Louise Labé

By Madeleine Lazard. Paris, Fayard, 2004. 286 pp. Pb €20.00. ‘Toute l'invention consiste à faire quelque chose de rien.’ Racine's words concerning the composition of Bérénice could equally be applied to anyone undertaking a biography of Louise Labé, whose literary output has finally been recognized this year by the French academic establishment by its inclusion in the programme of the agrégation. Virtually nothing about Labé's life is known with any certainty. Her birth can only be situated between 1520 and 1523, her death some time in 1566, and her education can merely be surmised to have had its origins in one of the convents in Lyon. A handful of legal documents provide surer evidence about her rope-maker family, her marriage to the elderly Ennemond Perrin, and her relative wealth at her death. For the rest, there are her printed works, and a good deal of legends, both favourable and unfavourable, which have accumulated over the years. Given these difficulties, Madeleine Lazard does the only thing she can honestly do with the life of Lyon's most famous woman poet: she sets out in detail the small number of facts, examines meticulously the rather more numerous speculations, and provides a wealth of background material to allow the reader to place Labé in her intellectual and cultural context. This biography is aimed at a general audience, not at the specialist reader, so much of the work is concerned with providing information on Renaissance Lyon, its commercial, intellectual and religious development, the particular nature of its literary climate and the importance of the so-called sodalitium lugdunense, and the place of women writers in this setting. Lazard considers in some detail the links which Labé might have had with other writers, a number of whom championed her compositions by writing encomiastic verse for the first edition of her works. Marketed as a modern-day Sappho, there can be no doubt of her impact at the time. Given the paucity of detail concerning Labé's life, it is perhaps unsurprising that some of the best chapters in this book are devoted to an analysis of her writing. A final chapter provides a conspectus of her reputation across the centuries. What emerges from this study is the extreme improbability of her literary success. The rope-making background in which she grew up and into which she married offered no promise of what she would become, for her large family, though relatively affluent, lacked both status and education. Lazard, then, despite the dearth of biographical information, succeeds in producing a sensitive portrait of Labé. One might regret the absence of illustrations, and a table would have made better sense of Labé's complicated family tree, but the work as a whole manages to be both informative and honest, imaginative and scrupulous, in short a good introduction to an important literary phenomenon

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