“I would rather finish it by moonlight,” I answered, looking into her eyes.
“You are a saucy stripling,” she said. “I should not be surprised if you wrote these lines I just found on yonder tree.”
“What lines?” I asked; for the trees, to tell the truth, were tattooed with my verses.
“These,” she answered.
“O these!” I said, laughing.
“Read them to me,” she said.
“But they are so long,” I hesitated, “no less than a chant-royal—a Prayer to the Queen of Love, in five long verses, and an envoi! Are you quite sure you can support so much verse at one sitting—”
“I have not lived at the Court of King Renée for nothing,” she replied, laughing.
“The Court of King Renée!” I exclaimed, looking at her in amazement. “You have really lived there? How wonderful! Tell me about it.”
“Indeed, I have!” she answered, with a mocking expression that seemed strangely at variance with her romantic privileges. “O yes! No doubt it is a wonderful place for you ballad-making gentlemen. There you can strum and hum all day to your heart’s content, and your poor bored mistresses must listen to all your magniloquent nonsense, without a yawn—besides being quite sure that you don’t mean a single word of it. Yes! No woman can live at the Court of King Renée unless she is prepared for poetry morning, noon and night—Yes! and far into the middle of the night—and even, when at last you have fallen asleep again, after being awakened by some long-winded serenade, you are barely off, when, with the first break of dawn, comes another fool beneath your window with his lute and his falsetto singing you an ‘aubade!’ An aubade, indeed! And you at last so beautifully asleep. As you would have your lady love you, dear youth—never sing her an aubade!”