“Le Tombeau de Fleurie, pour Niré”: The poetic celebration of the death of Marie de Clèves (1574)

The passing of Marie de Clèves shook the royal court because Henri III venerated her like a nearly divine figure. Solicited or reacting spontaneously, poets composed a plethora of verses to celebrate the tragic passion of Niré (Henri) and Fleurie (Marie). This study recalls the circumstances surrounding Marie’s death, analyzes the discursive motifs and patterns displayed by the corpus, and examines the strategy poets used to organize their texts according to a poetics of the collection.