Nicolas de Montreux was a French nobleman, novelist, poet, translator and dramatist. Born in Sablé-sur-Sarthe, in the province of Maine, he was the son of a maître des requêtes and may have become a priest around 1585. In 1591 he came under the protection of the Duke of Mercœur and participated in the civil warson the side of the Ligue, until he was imprisoned. Upon his release, he joined the court of Henry IV of France. Montreux signed many of his works with the anagram "Ollénix du Mont Sacré".
Works
Montreux's vast corpus spans theater, the novel, the pastoral, history, poetry and spiritual reflection and he shows a pronounced preoccupation with moral questions. With Béroalde de Verville, Montreux represents a literature of transition from the Valois court to the Bourbon court of Henry IV and the baroque, and both of these authors attempted to compete with the translation of foreign masterpieces by the creation of original works in French. Montreux's first work was published at the age of 16. His most famous work is an immense pastoral novel/play the Bergeries de Julliette in five volumes which uses a prose frame in which is inserted short stories and short plays in verse. Montreux's work would be the most significant pastoral novel produced in France until L'Astrée by Honoré d'Urfé. He wrote several long adventure novels which, like Bérolade de Verville's, were inspired by the Hispano-Portuguese chivalric adventure novel and the ancient Greek novel : Les chastes et delectables Jardins d'Amour semez de divers discours et histoires amoureuses, L’Œuvre de la Chasteté, qui se remarque par les diverses fortunes, adventures et fidelles Amours de Criniton et de Lydie in three volumes et Les Amours de Cleandre et Domiphille. Montreux is responsible for several plays: four tragedies Tragédie du jeune Cyrus, Isabelle, Cléopâtre, Sophonisbe ; two comediesLa Joyeuse and Joseph le Chaste; 3 pastorals Athlette, DianeArimène ou le berger désespéré. He also wrote religious poems, a history of the Ottoman Empire from 1565 to 1606, and a long work of spiritual philosophyL'Homme et ses dignités. Apart from his Bergeries de Juliette, Nicolas de Montreux was largely forgotten by the end of the 17th century, yet he remains an important precursor to the baroque novel of the first half of the 17th century.
