‘C’est que la feuille tombe et que la flamme baisse,
Qu’aux roses sur nos fronts succède le linceul,
Que notre cœur s’attache et qu’après il delaisse,
C’est que l’on était deux et que l’on reste seul.
‘Qui de nous, du passé refaisant le voyage,
Ne voit en souvenir, à travers le chemin,
Quelque désert fleuri, quelque paisible ombrage.
Ou le bonheur s’assit auprès du pélerin.
‘Au désert de la vie, oasis fortunées,
Deux souvenirs épars dans l’ombre de nos jours,
Astres qui vont baissant au déclin des années,
Mais dont l’éclat lointain nous enchante toujours.’
NERNIER, HTE. SAVOIE
Another notable man—more notable as a man than a poet—was Petit-Senn, who lived to a patriarchal age and was a member of all the literary groups in succession. He is sometimes spoken of as a Genevan Voltaire; and he resembled Voltaire in living a little way out of the town, yet in touch with its intellectual life, and receiving the homage of a constant stream of admiring pilgrims; but he is even better entitled to be styled the Genevan Mæcænas. Possessed of something more than a modest competence, he opened his purse freely to the poorer poets, not only relieving their necessities, but paying for the publication of their works. His ‘Miliciade’—a satire on the amateurishness of the Genevan army—had an immense success when he gave a reading of it in a concert-hall; and his ‘Bluettes et Boutades’ are short sentences generally worthy of being ranked with epigrams. We may cull a few of them:
‘In the eyes of the world, however one may have made one’s money, one has done better than if one had lost it.
‘The egoist weeps over the story of a shipwreck at the reflection that he might himself have been on board.
‘We are more ready to do justice to the dead than to the absent.
‘Some of the sins of youth are so agreeable that age repents of them only in order to have an excuse for recalling them.
‘When a friend asks you for money, consider which of the two you would rather lose.
‘The most lucrative kind of commerce would be to buy men at their real value, and sell them at their own valuation.
‘If hypocrisy were to die, modesty would, at least, have to go into half-mourning.
‘Let us respect white hairs ... especially our own.’
Petit-Senn and Etienne Gide were the poets who remained in their city. It is characteristic of Genevan literary history that the others sought their fortune abroad. Trop grand poisson pour notre petit lac was presumably their motto, though they were not fish who cut any very striking figure in the lakes to which they repaired. Charles Didier was the one of them who succeeded best. He took long walking tours in Italy, glorified the carbonari, pictured the meetings of their secret societies in the style of ‘The Mysteries of Udolpho,’ and ultimately acquired something of a literary position in Paris, where he was numbered among the friends of George Sand. Imbert Galloix also went to Paris, but fell into destitution there. Nodier helped him. ‘I send you,’ he wrote, ‘the half of what I have in the house. It is the first time that I blush for my poverty.’ Petit-Senn also sent him money, for which he appealed in a very pathetic letter; but he died—a pitiful figure, reminding one of Chatterton—at the age of twenty-one. Others of the company were Henri Blanvalet, who for twenty years was private tutor to the Frankfort Rothschilds—truly a sorry position for a poet; and André Verre, who went to Russia to teach in a girls’ school, and ultimately edited a newspaper in Buenos Ayres. None of them count. They were merely echoes of the louder voices heard in the French cénacle.