Louise Labé, poet victim of a facial check

In the world of letters, fights are done with speckled foils, so they last a long time. One has opposed two camps for fifteen years: those who support – as we have always thought – that existed in the 16^e century a writer named Louise Labé; and those who – more recently – thought they saw in what her contemporaries nicknamed “la Belle Cordière” a mystification, the construction of a few male poets. Luckily for everyone, a new edition has just been released that could put an end to this war of the sexes playing out in our libraries.

Let’s rewind. At the end of the summer of 1555, a small book entitled “Works of Louise Labé Lyonnaise” appeared in Lyon. It contains an epistle, a dialogue in prose, three elegies, twenty-four sonnets by the author and twenty-four by authors who braid her laurels. It is first the dialogue which knows the success (it is even translated into English in 1584). After a slump in the 17th^e century, it was the turn of the versified part to circulate, until the work was almost reduced to a few of the sonnets signed by Louise Labé, which ended up, by way of consecration, by entering the program in 2005. national competitions.

And here is how, today, every French high school student comes across these four verses at least once in their career: “I live, I die: I burn myself and drown myself / I am extremely hot while enduring cold / Life is both too soft and too hard for me / I have great troubles mixed with joy