The distinguished Ronsard scholar François Rouget has produced an edition of a 1579 manuscript uncovered in the National Library of Russia (St. Petersburg, Fr. F. XV. 11). Philippe Desportes’s previously unpublished Phraséologie oratoire was written for Henri III, in part as a nationalist project to bolster the prestige of French eloquence. The manuscript is a significant find and its publication a useful undertaking (no doubt the rich holdings of Russian libraries conceal other such treasures). The editor, who teaches in Canada, benefits from a network of researchers on early modern rhetoric working in that country.

Desportes’s manuscript arises from the intellectual context of the Palace Academy of the late 1570s. It exemplifies the moral and metaphysical structuring accomplished by commonplace books and constitutes as well a valuable addition to our understanding of eloquence at court in the early years of Henri III’s reign. The work is organized under twelve rubrics and is similar in conception to a slightly older work by Pontus de Tyard, the Modèles de phrases. Rouget’s edition is augmented by a series of twenty-eight love letters composed by Desportes, not printed since the seventeenth century (and at that time misattributed). The volume thus echoes the structure of Lapp’s 1967 edition of Tyard’s Modèles.

Rouget’s edition is a meticulously edited portable library of sententious wisdom, often of a Neo-Stoic character, borrowed from both classical and modern authors, and, in particular, not infrequently from Seneca and Plutarch. The twelve sections begin with lists of synonyms (see, for example, the synonyms for praise [184]; no synonyms are given for refusal [313]). The ensuing bits of moral advice are sometimes expressed in elegant, chiseled phrases — “Le pauvre demande tacitement quand il donne au riche” (“A poor man asks, tacitly, for something when he gives to a rich one” [74]) — approaching the pithy economy of a La Rochefoucauld. There are occasional repetitions, and it is intriguing to see the rubrics bleeding into each other (see, for example, the heading on 68). By contrast, the short collection of love letters provides an illustration of savvy rhetorical galanterie: it functions, if not quite as an epistolary protonovel (the detail is not fine-grained enough, the content too general), certainly as a bare outline of amorous misfortune.

The edition, prefaced by a lucid introduction, is very clear. The text is reproduced carefully in its original layout, with barred words indicated. There are very few typographical errors (the text of the first of the love letters [351] is a notable exception). The careful mirroring of page layout will make this volume useful both for research and teaching, as will the reproductions of manuscript pages (340–47). There are occasional glitches, no doubt inevitable these days given publishers’ parsimony. It is odd to be told that there are twelve subdivisions to Desportes’s manuscript (29) and then that there are eleven (30), or indeed that the order of the sections is both the same and not the same as that chosen by Pontus de Tyard for his own compendium (“l’ordre est le même. . . . Si l’ordre est légèrement changé” [30]). It is perhaps regrettable that the bibliography is so overwhelmingly slanted to French-language sources: three of the seventy-seven secondary sources are in a language other than French; classic English and German works are cited in French translation, for example Curtius, Yates, Moss. Yet the introduction relies extensively on sources from outside of the French-speaking world (Sealy, Moss, Blair). This reviewer would have appreciated page numbers corresponding to the rubrics and subrubrics listed by Desportes (45–47). Perhaps it is the parti pris of this series from Classiques Garnier to address itself primarily to French speakers (they are admittedly likely to make up the lion’s share of readers), but it seems a shame to destine this edition to a presumptively monolingual audience, instead of to the broader contemporary republic of letters. Nevertheless, the edition will be of considerable interest to anyone working on early modern rhetoric and in particular love discourse.