Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: May 29, 2025
This remarkable woman was called Clémence Isaure, and the story has grown up that some years after the founding of the Jeux Floraux she left a sum of money in trust which was to serve as a permanent endowment for this most illustrious institution of her native city.
At that time a company of poets, and they were of bourgeois origin and not of the nobility, determined to take vigorous measures to restore the art of the troubadour to its former high position, and to this end they founded the Collège du Gay Sçavoir, which was to support and maintain annually in Toulouse a poetic tournament called Les Jeux Floraux, wherein the prizes were to consist of flowers of gold and silver.
To prove that Clémence Isaure really did exist in Toulouse a tomb was shown which seemed to bear her name; and so strongly rooted is this belief, that her statue is held in reverence, and every year in May, even to this day, when the date for the Jeux Floraux arrives, the first thing on the programme for that solemn occasion is a formal eulogy in honor of this distinguished patroness.
Mistral's name has long been European, and other English writers have charmingly described the Feux Floraux of the olden time and the society of Lou Felibrige with its revival of Provencal literature. But forty years ago, and twenty years before his masterpiece had found a translator here, he was known and highly esteemed by a great Englishman.
Guiraut Riquier, the last of the troubadours, provides examples of this new genre: from the fourteenth century it was the only kind of poem admitted by the school of Toulouse and the Jeux Floraux crowned many poems of this nature. These, however, have little in common with classical troubadour poetry except language.
PIERRE-MARIE-CHARLES DE BERNARD DU GRAIL DE LA VILLETTE, better known by the name of Charles de Bernard, was born in Besancon, February 24, 1804. He came from a very ancient family of the Vivarais, was educated at the college of his native city, and studied for the law in Dijon and at Paris. He was awarded a prize by the 'Jeux floraux' for his dithyrambics, 'Une fete de Neron' in 1829.
The Academie des jeux floraux altered the character of the competition by admitting French poems after 1694. At the end of the sixteenth century, Provençal poetry underwent a revival; in our own time, poets such as Jasmin, Aubanel, Roumanille and above all, Mistral, have raised their language from a patois to a literary power.
He was awarded a prize by the 'Jeux floraux' for his dithyrambics, 'Une fete de Neron' in 1829. This first success in literature did not prevent him aspiring to the Magistrature, when the Revolution of 1830 broke out and induced him to enter politics.
There was the Minerva, decreed him at a conference of the elegant, pedantic "Jeux Floraux," which had proclaimed Pierre de Ronsard "Prince of Poets."
Word Of The Day
Others Looking