Tu es, belle Angevine,[117] un bel astre des cieux;
Les anges, tous ravis, se paissent de tes yeux,
La terre te regrette, O beauté sans seconde!
Maintenant tu es vive, et je suis mort d'ennui,
Malheureux qui se fie en l'attente d'autrui;
Trois amis m'ont trompé,—toi, l'amour, et le monde.
Ronsard had by this time acquired a reputation which eclipsed that of all his contemporaries. He was caressed and patronised by Charles the Ninth (of hateful memory), who, like Nero, exhibited the revolting combination of a taste for poetry and the fine arts, with the most sanguinary and depraved dispositions. Ronsard, having lost his Marie, was commanded by Catherine de' Medicis to select a mistress from among the ladies of her court, to be the future object of his tuneful homage. He politely left her Majesty to choose for him, prepared to fall in love duly at the royal behest; and Catherine pointed out Helène de Surgeres, one of her maids of honour, as worthy to be the second Laura of a second Petrarch. The docile poet, with zealous obedience, warbled the praises of Helène for the rest of his life. He also consecrated to her a fountain near his château in the Vendomois, which has popularly preserved her name and fame. It is still known as the "Fontaine d'Helène."
Helène was more witty than beautiful, and, though vain of the celebrity she had acquired in the verses of Ronsard, she either disliked him in the character of a lover, or was one of those lofty ladies
Who hate to have their dignity profaned
With any relish of an earthly thought.[118]
She desired the Cardinal du Perron would request Ronsard (in her name) to prefix an epistle to the odes and sonnets addressed to her, assuring the world that this poetical love had been purely Platonic. "Madam," said the Cardinal, "you had better give him leave to prefix your picture."[119]
I presume my fair and gentle readers (I shall have none, I am sure, who are not one or the other, or both,) are as tired as myself of all this affectation, and glad to turn from it to the interest of passion and reality.
"There is not," says Cowley, "so great a lie to be found in any poet, as the vulgar conceit of men, that lying is essential to good poetry." On the contrary, where there is not truth, there is nothing—