Pierre de Saint-Louis, born Pierre Barthélemy, was born in Vauréas and eagerly learned reading and writing--among other skills, like the designing of anagrams--from a young age. He fell in love with a young woman named Madeleine, but she died shortly before they were to be engaged. Heart-broken, Pierre decided to forsake the world, and, because his love had given him a scapular shortly before she died, he entered the Carmelites. He resumed studies, became a professor of literary arts (belle-lettres) at Saint-Marcellin, and lived in many Carmelite houses, eventually dying in at the convent of Pineti, in the Alps. He was also an aspiring poet, having some of his works printed during his life-time. His two most famous works are epics, one on St. Elijah, traditional founder of the Carmelite order, named the Eliade, and another about St. Mary Magdalene, named the Magdaléïde. (Some see this choice of subject matter derived from his early love, Madeleine.)
The following poem is a selection from the Magdaléïde . The poem is often ridiculed for its style and extravagant metaphors, but some beauty can be found in it, despite the fabulously florid writing. The story of the poem is based on a French legend about St. Mary Magdalene: after persecutions expelled her from the Holy Land, she travelled to a mountainous region of France near Marseille, called Sainte-Baume, "Holy Cave," after the cave she is said to have lived in. This selection is from Book II, where Mary is kneeling before a crucifix and realizing the extent of her sins while gazing at Christ's face. I strove to emulate the constant rhyming couplets of the original, to properly reflect de Saint-Louis' style.
In this portrait sans mask, where all could be seen, she saw what she was, and what she could be, and always regarding that Head so trespassed, she saw her own future in that present past, although the bruised trunk of that afflicted Head had no more in its tomb than rest in a bed, though she once had the vesture, the majesty, the grace and attractions of a rare beauty, and although she once had been possibly crowned, with chaplet of flowers or roses around, when a thousand adorers, by her eyes embraced were found taken captive by her locks enlaced. This is what Mary did, to contemplate mental, in that hole which served her for prayer-room and temple thus thinking on what she had once been in vice, she made in that corner petite paradise, receiving from heaven celestial dew, like the mother-pearl, exposed to sun’s view. Or, though she had death always before her eyes, her spirit in heaven yet lives and yet flies. That visage so changed makes her change her face, and her snow is melted before that sweet gaze, her eyes like alembics which pour night and day to distill rose water in her love’s fierce blaze, whose sweet odor spreading through all of her Baume, like incense, it fills it, perfume and balsam, and like the dew poured forth at each morning-time makes tears in the night, gushing forth on the thyme, when at day’s vermillion, she weeps His absence, desires His return, and seeks for His presence, the same Magdalene in that obscurity (Thinking His sun hides its soft clarity And for a short time deprives her of His charms) Bedews without ceasing the earth with tear-drops, Then, having her eyes in that water all fixed, She’s melted and mixed below the crucifix.
Source: Pierre de S. Louis, La Madelaine au desert de la Sainte Baume en Provence: poëme spirituel et chretien (Lyon: Jean-Baptiste & Nicholas de-Ville, 1700), 17-18.
Introduction Source: Louis-Gabriel Michaud, Biographie universelle ancienn et moderne..., Nouevelle édition, Tome XXXIII (Paris: Madame C. Desplaces and Leipzig: F.A. Brockhaus, 1843), 281-282.