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SEDUCTIVE TOPOGRAPHIES: THE LANGUAGES OF LANDSCAPE IN LA PUCE DE MADAME DES-ROCHES
Romanic Review, May 2004 by Tarte, Kendall
Other poems in La Puce follow Pasquier's model: they present lists in the style of anatomical blasons, depict a siege of the female body, or imagine the transformation of the poet into the flea. Odet de Turnèbe invents a fiction of exploration and conquest that itemizes and describes several body parts.47 He forms a fantasy link, through the character of the flea, between himself and the woman's body. Addressing the flea, the poet remarks on its good fortune to have such beautiful "lodgings," the woman's breasts, which he names three times: the insect has "la grace / De te loger en si beau lieu, / En ce sein le temple d'un Dieu, / Ce sein qui tous les seins surpasse."48 Turnèbe defines the breast as a place-"si beau lieu"-and depicts the flea as its explorer, susceptible to the dangers of such a mission. In the next three stanzas, the poet asks the flea a series of questions-each beginning with "As tu ... "?-that constitute a potential itinerary for discovery of the woman's body:
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The poet interrogates the flea, revealing a narrative of exploration as well as a description in the style of an anatomical blason. Turnèbe inserts these lines within a longer section that describes the flea's movements through various locations on the female body. Unlike the adjacent stanzas, however, these three stanzas are composed of questions. They therefore comprise potential, rather than real, actions imagined by the poet. Through his rhetoric, Turnèbe proposes an exploration of different levels of reality. The typical narration of actions that the poet imagines-here, the flea's residence on the woman's body-comprises one level. Within the fiction of the poem, Turnèbe creates a second fictional layer, made up of actions evoked by questions that the poet asks the flea. Through this interrogation, he invents a possible tour of the woman's body. The imagined exploration of the body thus shifts into another level-the suggestion of an itinerary of movements and their possible consequences. In the world of the poem, this doubly imaginary exploration remains unrealized. However, the description of the flea's likely movements in the resulting stanzas represents a female body. The poem itself thus constitutes a portrait of this body.50
The structure of these lines praising the beloved's body reveals the dangers of conquest to the conqueror. Each question presents a part of the body and the specific damage it could cause; each body part thus shifts from object of admiration to source of danger. Through the imagination of the poet, the flea undertakes a daring and risky conquest of this body. It burrows between the woman's breasts, where it might burn, and it runs like liquid over them. Turnèbe again refers to the breasts three times, this time using three different expressions-"ses mamelles," "ses deux fraises iumelles," and "ses deux bouts aymez."51 The flea then hangs from the woman's hair; it approaches her eyes and kisses her cheek. The poet's interrogation uses active verbs to describe the possible activities of the flea-"[f]ureter," "te couler," "te pendre," "s'hazarder," "approch[er]," "baiser"-and the possible consequences-"te brusler," "reduire en cendre," "t'y prendre & estre enlacée," "[s]'empestre[r]," "sentir une viue ardeur," "[c]onsume[r]." The verbs "fureter" and "couler" introduce the theme of attack, which the following stanzas will develop.52 The description of the hazards to the flea plays on a series of Petrarchist images of fire and entrapment: the risks include being reduced to ashes by the woman's breasts, having one's heart consumed by the cruel flames of the women's cheek, and becoming ensnared in the lady's hair.53 The rhetoric of the dangers of conquest thus provides Turnèbe with a metaphoric structure on which to base his graphic explorations of the female body.
