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SEDUCTIVE TOPOGRAPHIES: THE LANGUAGES OF LANDSCAPE IN LA PUCE DE MADAME DES-ROCHES
Romanic Review, May 2004 by Tarte, Kendall
In this map based on rocks, Binet plays on the associations of Catherine Des Roches's name. He includes only two places; for both he can make clever references to rocks. The name of the port city to the southwest of Poitiers, La Rochelle, contains the sound "roche." Located just outside Poitiers, Lusignan housed the "Roc Melusin," the castle that according to popular legend was constructed by the medieval character Mélusine. The quatrains set up the comparison between the fused Des Roches-Poitiers and these two regional sites, depicting all three as resisters to outside forces. During earlier years of the Wars of Religion, the Protestant city of La Rochelle withstood a long and bloody Catholic siege, and the Duc de Montpensier's troops destroyed the castle of Lusignan after the Protestant army had occupied it. The religious conflicts in this difficult region also affected Poitiers, which most notably had resisted a Protestant siege by Gaspard de Coligny and his troops in 1569. In the sonnet, the personified Poitiers rock-"au pays Poiteuin / Vne autre Roche"-defies love, also personified: "Amour," "un Roy diuin." Whereas by 1579 La Rochelle was no longer in direct conflict with the Catholic king and Lusignan was in ruins, Binet's allegorical "Roche" remains defiant to Love.60
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This "rock" becomes the site of a conquest-one that is both topographical and sexual-in the sonnet's tercets. Amour's success depends on the familiar transformation: his metamorphosis into a flea allows him to take on the twin tower of the fortress-"le fort de vostre tour iumelle." The line that describes the result of the flea's attempted siege invites multiple readings: "Mais il fut découuert par maints doctes esprits." In each case, the expression "maints doctes esprits"-a great many learned minds-designates the puce poets. Binet stresses that these men are authors. Besides being learned, they are "les enfans des Dieux": children of the Gods like the Muses, they are linked to these figures of inspiration and, thus, are poets. Their discovery-the referent of the pronoun "il"-is ambiguous, however: it may designate the fortress-"le fort"-or the spy disguised as a flea-"un espion." In one reading, "le fort de vostre tour iumelle" refers to the mother-daughter pair through an architectural metaphor of a double tower that recalls the topographical allusion to a double mountain. The poet thus congratulates himself and the other Grands Jours participants for having "discovered" these poets, the Dames Des Roches. Another reading draws on traditional representations of the city, which link the urban space-a fortified, walled city-to the female. Binet identifies the woman's body as architecture, blurring the line between this physical landmark and the breasts. Within this metaphor, violation of the city walls constitutes a violation of the city's chastity; a city under siege is therefore analogous to a woman who protects and defends her chastity.61 In Binet's fiction, this body-fortress belonging to an imaginary Catherine Des Roches was twice discovered: it was besieged by Amour in the poem, and uncovered and displayed in the blasons of the anthology. Binet plays with the associations of the word "maints," which means "many," but is also a homonym of "mains," meaning "hands." This wordplay suggests the physical aspect of the bodyfortress, as it is besieged by hands. In the anthology, the puce poets lay bare the female body and expose the topography of Poitiers; in this sonnet Binet depicts their uncovering of the Poitiers fortress that is both a walled city and a woman's body. In an alternate interpretation, Amour, disguised as the flea, poses the sole threat to this body. The poets discover the transformed spy-"un espion"-and prevent its attack of the body-fortress, Catherine Des Roches. The Grands Jours participants thus preserve Catherine's chastity through the fictions of their poems, including this one.
