Le voeu de la vengeance est un voeu légitime,
Fais que de ton appui je sois fortifié;
Ta justice t'en prie, et les auteurs du crime
Sont fils de ces bourreaux qui t'ont crucifié.
EXTRACTS FROM THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."
These stanzas, which are among the best-known as they are, in the opinion of many, the dullest, in French literature, serve well to close this book.
One verse at least (the fourth) is most legitimately famous, though it is hackneyed from the constant repetition of fools. For the rest a certain simplicity, a great precision, may or may not atone for their deliberate coldness.
What is certain is that, poetry or not, they admirably express the spirit of his pen and its prodigious effect. They express the classical end of the French Renaissance with as much weight and hardness as the great blank walls of stone that were beginning to show in the rebuilding of Paris. It is for this quality that I have printed them here, using them as the definite term of that long, glorious, and uncertain phase in European letters.
THE "CONSOLATION OF DU PERRIER."