and contains many lines which still form part of the common talk of France.
Gay, fluent, contemptuous—written scornfully in a colloquialism which, in that day of set and formal phrases, was in itself an insult—Pompignan, like Maupertuis, was stifled with badinage, and laughed—to death.
Though all the wit of the thing, and more than half its significance, are lost in a translation, even in a translation some idea of the sufferings of that wretched provincial Marquis may be gained still.
The Universe, my friend, thinks of you not at all:
The future less. Look to your house and diet:
Drink: sleep: amuse yourself: be wise: be quiet.
[388] . . . . . . . . . .
Oh, but my beautiful Discourse, they laugh at it!
The malice of their vulgar gibes hurts so,
That, sure of justice, to the King I’ll go.
. . . . . . . . . .
He’ll make it law to find my writing good
I’ll tell him of it all without delay
And get the laugher’s licence ta’en away.
The poem ends with lines which, as Voltaire wrote them, stabbed straight to the enemy’s heart:
Ruined great Alexander’s tomb and town:
And for great Cæsar’s shade no home there be,
Yet Pompignan thinks a great man is he.
He thought so no longer. “Vanity” was his deathblow. The very Dauphin laughed at it. The Marquis went home to his province, and never again dared to appear at the Academy.
In 1769, when his play, “Dido,” was acted in Paris, the Comédie Française announced quite innocently that it would be followed by “The Coxcomb Punished” of Pont-de-Veyle. Everything was against poor Pompignan. He died in 1784. The turn of his priestly brother, Aaron, was yet to come.
If Pompignan had been nothing but a self-satisfied nobleman who over-estimated his own talents and under-estimated those of the philosophers and the Academicians, he would certainly not have deserved the fury of ridicule with which he was assailed, and the laugh would have turned against the laughers.
But this was no harmless fool. It may have been a small thing that, as Voltaire wrote, “if Le Franc had not been covered with ridicule, the custom of declaiming against the philosophers in the opening discourse of the Academy would have become a rule.” But it would have been no small thing that a Pompignan should be tutor to the Dauphin’s sons; should teach the boy who was to rule France a narrow hatred for the light and learning which alone could save it; and preach the principles of l’infâme to the susceptible youth who would one day practise them to the ruin of a great kingdom.