Hélène de Surgères(1545 — 1618)

Hélène de Surgères was a maid of honor to Queen Catherine de' Medici when, so the story goes, the queen asked the celebrated poet Pierre de Ronsard to sing the praises of her beauty to console her after the death of her fiancé Jacques de La Rivière, killed during the Wars of Religion. From this commission was born one of the most famous collections in French poetry.

When Ronsard composed his *Sonnets pour Hélène* for her in 1578, the poet was past fifty and nearly deaf, while Hélène was about thirty. Their relationship was above all literary and platonic: Ronsard celebrated a learned muse more than a lover.

The best-known sonnet written for her, “Quand vous serez bien vieille, au soir, à la chandelle” (“When you are very old, at evening, by candlelight”), imagines Hélène as an old woman spinning wool by the fire and remembering that the great Ronsard had once sung her praises. It is the origin of the famous advice “Gather the roses of life today.”

Hélène played on her first name, which recalled Helen of Troy, the most beautiful woman of Greek antiquity. Ronsard relentlessly exploited this comparison, making her a new Helen capable of setting poets ablaze just as the ancient one had inflamed warriors.

Known for being cultivated and a little proud, Hélène enjoyed learned discussions on the Neoplatonic philosophy of love, very much in fashion at the Valois court. Several of Ronsard's sonnets, in fact, complain of her coldness and her demands.