MAROT, CLEMENT French poet, was born at Cahors, the capital of the province of Quercy, some time during the winter of the year 1496-1497. His father, Jean Marot (c. 1463-1523), whose name appears as des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman, a poet of considerable merit, and held the post of escripvain (apparently uniting the duties of poet laureate and historiographer) to Anne of Brittany. Clement ap pears to have been educated at the university of Paris, and to have then begun the study of law. Jean Marot took great pains to instruct his son in the fashionable forms of verse-making, after the complicated rules of the rhetoriqueurs. Clement himself practised with diligence this poetry (which he was to do more than any other man to overthrow), and he has left panegyrics of its coryphaeus Guillaume Cretin, the supposed original of the Ram inagrobis of Rabelais, while he translated Virgil's first eclogue in 1512. He became page to Nicolas de Neuville, seigneur de Villeroy, and this opened to him the way to court life.
As early as 1514, before the accession of Francis I., Clement presented to him his Judgment of Minos, and shortly afterwards he was either styled or styled himself facteur (poet) de la reine to Queen Claude. In 1519 he was attached to the suite of Marguerite d'Angouleme, the king's sister, the great patron of letters. He was also a great favourite of Francis himself, attended the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 152o, and celebrated it in verse.
In 1524, Marot accompanied Francis on his disastrous Italian campaign. He was wounded and taken at Pavia, but soon re leased, and he was back again at Paris by the beginning of 1525. His luck had, however, turned. Marguerite for intellectual rea sons, and her brother for political, had hitherto favoured the double movement of Aufklarung, partly humanist, partly Re forming, which distinguished the beginning of the century. Formidable opposition to both forms of innovation, however, was now manifested, and Marot, who was at no time particularly prudent, was arrested on a charge of heresy and lodged in the Chatelet, February 1526. A friendly prelate, acting for Mar guerite, extricated him before Easter. His imprisonment is de scribed in a vigorous poem entitled Enfer. His father died about this time, and Marot appears to have succeeded to his place of valet de chambre to the king. He was certainly a member of the royal household in 1528 with a stipend of 25o livres, besides which he had inherited property in Quercy. In 1530, probably, he
married. Next year he was again in trouble, not it is said for heresy, but for attempting to rescue a prisoner, and was again delivered ; this time the king and queen of Navarre seem to have bailed him themselves.
In 1532 he published (it had perhaps appeared three years earlier), under the title of Adolescence Clementine, the first printed collection of his works. Of the many editions of this work Dolet's edition of 1538 is believed to be the most authoritative. Unfortunately, Marot was implicated in 1535 in the affair of "The Placards," and this time he was advised or thought it best to fly. He passed through Beam, and then made his way to Renee, duchess of Ferrara. At her court he wrote his celebrated Blasons (a descriptive poem, improved upon mediaeval models), which set all the verse-writers of France imitating them. But the duchess Renee was not able to persuade her husband, Ercole d'Este, to share her sympathy with the Reformers, and Marot had to quit the city. He then went to Venice, but before very long the pope Paul III. remonstrated with Francis I. on the severity with which the Protestants were treated, and they were allowed to return to Paris on condition of recanting their errors. Marot returned with the rest, and abjured his heresy at Lyons. In 1539 Francis gave him a house and grounds in the suburbs.
It was at this time that his famous translations of the psalms appeared. The powerful influence which the book exercised on contemporaries is not denied by anyone. The psalms were sung in court and city, and they materially advanced the cause of the Reformation in France. Indeed, the vernacular prose transla tions of the Scriptures were in that country of little merit or power, and the form of poetry was still preferred to prose. At the same time Marot engaged in a literary quarrel with a bad poet named Sagon, who represented the reactionary Sorbonne. Half the verse-writers of France ranged themselves among the Maro tiques or the Sagontiques. The victory, as far as wit was con cerned, naturally rested with Marot, but probably a certain amount of odium was created against him, which may have had 'These "placards" were the work of the extreme Protestants. Pasted up in the principal streets of Paris on the night of Oct. 17, 1534, they vilified the Mass and its celebrants, and thus led to a renewal of the religious persecution.