Works
Montreux's vast corpus spans theater, the novel, the pastoral, history, poetry and spiritual reflection and he shows a pronounced preoccupation with moral questions (such as chastity). With Béroalde de Verville, Montreux represents a literature of transition from the Valois court (and the generation of "La Pléiade") to the Bourbon court of Henry IV and the baroque, and both of these authors attempted to compete with the translation of foreign masterpieces by the creation of original works in French.
Montreux's first work was published at the age of 16 (a French adaptation from Italian of the 16th volume of Amadis of Gaul, 1577).
His most famous work is an immense pastoral novel/play the Bergeries de Julliette in five volumes (1585–1598) (inspired by the Diane of Jorge de Montemayor and the pastoral works of Ariosto and Tasso) which uses a prose frame in which is inserted short stories and short plays in verse. Montreux's work would be the most significant pastoral novel produced in France until L'Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé.
He wrote several long adventure novels which, like Bérolade de Verville's, were inspired by the Hispano-Portuguese chivalric adventure novel (like Amadis of Gaul) and the ancient Greek novel (like the works of Heliodorus of Emesa or Achilles Tatius): Les chastes et delectables Jardins d'Amour semez de divers discours et histoires amoureuses (1594), L’Œuvre de la Chasteté, qui se remarque par les diverses fortunes, adventures et fidelles Amours de Criniton et de Lydie in three volumes (1595-9) et Les Amours de Cleandre et Domiphille (1597).
Montreux is responsible for several plays: four tragedies Tragédie du jeune Cyrus (drawn from Xenophon, 1581), Isabelle (1594), Cléopâtre (1594), Sophonisbe (1601); two comedies La Joyeuse (drawn from Xenophon, 1581) and Joseph le Chaste; 3 pastorals Athlette (1585), Diane (1592) Arimène ou le berger désespéré (1597). He also wrote religious poems, a history of the Ottoman Empire from 1565 to 1606, and a long work of spiritual philosophy L'Homme et ses dignités (1599).
Apart from his Bergeries de Juliette, Nicolas de Montreux was largely forgotten by the end of the 17th century, yet he remains an important precursor to the baroque novel of the first half of the 17th century.
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Famous quotes containing the word works:
“...A shadow now occasionally crossed my simple, sanguine, and life enjoying mind, a notion that I was never really going to accomplish those powerful literary works which would blow a noble trumpet to social generosity and noblesse oblige before the world. What? should I find myself always planning and never achieving ... a richly complicated and yet firmly unified novel?”
—Sarah N. Cleghorn (1876–1959)
“Reason, the prized reality, the Law, is apprehended, now and then, for a serene and profound moment, amidst the hubbub of cares and works which have no direct bearing on it;Mis then lost, for months or years, and again found, for an interval, to be lost again. If we compute it in time, we may, in fifty years, have half a dozen reasonable hours.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“His character as one of the fathers of the English language would alone make his works important, even those which have little poetical merit. He was as simple as Wordsworth in preferring his homely but vigorous Saxon tongue, when it was neglected by the court, and had not yet attained to the dignity of a literature, and rendered a similar service to his country to that which Dante rendered to Italy.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)