Que n'est la mort: mais par expérience Qu'en la baisant, mourir vivre me semble." Of his wife, nothing is known; of his "petits Marotteaux," only one has left any sign behind. This was Michel Marot, who was page to Marguerite of France in 1534. He has left three or four pieces behind him, one of which, the Ode to the Queen of Navarre, begins: "Ma princesse, Ma maistresse, Je suis le fils de Clément." And that is all that is known about Michel. Like many other poets, from Ovid downwards, Marot had a vast opinion of his own reputation. He tells the Dauphin that he is meditating a work, si ma muse s'enflamme, "Qui, malgré temps, malgré fer, malgré flamme, Et malgré mort, fera vivre sans fin Le roi François et son noble dauphin." Certainly, so long as the French language continues to be spoken, Clément Marot will be read, and will tell the ages of the many times he tested the friendship of the good king Francis, and found it sincere. One rises from the perusal of Marot with a feeling somewhat akin to contempt, mixed with liking. He was so continually in scrapes; was so helpless and dependent; was so constantly begging; so perpetually unlucky, and so persistently careless,-that one feels towards him much as one would have felt towards Oliver Goldsmith-"A monstrous clever man, sir; but a child might turn him. And dissipated, I am told." In person, Marot was, like Goldsmith and Moore, of small stature and stout. His portrait, as I have said above, indicates a temperament sensual and easy, with that sort of tournure which agrees with what we are told of the vanity of the man. Let me conclude my notice of Marot with an epigram by Theodore Beza: CLEMENTI MAROTO. Tam docte Venerem divinus pinxit Apelles, Illi ut credatur visa fuisse Venus. At tamtam sapiunt Venerem tua scripta, Maroto, Ut tibi credatur cognita tota Venus. NOTE I. The Twelfth Eclogue of Spenser's Shepherd's Kalendar is, in parts, almost a translation of Marot. For instance, compare the following with the lines in page 254: "Whilome in youth, when flowed my joyfull spring, Like swallows swift I wandered here and there: I went the wasteful woodes and forest wide, How often have I scaled the craggie oke, NOTE II. From the Journal d'un Bourgeois de Paris, 1535. Lundi. 25 Jan. Adjournez à son de trompette à trois briefs jours par les carrefours de Paris, jusques au nombre de soixante trois Lutheriens, qui s'en estoient fuis hors Paris, à comparoir en personnes, et à faulte de non comparoir, estre attains du cas. . . et condamnez à estre broulez. Desquelz appelez estoit Caroli, prestre. . . . maistre Clément Marot. . . . CHAPTER XIII. CLOTILDE DE SURVILLE. In the year 1803 there appeared in Paris a very remarkable collection of poems, said to be of the fifteenth century. The editor, M. Vanderbourg, professed to have received from the widow of an ex-officer of the ancien regime a bundle of Manuscripts which contained the poems, never till then published, of a woman of his family remarkable alike for learning, genius, beauty, and piety. Certainly the published verses sufficiently attested to the genius of the writer. In an illiterate age, these were learned; in a comparatively gross age, these were perfectly pure; in an age of bad taste, these were in good taste; in an age of turmoil, trouble, and disaster, these were quiet and self-contained; and in an age of affectation, these were simple. Moreover, whereas the diction of the known poets of the time-of Alain Chartier and Charles of Orleans-was comparatively obscure, that of the newly found poetess, Madame de Surville, was clear, easy, and graceful. Consider the delight with which we should welcome a poem-of the fifteenth century-as sweet and touching as any in the nineteenth. Consider the glory of finding a writer of the time of Henry the Fifth as easy and as simple as Shakespeare. And then imagine the rapture of the Parisians at finding, in an unknown author of the time of mad Charles the Sixth, all the beauties of their own day, with all the canons of taste (not then laid down) inviolate and perfect. This was what Monsieur Vanderbourg offered them. The first edition was speedily run out, but, alas! before the second had time to appear, it was necessary for the editor to gird on his armour, and sally forth to defend the fair fame of his protégée. This had been attacked. Clotilde de Surville was accused, not of those offences which womankind visit so severely; not of the minor sins which are sometimes forgiven; not of any feminine or even human crimes, delinquencies, or shortcomings, but of the grand, unpardonable offence of never having been. "There is not" said the critics-" there is not, and there never has been, any Madame Clotilde de Surville at all." M. Vanderbourg was equal to the occasion. Perhaps he had anticipated some such attack. He rose in his wrath, and in his next edition, that of 1805, he smote his enemies, hip and thigh, with great slaughter. So he said: they on the other hand, not knowing when they were beaten, replied that there was no slaughter at all; that they had the best of it; that all the arguments of M. Vanderbourg were worthless; and they repeated that, in short, there was no Madame Clotilde de Surville at all, and never had been. Further, that the original genuine Clotilde was nobody but the late Marquis de Surville; and, if it was not he, it was no one but M. Vanderbourg himself. The critics are dead U |