A History of Reading

by Alberto Manguel

dozen sonnets for which she is remembered. The collection, presented to another Lyonnaise woman of letters, Mademoiselle Clémence de Bourges, carries an illuminating dedication: “The past,” Labé writes there, “gives us pleasure and is of more service than the present; but the delight of what we once felt is dimly lost, never to return, and its memory is as distressing as the events themselves were then delectable. The other voluptuous senses are so strong that whatever memory returns to us it cannot restore our previous disposition, and however strong the images we impress in our minds, we still know that they are but shadows of the past misusing us and deceiving us. But when we happen to put our thoughts in writing, how easily, later on, does our mind race through an infinity of events, incessantly alive, so that when a long time afterwards we take up those written pages we can return to the same place and to the same disposition in which we once found ourselves.”7 For Louise Labé, the reader’s ability is to re-create the past.