elie Jules (1853-), French critic and dramatist, was born at Vennecy (Loiret) on the 27th of April 1853. He became a professor at the university of Grenoble, but he had already become known by his literary criticisms, and in 1884 he resigned his position to devote himself entirely to literature. He succeeded J. J. Weiss as dramatic critic of the Journal des Debats, and subsequently filled the same office on the Revue des Deux Mondes. His literary studies were collected under the title of Les Contemporains (7 series, 1886-1899), and his dramatic feuilletons as Impressions de thedtre (10 series, 1888-1898). His sketches of modern authors are interesting for the insight displayed in them, the unexpectedness of the judgments and the gaiety and originality of their expression. He published two volumes of poetry: Les Medaillons (1880) and Petites orientales (1883); also some volumes of conies, among them En mange des vieux livres (1905). His plays are: Revoltee (1889), Le depute Leveau, and Le Manage blanc (1891), Les Rois (1893), Le Pardon and L' Age difficile (1895), La Massiere (1905) and Bertrade (1906). He was admitted to the French Academy on the 16th of January 1896. His political views were defined in La Campagne nationaliste (1902), lectures delivered in the provinces by him and by G. Cavaignac. He conducted a nationalist campaign in the Echo de Paris, and was for some time president of the Ligue de la Patrie Francaise, but resigned in 1904, and again devoted himself to literature.