Bernard Bluet d’Arbères

Bernard d'Arbères (1566, Arbère, Duchy of Savoy – July 1606, Paris), also known as Bernard de Bluet d'Arbères and by the self-styled title Count of Permission, was a domestic servant and court jester to Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy. Later in life, he claimed to receive divine visions and became known in Paris as a visionary and seer.

Though illiterate, Bluet dictated a large number of mystical writings. He later sought, without success, to enter the service of Henry IV of France, and died impoverished during a plague outbreak in 1606.

Biography de Bluet was born in 1566 to a poor peasant family in the village of Arbère, Savoy (now part of Divonne-les-Bains in the department of Ain, near the Swiss border). de Bluet worked as a shepherd from an early age and left home at the age of nine to become a wheelwright, later finding employment assembling artillery equipment at a fort in Rumilly.

Of Protestant origin, de Bluet later converted to Catholicism and lived as a hermit for some fifteen years, at times traveling with a small mobile chapel. After his conversion he came to the attention of Charles Emmanuel I, Duke of Savoy, who dressed him as a prince and employed him as both servant and jester.

The poet Agrippa d'Aubigné mentioned Bluet's "flowery style" in his satirical prose work La Confession de Sancy.

Philosopher Michel Foucault discussed de Bluet as part of the early modern "great tradition of the literature of madness", describing his work as "extraordinary, yet completely unreadable".

Nineteenth-century bibliographer Octave Delepierre declared that de Bluet "was to the literary madmen what Adam Billaut was to the worker-poets".

Commemoration In de Bluet's memory, a street in Divonne-les-Bains bears the title he adopted, rue du Comte-de-Permission.