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SEDUCTIVE TOPOGRAPHIES: THE LANGUAGES OF LANDSCAPE IN LA PUCE DE MADAME DES-ROCHES
Romanic Review, May 2004 by Tarte, Kendall
Finally, the "colline iumelle" and the presence of the Muse suggest a third, mythological interpretation that connects Parnassus to Catherine. After a comparison of the flea to Apollo in the opening quatrains, the final section of the poem declares that the god-who in mythology typically oversees the activities of the Muses-has disguised himself as a flea. Apollo has fled the noisy masses for an area whose topography recalls the Des Roches' name: "les rocs sourcilleux, / Et les costaux & la montagne."38 As in Couldray's sonnet, the god discovers that Poitiers has replaced Parnassus. The poet describes this realization:
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A rock, described as foreign ("une autre Roche estrange") and Poitevin ("une Roche Poiteuine") replaces Parnassus. This wording, like Lemaire's reference to Lyon as "ung aultre Ilion," highlights the translatif) at work here.40 The associations of the word "[r]oche" identify the Muse's new residence with the poet Catherine Des Roches. The penultimate quatrain links the physical aspects of the mythologized city to the imaginary body of Catherine Des Roches: "Alors droit en Poitou tira; / Et se formant en une Puce, / Sur ce double yuoire vola, / Sur lequel à present se musse."41 With this "double ivory," typical blason imagery evokes the color and shape of Catherine's imagined breast. The image also refers back to the topographical transfer from the "double roche Parnasine" to Poitiers in the preceding quatrain. Again referring both to an imaginary view of Poitiers and Catherine's imagined breast, the poet thus links sexuality and topography.
The metaphor of a topography of the female breast-"double yuoire," "colline iumelle," "tertre jumeau"42-highlights the puce poets' ingenuity and erudition. Contemporary references to the two Des Roches women, the hilly Poitiers landscape, and the female breast blend with their mythical counterpart, Parnassus and the Muses. Whereas the poems considered thus far concentrate on this one part of the female anatomy, others open a panoramic view onto the entire body and present an inventory of the various parts of an imaginary Catherine Des Roches. The descriptive poetic tradition-beginning with medieval poetic lists praising the various parts of one female body and continuing with the sixteenth-century anatomical blasons that describe systematically individual body parts-is an important influence on certain puce poems.43 In these, the lustful flea travels the length of Des Roches's body. The poets pause along with the flea-or as incarnations of the flea itself-to praise each part of her anatomy. Pasquier, for example, whose "Pvce" initiated the contest and set the tone for the rest of the anthology, envies the drunken flea who jumps up and down the female body, "[d]u haut en bas, puis en haut."44 The poet catalogs the body parts as he follows the flea in this movement: "Tu volettes à taton / Sur l'un & l'autre teton: / Puis tout à coup te recelles / Sous l'abri de ses aiselles, / Or panchée sur son flanc / Humes à longs traits son sang;" "Car quand folle tu te ioues / Maintenant dessus ses ioues, / Puis par un nouueau dessein, / Tu furettes en son sein."45 Through the fiction of the flea, the poet imagines that he takes possession of the woman's body. Shifting from the second to the first person, Pasquier describes desired actions using verbs in the conditional: "Pleust or à Dieu que ie pusse / Seulement deuenir Puce: / Tantost ie prendrois mon vol / Tout au plus beau de ton col, / Ou d'une douce rapine / Ie succerois ta poitrine, / Ou lentement pas à pas / Ie me glisserais plus bas."46 The vocabulary of theft-"mon vol," "une douce rapine"-depicts the gentle attack he would wage on Catherine's body.
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