La cause de ma joie et de mon désespoir,
Mon âme les compense, et sous les lauriers roses
Etouffe l’ellébore et les soucis moroses.
In 1873 we have a translation by Etienne Prosper Dubois-Gucham, La Grecque Pléiade; in 1878 that of P. L. Courier; in 1882, the verses of de la Roche. About this time J. Richepin published in his undated romance, Grandes Amoureuses, prose translations of several fragments, and in 1889 Paul Lenois made a prose version. In 1884, Alphonse Daudet, after writing a novel on French life and customs as a warning to young men, and picturing a courtesan carried upstairs in the arms of her lover, gave the courtesan and the novel the title of Sapho. Soon afterwards appeared anonymously Madame E. Caro’s Sapho. In 1895 were heard the songs of Pierre Louys, who in Les chansons de Bilitis traduites du Grec pour la première fois[176] transforms Mytilene into a modern Sodom and Sappho into the mistress of a band of hetaerae. He pretends that he is translating Greek poems that were found in excavating the poetess’ grave on Amathus. He even represents them as published by a Doctor Heim of Leipzig. Further to mystify the reader Louys tells of some of the poems that have not been translated and marks restorations in the text, as if these songs had actually been found marred and mutilated and as if the archaeologist had restored the missing words. He even uses, to give a Greek atmosphere, many Greek expressions such as Kypris Philommeïdès. Many of his Greek forms, such as Dzeus, are absurd. Charming as are these Bucoliques en Pamphylie, Élégies à Mitylène, Épigrammes dans l’île de Chypre, they belong rather to pornographic literature, as does his romance called Aphrodite, in which the pseudo-Lesbian idea of two girls marrying one another is to be found. Such bits of perverted Sapphism as appear in many other French writers have no place in the literature of the real Sappho, who can now, after the discovery of all the new papyri, easily be distinguished from the Sappho of romance and legend. Unfortunately the last French translation by Meunier (1911) does not include these recent relics.
One of the latest French imitations of Sappho is by that great reviver of Aristophanes, Maurice Donnay, whose comedies have attracted such large audiences in Europe. In his Lysistrata (Act I, scene II), Donnay makes the pretty Hirondelle as she walks along the shore of the violet sea recite to the accompaniment of the music of the waves the song which divine Sappho composed for the Egyptian courtesan Rhodopis, although we have no evidence for such a song:
Rhodopis, ton amant est comme
Un dieu: son bonheur me courrouce.
Quand je pense que c’est un homme
Pour qui ta voix se fait si douce,
Et que c’est Charaxos, mon frère,