The sweet-souled
songster had no more than others attained real calm in it. Even in
youth nervous distress had been the chief facial characteristic.
Triumphant, nevertheless, in his battle for Greek beauty--for the
naturalisation of Greek beauty in the brown cloud-lands of the North-
-he might have been thinking, contemptuously, of barking little
Saint-Gelais, or of Monsieur Marot's pack-thread poems. He, for his
part, had always held that poetry should be woven of delicate silk,
or of fine linen, or at least of good home-spun worsted.
To Gaston, yielding himself to its influence, for a moment the scene
around seemed unreal: an exotic, embalming air, escaped from some old
Greek or Roman pleasure-place, had turned the poet's workroom into a
strange kind of private sanctuary, amid these rude conventual
buildings, with the March wind aloud in the chimneys. [68]
Notwithstanding, what with the long day's ride, the keen evening,
they had done justice to the monastic fare, the "little" wine of the
country, the cream, the onions,--fine Camille, and dainty Jasmin, and
the poet turned to talk upon gardening, concerning which he could
tell them a thing or two--of early salads, and those special apples
the king loved to receive from him, mille-fleurs pippins, painted
with a thousand tiny streaks of red, yellow, and green.
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