If our life is less than a single day

In eternity, and the year in its turn

Wastes our days, without hope of return,

If everything is born to decay,

Why my captive soul your dreams display?

The news broke on Tuesday 17 September at 3.33 pm. Many French jaws dropped in unison on hearing it. French Renaissance enfant terrible Joachim du Bellay had been identified in one of the two lead sarcophagi dug up during the restoration works of Notre-Dame cathedral in Paris. We knew the celebrated poet had been buried there after his death in 1560 at the age of 37, but last time we checked, in 1758, his tomb had disappeared. It was thought he had been lost forever.

It is now known that his grave had been displaced at some point in the previous two centuries and that nobody had cared to leave a note for the next generations. His coffin had in fact been moved to the epicentre of the cathedral, just under the crossing of the nave and the transept. Notre-Dame being France’s kilometre zero, the point where all roads converge, one can safely argue that Joachim du Bellay is now France’s heart, in eternity.

Archaeologists, scientists, and forensic experts at Toulouse University Hospital shared their findings during a press conference filled with their many discoveries from the five-year-long excavations and searches in and around Notre-Dame since the fire. And they are certain: the skeleton found in one of the two lead coffins is that of a young man in his thirties who suffered from bone tuberculosis and chronic meningitis all his life, just like Bellay. His hip bone also showed the deformation of a keen horseman. Bellay did spend a good deal on the saddle, notably riding from Paris to Rome, where his uncle, Jean du Bellay, diplomat, bishop and cardinal, lived for a few years.

Why should the news make headlines almost 500 years after the poet’s demise? Perhaps because most French children still know some of his poetry by heart. Heureux qui comme Ulysse (Happy, who like Ulysses) is still taught today in France’s primary schools and learnt at an age so tender that the words never leave you. Joachim du Bellay’s friend Pierre de Ronsard is also still taught in primary schools. Mignonne, allons voir si la rose (Sweetheart, let us see if the rose) graces school copybooks next to children’s drawings of roses. It also helps when those poems are regularly taken up by singers such as George Brassens or more recently Franco-Algerian Nadir Khouidri, who, in 2007, enjoyed much success when he adapted Happy, who like Ulysses to music.

Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard were revolutionaries in their own way. They played a central role in giving the French language its lettres de noblesse, thus extricating it from the claws of Latin. In 1549, Joachim du Bellay wrote a manifesto, La Défense et illustration de la langue française, advocating the invention of an elegant and worthy language on par with Latin and Greek, a language that would unify the country and its people. Joachim du Bellay and Pierre de Ronsard thus founded the Pléiade, a 16th-century literary movement, which aimed at elevating the French language and enriching it. To achieve this, French poets decided to follow in the steps of Petrarch and Dante, who did for the Tuscan (and Italian) language what they themselves wished to do for French.

By imitating, or rather ‘digesting’ the works of the Ancients – in particular, Ovid, Pindar, Virgil and Horace – and by innovating and creating new poetic forms and models, Bellay and Ronsard shaped and vivified France’s vernacular language.

Alongside Joachim du Bellay, Notre-Dame’s team of archaeologists also found 700 remnants of the 1230 rood screen that separated the worshippers from the ecclesiastics. Demolished under Louis XIV, this medieval splendour made in wood, displayed bright colours which archaeologists have been able to ‘stabilise.’ Some of those exceptional pieces will be shown to the public at the Cluny Museum, opposite the Sorbonne, from 19 November in the aptly named exhibition ‘Making stones talk: Medieval sculptures of Notre-Dame.’ Just like Joachim du Bellay’s words, still echoing today:

Why for the shadow of our day so burn,

If for flight to a clearer one you yearn,

Graced with wings to help you on your way?

There, is the good, every soul’s desire.

There, the rest to which all men aspire,

There, is the love, there the delight in store.

There, O my soul, in highest heaven clear,

There you may realise the Idea

Of the beauty, that in this world I adore.