Nicolas de Montreux

Nicolas de Montreux (c. 1561–1608) 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 (he became his librairian) and participated in the civil wars on 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".

Montreux's vast corpus spans theater, the novel, the pastoral, history, poetry and spiritual reflection and he shows a pronounced preoccupation with moral questions (such as chastity). With Béroalde de Verville, Montreux represents a literature of transition from the Valois court (and the generation of "La Pléiade") 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 (a French adaptation from Italian of the 16th volume of Amadis of Gaul, 1577).

His most famous work is an immense pastoral novel/play the Bergeries de Julliette in five volumes (1585–1598) (inspired by the Diane of Jorge de Montemayor and the pastoral works of Ariosto and Tasso) 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.

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