from Louis XIV., is no longer operative but to French official
representatives is still accorded a courteous precedence. The
Maronite population has greatly increased at the expense of the
Druses, and is now obliged to emigrate in considerable numbers.
Increase of wealth and the influence of returned emigrants tend to
soften Maronite character, and the last remnants of the barbarous
state of the community—even the obstinate blood-feud—are
disappearing.
See C. F. Schnurrer, De ecclesia Maronitica (1810); F. J. Bliss in Pal. Expl. Fund Quarterly Statement (1892); and authorities for Druses and Lebanon. (D. G. H.)
MAROONS. A nègre marron is defined by Littré as a fugitive slave who betakes himself to the woods; a similar definition of cimarron (apparently from cima, a mountain top) is given in the Dictionary of the Spanish Academy. The old English form of the word is symaron (see Hawkins’s Voyage, § 68). The term “Maroons” is applied almost as a proper name to the descendants of those negroes in Jamaica who at the first English occupation in the 17th century fled to the mountains. (See Jamaica.)
MAROS-VÁSÁRHELY, a town of Hungary in Transylvania, capital of the county of Maros-Torda, 79 m. E. of Kolozsvár by rail. Pop. (1900), 19,522. It is situated on the left bank of the Maros, and is a well-built town; once the capital of the territory of the Szeklers. On a hill dominating the town stands the old fortress, which contains a beautiful church in Gothic style built about 1446, where in 1571 the diet was held which proclaimed the equality of the Unitarian Church with the Roman Catholic, the Lutheran, and Calvinistic Churches. The Teleki palace contains the Teleki collections, which include a library of 70,000 volumes and several valuable manuscripts (e.g. the Teleki Codex), a collection of old Hungarian poems, and a manuscript of Tacitus, besides a collection of antiquities and another of minerals. Maros-Vásárhely has also an interesting Szekler industrial museum. The trade is chiefly in timber, grain, wine, tobacco, fruit and other products of the neighbourhood. There are manufactures of sugar, spirits and beer.
MAROT, CLÉMENT (1496–1544), 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 more correct name appears to have been des Mares, Marais or Marets, was a Norman of the neighbourhood of Caen. Jean was himself a poet of considerable merit, and held the post of escripvain (apparently uniting the duties of poet laureate and historiographer) to Anne of Brittany. He had however resided in Cahors for a considerable time, and was twice married there, his second wife being the mother of Clément. The boy was “brought into France”—it is his own expression, and is not unnoteworthy as showing the strict sense in which that term was still used at the beginning of the 16th century—in 1506, and he appears to have been educated at the university of Paris, and to have then begun the study of law. But, whereas most other poets have had to cultivate poetry against their father’s will, Jean Marot took great pains to instruct his son in the fashionable forms of verse-making, which indeed required not a little instruction. It was the palmy time of the rhétoriqueurs, poets who combined stilted and pedantic language with an obstinate adherence to the allegorical manner of the 15th century and to the most complicated and artificial forms of the ballade and the rondeau. Clément 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 Crétin, the supposed original of the Raminagrobis of Rabelais, while he translated Virgil’s first eclogue in 1512. Nor did he long continue even a nominal devotion to law. He became page to Nicolas de Neuville, seigneur de Villeroy, and this opened to him the way to court life. Besides this, his father’s interest must have been not inconsiderable, and the house of Valois, which was about to hold the throne of France for the greater part of a century, was devoted to letters.
As early as 1514, before the accession of Francis I., Clément 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’Angoulême, the king’s sister, who was for many years to be the mainstay not only of him but of almost all French men of letters. He was also a great favourite of Francis himself, attended the Field of the Cloth of Gold in 1520, and duly celebrated it in verse. Next year he was at the camp in Flanders, and writes of the horrors of war. It is certain that Marot, like most of Marguerite’s literary court, and perhaps more than most of them, was greatly attracted by her gracious ways, her unfailing kindness, and her admirable intellectual accomplishments, but there is not the slightest ground for thinking that his attachment was other than platonic. It is, however, evident that at this time either sentiment or matured critical judgment effected a great change in his style, a change which was wholly for the better. At the same time he celebrates a certain Diane, whom it has been sought to identify with Diane de Poitiers. There is nothing to support this idea and much against it, for it was an almost invariable habit of the poets of the 16th century, when the mistresses whom they celebrated were flesh and blood at all (which was not always the case), to celebrate them under pseudonyms. In the same year, 1524, Marot accompanied Francis on his disastrous Italian campaign. He was wounded and taken at Pavia, but soon released, and he was back again at Paris by the beginning of 1525. His luck had, however, turned. Marguerite for intellectual reasons, and her brother for political, had hitherto favoured the double movement of Aufklärung, partly humanist, partly Reforming, which distinguished the beginning of the century. Formidable opposition to both forms of innovation, however, now began to be manifested, and Marot, who was at no time particularly prudent, was arrested on a charge of heresy and lodged in the Châtelet, February 1526. But this was only a foretaste of the coming trouble, and a friendly prelate, acting for Marguerite, extricated him from his durance before Easter. The imprisonment gave him occasion to write a vigorous poem on it entitled Enfer, which was afterwards imitated by his luckless friend Étienne Dolet. His father died about this time, and Marot seems to have been appointed to the place which Jean had latterly enjoyed, that of valet de chambre to the king. He was certainly a member of the royal household in 1528 with a stipend of 250 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 Clémentine, a title the characteristic grace of which excuses its slight savour of affectation, the first printed collection of his works, which was very popular and was frequently reprinted with additions. Dolet’s edition of 1538 is believed to be the most authoritative. Unfortunately, however, the poet’s enemies were by no means discouraged by their previous ill-success, and the political situation was very unfavourable to the Reforming party. In 1535 Marot was implicated in the affair of “The Placards,”[1] and this time he was advised or thought it best to fly. He passed through Béarn, and then made his way to Renée, duchess of Ferrara, a supporter of the French reformers as steadfast as her aunt Marguerite, and even more efficacious, because her dominions were out of France. At Ferrara he wrote a good deal, his work there including his celebrated Blasons (a descriptive poem, improved upon medieval models[2]), which set all the verse-writers of France imitating them. But the duchess Renée was not able to persuade her husband, Ercole d’Este, to share her views, and Marot had to quit the city.
- ↑ These “placards” were the work of the extreme Protestants. Pasted up in the principal streets of Paris on the night of the 17th of October 1534, they vilified the Mass and its celebrants, and thus led to a renewal of the religious persecution.
- ↑ The blason was defined by Thomas Sibilet as a perpetual praise or continuous vituperation of its subject. The blasons of Marot’s followers were printed in 1543 with the title of Blasons anatomiques du corps féminin.
