ABSTRACT
When in 1553 Joachim Du Bellay accompanied his uncle, Cardinal Jean Du Bellay, to Rome, their diplomatic mission was also, for Joachim, a poetic one. He was in search of the ancient models that would provide the source of a new French poetry, the task he had laid out in the Deffence, et Illustration de la Langue Franoyse. Precisely what Du Bellay found in Rome and what he tried to bring of it to French poetry have been widely debated in criticism, which for most of the twentieth century held that the Regrets constitutes an obviously superior work. In lamenting the ruins of Rome, then, Du Bellay is able to form the tie with Rome's greatness that is necessary to the production of French greatness in the present and for the future. In the third sonnet, the emptiness of present-day Rome is illustrated through the disparity between two dramatically different significations of the name Rome.
