On Reading <i>La Puce de Madame Des-Roches</i>: Catherine des Roches's <i>Responces</i> (1583)

Abstract

Catherine des Roches's authorial participation in the famous poetic flea contest during the Grands Jours of Poitiers in 1579 was all but forgotten a decade and a half after her death when Estienne Pasquier claimed the volume of La Puce de Madame Des-Roches as his own by eliminating her name from the title in his collective work La jeunesse d'Estienne Pasquier (1610). As if sensing such a fate and wishing above all to remind her readers of her literary contribution to the contest, Catherine des Roches published her flea poems as responces in her Secondes oeuvres (1583). This study proposes several possible reasons for her inclusion of these replies in her second volume of collected works.

Creatures of Paper and Confessions of the Flesh: Reading Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches in the 21st Century

“…Anne Larsen has studied these poems in the context of the response genre, looking at them in connection with the male-authored poems, and has offered some possible explanations for the women's choice to reprint their poems: they did so to correct errors, to showcase their own poetic voice and authority as writers, and to situate their poems deliberately outside the conversation on the flea (which was, above all, a conversation on the female body). 10 Dissociating their poems from the reciprocal exchanges of the salon, the Des Roches encourage alternate readings of these works that assert their authorial independence and, in the case of Catherine, foreground the associations among women. 11 Some of these texts push against the typical portraits of Catherine Des Roches, that of her unwavering chastity and refusal of marriage, for example.…”