X. SAPPHO IN FRENCH LITERATURE[168]
The poetess of passion, perfect in expression, is more akin to French literature than to German, and so it is not surprising to discover Sapphic echoes in every period of the former from that of the erudite and artistic poetry of the Pléiade in the sixteenth century to the present day of Maurice Donnay. In the sixteenth century Louise Labé was composing sonnets which burned like an ode of Sappho, and in 1556 Remy Belleau in his Anacréon published the first French translation of Sappho. Only three years later (1559), another of the Pléiade, Pierre de Ronsard, who turned from his admiration of Homer and Pindar to Horace, Anacreon, and Sappho, gave in the second book of his Amours, a translation of the second ode of Sappho:
Je suis un demy-dieu quand, assis vis-à-vis
De toy, mon cher souci, j’escoute des devis,
Devis entre-rompus d’un gracieux sourire,
Souris qui me retient le coeur emprisonné:
Car, en voyant tes yeux, je me pasme étonné
Et de mes pauvres flancs un seul vent je ne tire.
Ma langue s’engourdit, un petit feu me court