Jacques de la Palice died in the
battle of Pavia (1525), while fighting against the
Spanish armies as a
Marshal under
Francis I. The
epitaph on his
tombstone reads ''Ci-gît le Seigneur de La Palice: S’il n'était pas mort, il ferait encore envie.'' ("Here lies Sir de la Palice: If he weren't dead, he would be still envied.") Some sources claim that the last two verses came from a song that his soldiers composed in his honor, which would have said something along these lines Apparently the last verse was misread, intentionally or accidentally, as
il serait encore en vie ("he would be still alive"). The misreading was due perhaps to the similarity between the letter f and the
long s, ſ. In any case, not many years after the battle (which was a resounding fiasco for the French), a satirical song became widely popular in France, which began like this: La Palice is not mentioned again in the song. Between the 16th and the 18th century, the first stanza of this song evolved and multiplied into a great many humorous quatrains, which attributed to Jacques several other similar feats, like his custom to always go in person when eating at his neighbors. An often-quoted example is The song was a success at the time, but was then forgotten until its rediscovery in the 19th century by
Edmond de Goncourt. Edmond is also credited with coining the French
noun lapalissade. The word was eventually borrowed into
Italian as
lapalissiano (
adj.), and into
Portuguese as
lapaliçada (n.). However, some sources have a different version: they claim that, somewhere between the 18th and 19th centuries, an unrelated song — originally a parody of the
Chanson de Roland — was rewritten to refer to La Palice. == The de la Monnoye version ==