Pierre de Ronsard (1524–85) is widely regarded as the greatest French poet of the renaissance and the leading figure of La Pléiade, the group of humanist writers who sought to enrich the French language by drawing on the models of classical Greece and Rome. Celebrated for his love poetry, odes and sonnets, Ronsard became court poet to the Valois kings and helped establish French as a literary language capable of rivalling Latin and Italian. His reputation has long rested on elegant, highly wrought works such as Les amours, in which love is idealised in the Petrarchan tradition, and on his later political and philosophical verse. And among his youthful writings lies a strikingly different collection – the Livret de folastries (Little Book of Follies), published in 1553 when Ronsard was still in his twenties.
The title itself announces a world of playful licence, for ‘folastrie’ suggests frolics, amorous escapades and mischievous foolery rather than mere folly. Far removed from the lofty sentiments of courtly love, these poems delight in the comic, physical and often unruly realities of desire. Drawing inspiration from Latin poets such as Catullus, Martial and Ovid, as well as the earthy traditions of French farce and popular song, Ronsard abandons idealised heroines in favour of flirtatious lovers, prostitutes, drunken revels, jealous quarrels and unabashed sensuality.
As Ronsard’s career progressed and he assumed the role of royal poet during the turbulent years of the French wars of religion, the youthful exuberance of the Livret de folastries became increasingly at odds with the dignified public image he wished to project. He therefore excluded the collection from later authorised editions of his works, and for centuries it remained one of his least familiar works. Modern scholarship has restored its significance, recognising it not as an embarrassing curiosity but as an essential counterpoint to the more elevated poetry for which Ronsard is best known.
Maillol’s illustrations for Ronsard's Livret de folastries occupy a singular place in his book work – of the fourteen volumes he illustrated between 1907 and 1944, this is the only one for which he worked in etching rather than his more customary woodcut. The plates were in fact executed a decade before publication, between May and October 1927, and sat unpublished with Vollard until this edition finally appeared – Ambroise Vollard’s last, issued only after his death in a 1939 car accident and finished off posthumously by Lucien Vollard and Martin Fabiani, with the final sheets printed as late as May 1940.
The etched line here is unmistakably a sculptor’s, not a painter’s. Figures are built from clean contours rather than incident or gesture, with depth suggested by dense cross-hatching rather than tonal wash. The standing trio of women reads almost as a direct transposition of his Three Graces sculpture into print, down to the frieze-like processional arrangement and the classical calm of the poses. The plates of solitary standing figures carry this same monumental stillness, with downcast gaze, weight settled into the hip, a sandal rendered with the same unhurried attention as the body itself.
The intimate scenes maintain sculptural feeling, with embracing couples rendered with the same rounded, grounded fullness and unhurried classicism as the standing figures. Here desire is treated as form and mass rather than as incident or narrative, the erotic content subordinated to the same sculptural calm that governs much of Maillol’s work.
Set alongside Jean Berque’s later colour-etched edition of the same text which you can see here, the contrast in temperament is instructive – where Berque works in loose, painterly wash and a confident calligraphic line, Maillol gives the same playful Ronsard text a gravity and physical weight.
The Maillol-illustrated Livret de folastries was published by Éditions Ambroise Vollard in a limited, numbered and boxed edition of 260 copies.
