Marin le Roy, sieur du Parc et de Gomberville (1600 – 14 June 1674) was a French poet and novelist.

He was born at Paris, and at fourteen he produced a volume of poetry. At twenty he wrote a Discours sur l'histoire and at twenty-two a pastoral, La Charité, which is really a novel. The characters, though disguised as shepherds and shepherdesses, represent real people for whose identification the author himself provides a key.

Marin le Roy de Gomberville

This was followed by a more ambitious work, Polexandre (5 vols. 1632–1637). The hero wanders through the world in search of the island home of the princess Alcidiane. It contains much history and geography; the travels of Polexandre extending to such unexpected places as Benin, the Canary Islands, Mexico and the Antilles, and incidentally we learn all that was then known of Mexican history.

Marin le Roy de Gomberville

Cythérée (4 vols.) appeared in 1630–1642, and in 1651 the Jeune Alcidiane, intended to undo any harm the earlier novels may have done, for Gomberville became a Jansenist and spent the last twenty-five years of his life in pious retirement. He was one of the earliest and most energetic members of the Académie française.

Marin le Roy de Gomberville

In 1646, Gomberville published the first edition of his emblem book, La Doctrine des Moeurs ("The Doctrine of Morals") based on Otto van Veen's "Quinti Horatii Flacci Emblemata" [1607]. Later editions appeared in 1681, 1682, 1683, 1684, 1685, and 1688 (all Paris). The illustrations in the first edition, mirror images of van Veen's, were engraved by Pierre Daret.

References

1600 births

1674 deaths

Writers from Paris

French poets

French nobility

17th-century French male writers

17th-century French novelists

Members of the Académie Française

French male poets

French male novelists