Denis Bjaï, Université d’Orléans
Du Bartas as an Ichthyologist in La Sepmaine
In Day 5 of La Sepmaine, Du Bartas carries on with his inventory of the Creation
by an extensive discourse on fi shes. He not only ascribes the same living creatures
to the sea as to the earth (“[The sea] has even got its man . . . / Its monk, and its
prelate”, 2.43–45), but he also depicts the strange shapes of the fi shes, their odd
features, and their mysterious sympathies and antipathies when he describes the
electrical discharge of the torpedo or the incredible power of the remora to bring a
ship to a complete standstill. Thanks to the contemporary commentaries of Simon
Goulart and Pantalon Thévenin, this study will focus on the way the poet transposes
the rich scientifi c matter, already reexamined by humanism, that he inherited from
the antiquity, so as to write an epic “partly heroic, partly panegyric, partly prophetic
and partly didactic.”