One single poet, a third-rate one, Clement Marot, attained lustre under Francis I.

Rabelais is the only great prose writer who belongs strictly to that period.

The scholars, the learned critics of what had been left by antiquity in general and by Greek and Roman antiquity in particular, Bude (Budaeus), J.C.Scaliger; Muretus, Danes (Danesius), Arnyot, Ramus (Peter la Ramee), Robert Estienne (Stephanus), Vatable (Watebled), Cujas, and Turnebius make up the tale of literature specially belonging to and originating in the reign of Francis I., just as the foundation of the College Royal, which became the College de France, is his chief personal claim to renown in the service of science and letters.
Let us return to the poets of the actual reign of Francis I.

The first we encounter speaks thus of himself:-- "I am not rich; that, certes, I confess; But, natheless, well born and nobly bred; I'm read by both the people and noblesse, Throughout the world: 'That's Clement,' it is said.
Men live their span; but I shall ne'er be dead.
And thou--thou hast thy meadow, well, and spring, Wood, field, and castle--all that wealth can bring.
There's just that difference 'twixt thee and me.
But what I am thou couldst not be: the thing Thou art, why, anybody else might be." Now who was this who, with perfect confidence, indulged in such proud language?
Was it a Homer, a Dante, a Corneille, one of those great poetical geniuses whose works can move a whole people, are addressed to all the world, and "will live forever"?
No; it was a poet of the court and of the fashionable world of Paris, of Blois, and of Amboise, in the sixteenth century, a groom-of-the-chamber to Marguerite de Valois, and one of Francis I.'s favorites, who had written elegies, eclogues, epistles, complaints, roundelays, and epigrams on the incidents and for his masters and mistresses of the hour; France owed to him none of those great poetical works consecrated to description of the grand destinies and grand passions of man, and to the future as well as to the writer's own time.
[Illustration: Clement Marot----162] Clemont Marot, the son of a petty burgess of Cahors, named John Marot, himself a poet in a small way, who had lived some time at the court of Louis XII., under the patronage of Queen Anne of Bretagne, had a right to style himself, "well born and nobly bred;" many of the petty burgesses of Cahors were of noble origin, and derived therefrom certain privileges; John Marot, by a frugal and regular life, had acquired and left to his son two estates in the neighborhood of Cahors, where, no doubt, Clement resided but little, for he lived almost constantly at the court, or wandering about Europe, in every place where at one time the fortunes of the king his protector and at another the storm of the nascent religious reform left him stranded willy-nilly.

He was present in 1525 at the battle of Pavia, where he was wounded and taken prisoner with his king, but soon released, since the Imperialists let go on easy terms gentlemen of whom it was impossible to make a rich booty.