Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches

Madeleine Neveu (b. c. 1520–d. 1587) and Catherine Fradonnet (b. 1542–d. 1587), the mother-daughter pair known as the “Dames Des Roches,” were prolific writers and the celebrated hosts of a humanist salon in their hometown of Poitiers, France. Catherine was the only surviving child of Madeleine, who took responsibility for her daughter’s education. Catherine famously refused to marry, and the two lived on their own after the death of Madeleine’s second husband in 1578. That same year they published their first collection of poetry and prose, Les Œuvres de Mes-Dames Des Roches. Their use of a surname based on landholdings, rather than the name of a husband or father, gave the women a means to affirm their mother-daughter bond on the title pages of their works. The name “Des Roches” (“of the rocks”) also offered rich topographical associations that the two women and their contemporaries exploited in their writings. By the time special court sessions, the Grands Jours, brought Parisian legists to Poitiers in 1579, the Des Roches were well known. Étienne Pasquier’s visit, and his conversation with Catherine during which he claimed to see a flea on her breast, led to a salon game in which many male participants wrote jocular verse in the blason tradition. Catherine’s flea poem is a nimble refutation of the corporeal, often bawdy subtext of the male-authored poems. The collected texts—primarily in French and Latin—were published as La Puce de Madame Des-Roches in 1582–1583. Madeleine and Catherine Des Roches jointly published two more collections, Les Secondes œuvres (1583) and Les Missives (1586). Their first and third collections were published by Abel L’Angelier in Paris, an association that brought their works to a wider audience. The Des Roches treat themes common to Renaissance women’s writing, such as female education and the life of the mind, and they address poems to their salon contemporaries and to members of the French court. Madeleine’s poetry bears witness to her personal difficulties; she also engages with local events of the Wars of Religion. Catherine’s writing is more abundant and varied; it includes poetry, prose dialogues, and verse translations and adaptations of classical and biblical texts. The Des Roches were the first French women to publish their private letters. Their contemporaries often remarked on the strong bond between the mother and daughter, and eulogized them after their death of the plague in 1587—which apparently occurred, appropriately and poetically, on the same day.