Jean de La Gessée
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La Gessée was secretary to the Duke of Alençon.[1]
Judgments
From the seventeenth to the nineteenth century, literary historians generally had little regard for La Gessée's poetic talent. Charles Lenient said of the ode-satire genre that La Gessée invented: “This rigmarole […] went to join […] the chimeras of which the 16th century was the cradle and the tomb.”[2] Robert Sabatier judged La Gessée “prosaic and conventional” but conceded that, sometimes, he “surprisingly astonishes by the boldness of his finds.”[3] Guy Demerson, in the Introduction to his reissue of La Gessée's Jeunesses, expressed the wish that these works be read "without the prejudices of a gaze obscured by the critical tradition".[4]
