Quelle voix choisir? L’art de l’octonaire et deux poètes protestants: Antoine de la Roche Chandieu et Joseph Du Chesne

Before the fascination for vanity in painting, it existed, in late Renaissance France, a fascination for poetic vanities written by both Catholic and Protestant writers. However, the octonaire – an epigrammatic poem of eight verses that describes the vanity and inconstancy of the world – was invented by Protestant poets. Their poetry had to obey the rhetorical, literary and spiritual imperatives that were to incite the readers to hate the world and seek God. This article compares the book of poems of Antoine de la Roche Chandieu and the one of Joseph Du Chesne to highlight the differences between the two. These differences seem to reflect the tensions in Protestant poetics: between the simplicity of the biblical word and the splendor of the literary tradition.