DU BARTAS, dü bār"tā', GUILLAUME DE SALLUSTE, SEIGNEUR: French Protestant; b. at Montfort, near Auch (42 m. w. of Toulouse), 1544; d. in Paris July, 1590. He served in the Huguenot army under Henry of Navarre and undertook diplomatic missions to Denmark, Scotland, and England. His death was caused by a wound received at the battle of Ivry. As a poet he enjoyed great popularity in the sixteenth century, being regarded by the Protestants as the superior of the famous Ronsard. His poetry has been praised by no less a critic than Goethe. His masterpiece, La Semaine ou la création du monde, was published in 1578. In six years it passed through thirty editions and was translated into almost every European language (Eng. transl. by J. Sylvester, in Du Bartas, his Divine Weekes and Workes, London, 1641). In 1584 he published La Seconde semaine, an epic embodying a large part of the history of the Old Testament. The first collected edition of his works appeared in 1611 (2 vols.).

 

Bibliography: C. A. Sainte-Beuve, Tableau . . . de la poésie française au XV le siècle, 2 vols., Paris, 1838; P. Sayous, Études sur les écrivains de la Réformation, ib. 1841; E. and É. Haag, La France protestante, ed. H. L. Bordier, Paris, 1877-86; Lichtenberger, ESR, iv. 112-114, Paris, 1878; H. M. Baird, Huguenots and Henry of Navarre, i. 175, New York, 1886.