‘Who are you?’

‘Do you not recognize the most humble of your subjects and most exalted of your poets, my great king? … I am Claudius Vignetus, one of the Pléiade, celebrated author of the sonnet addressed to the billowing seas … Sire, I ask that you punish a traitor, a man who has dragged my honour through the mud, Mellin de Saint-Gelais!’4

‘You mean my favourite poet, my royal librarian?’

‘He has robbed me! He has robbed me of my sonnet! He has taken advantage of your generosity …’

‘Is he truly a plagiarist? … If so, I shall give his position to my dear Spifame, who at the moment is off travelling in the interests of the realm.’

‘Why not give it to me instead, Sire! I shall sing your praises the world over, from Orient to Occident:

O Sire, let my rhymes immortalize your renown! …’

‘You shall receive a pension of a thousand ecus, as well as my old pourpoint, for the one you are wearing is coming apart at the seams.’

‘Sire, it is clear to me that all the sonnets and epistles I have addressed to you have been intercepted by traitors in your court …

This sullen nest of villainy and treachery.’

‘Honourable Claudius Vignetus, you shall henceforth never leave my side; as my minister, you shall cast all my edicts and commands into rhyme to ensure that the memory of them lives on into future times. But we are expecting the visit of our beloved Diane5 at any moment now … Take leave, my friend, so that we may be alone.’

And having dismissed his poet, Spifame fell asleep in his chaise longue, as was his custom an hour after meals.

It took only a few days for the two lunatics to become fast friends: each understood and fostered the other’s way of thinking without ever calling into question their reciprocal identities. For the one, this poet provided the abundant praise that was the fertile soil of kingship, allowing the monarch to grow ever grander in his own esteem. For the other, this unlikely likeness further confirmed that he was indeed in the service of the king himself. Instead of a prison, they inhabited a palace; instead of rags, they wore splendid raiments; ordinary meals became sumptuous banquets where harmonious rhymes wafted through the air to the strains of viol and trumpet.

Spifame was generally quite expansive upon waking from his dreams; Vignet’s volubility usually followed dinner. One day the monarch told his poet of his exasperation with the unruly student population of Paris and outlined his plans for a campaign against Spain. But his most pressing area of concern, as shall be seen shortly, involved the reorganization and beautification of his capital city – whose endless roofs stretched out in the distance beneath the prisoners’ windows.

Vignet had lucid moments when he clearly registered the clank of iron bars slamming shut or the jangle of gaolers’ keys. This led him to suspect that someone was locking up His Majesty every now and then. He informed Spifame of his judicious observations, but the latter mysteriously replied that his ministers were up to no good, that he was fully aware of what they were plotting, and that once his chancellor Spifame had returned things would take a different turn: with the help of his only two friends, Raoul Spifame and Claude Vignet, the king of France would soon be released from captivity to revive the Golden Age sung by the poets.

In response to these revelations, Claude Vignet composed a quatrain which he offered to the king as a sign of his future benediction and glory:

You are the warmth that makes the fields so green,

You give life to the lamb and wings to flying things,

You are the sun that comes with every spring,

You melt the snows and banish winter’s spleen!

But his deliverance being so long in coming, Spifame thought it best to inform his people of the captivity in which his treacherous councillors were holding him. He composed a proclamation urging his loyal subjects to rise up in his favour. He furthermore issued a number of harsh decrees and edicts – or perhaps we should say, he launched them, for it was between the bars of his window that he launched these charters, which were scrolled up and weighted down with pebbles. Unfortunately, some of them fell on the roof of a pigsty, others ended up in the thick grass of a deserted courtyard that lay beneath his window; only one or two of them, buffeted by the winds, managed to alight like birds in the branches of a lime-tree that grew beyond the walls. Nobody even noticed them.

Seeing that all these public proclamations were producing little effect, Claude Vignet came to the conclusion that people were not taking them seriously because they were in handwritten form. So he decided to found a royal printing office that would at once serve to disseminate the king’s edicts as well as his own poems. Given the few resources he had at his disposal, he was forced to revert to the most primitive of typographical inventions. With infinite patience, he managed to carve twenty-five alphabetical wooden blocks with which he spelled out, letter by letter, the royal decrees (which were, of necessity, quite terse). The inking was in turn provided by the soot and oil of his lamp.

Thereafter the various official promulgations and announcements multiplied in a far more satisfactory fashion. A number of these documents, which have been preserved and since reprinted on several occasions, are most curious – especially the decree which states that King Henri II, upon due counsel and fully informed of his good citizenry’s righteous indignation against Paul and Jean Spifame, brothers of his loyal subject of the same name, condemns the two to be drawn and quartered, flayed, and boiled alive. As for Raoul Spifame’s ingrate of a daughter, she was to receive a public flogging and be sent off to the workhouse.

One of the more memorable documents to have come down to us from this period is the one in which Spifame, still irked by the judges’ earlier decision to ban him from the bar on account of his outlandish perorations, issues a royal order to all guards, bailiffs and other employees of the court to allow his friend and loyal subject Raoul Spifame free access to the halls of justice whensoever he wishes; furthermore, all barristers and other such whoresons are forbidden to impede in any fashion whatsoever the flights of his eloquence or the pleasures of his intimate conversation with respect to any matter political or other on which he chooses to express his opinion.

The remaining edicts, decrees and promulgations that have been preserved to this day as having been issued by Henri II deal with matters of justice, finance, war and above all with the local management of the city of Paris.

As for Vignet, he printed a number of epigrams directed against his poetic rivals, whose various positions, benefices and pensions he had managed to have conferred on himself. Having no other company on earth but themselves, the two friends were naturally kept quite busy by their mutual occupations – the one endlessly requesting favours which the other endlessly granted.

IV

The Escape

Having launched a good number of appeals to the loyal citizenry of Paris, the two prisoners were astonished that public sentiment had not been inflamed on their behalf and that they were still waking up in the same straits every day. Spifame attributed their lack of success to the machinations of his ministers, while Vignet ascribed it to Mellin’s and du Bellay’s unflagging rancour. The printing office was closed down for several days while a more serious course of action was considered – perhaps even a coup d’état. Although the two never dreamed of fleeing their prison simply to be free, they finally came up with a plan of escape that would no doubt open the eyes of all the Parisians and encourage them to scorn the Sophonisbe of Saint-Gelais and the Franciade of Ronsard.

They began filing away at the bars of their window. Proceeding patiently, they removed all traces of their progress; their job was all the more easy, given that the guards considered them to be model prisoners, contented with their fate. Once they had finished all their preparations, the printing office was reopened, and various incendiary proclamations, together with brief edicts and commissioned poems, were added to their baggage. Around midnight, after Spifame had addressed a terse but vigorous exhortation to his confidant, the poet attached the king’s bedsheets to one of the remaining bars, slipped down to the ground, and soon thereafter was helping Spifame back to his feet, the latter having fallen into the thick grass about two-thirds of the way through his descent, receiving several contusions in the process. Though it was pitch dark, Vignet quickly recognized the ancient wall that separated them from the open fields. More agile than Spifame, he managed to clamber to the top of it and proffered his leg to His Gracious Majesty, who took advantage of the handhold as he gingerly sought out the protruding stones of the wall with his feet. A minute later, they had crossed the Rubicon.

It was around three in the morning when our two liberated heroes finally reached a densely wooded area, where they thought they might be safe from pursuit; but, in truth, they were not unduly concerned with precautions, convinced that once released from captivity they would immediately be recognized by their subjects and poetic admirers.

None the less, they would have to wait for the gates of Paris to open, which did not take place until five in the morning. The road into town was already filled with peasants bringing their goods to market.