Affter the Frenchs he dyde yt ryme.'
Curiously enough, he does not do so; a blank space was left in the MS.
for the scribe to copy it out, but it was never filled in[[251]]. However, it places the genuineness of the poem beyond doubt; and the internal evidence confirms it; though it was probably, as was said, quite an early work.
In order to illustrate the poem fully, I print beneath it the French original, which I copy from the print of it in Furnivall's One-text Print of Chaucer's Minor Poems, Part I. p. 84.
It is taken from Guillaume De Deguilleville's Pèlerinage de l'Ame, Part I, Le Pèlerinage de la Vie humaine. Edited from the MS. 1645, Fonds Français, in the National Library, Paris (A), and collated with the MSS. 1649 (B), 376 (C), and 377 (D), in the same collection, by Paul Meyer. I omit, however, the collations; the reader only wants a good text.
Chaucer did not translate the last two stanzas. I therefore give them here.
'Ethiques[[252]] s'avoie leü,
Tout recordé et tout sceü,
Et après riens n'en ouvrasse
280