Explore "Clement Marot" by Hilaire Belloc on Textopian. Read with annotations and highlights.
If in Charles of Orleans the first note of the French Renaissance is heard, if in Villon you find first its energy appearing above ground, yet both are forerunners only.
With Marot one is in the full tide of the movement. The discovery of America had preceded his birth by three or perhaps four years. His early manhood was filled with all that ferment, all that enormous branching out of human life, which was connected with the expansion of Spain; he was in the midst of the scarlet and the gold. A man just of age when Luther was first condemned, living his active manhood through the experience of the great battlefields in Italy, wounded (a valet rather than a soldier) at Pavia, the perpetual chorus of Francis I., privileged to witness the first stroke of the pickaxe against the mediaeval Louvre, and to see the first Italian dignity of the great stone houses on the Loire -- being all this, the Renaissance was the stuff on which his life was worked.