A dish of
them came to table now, with a bottle, at the right moment, from the
darkest corner of the cellar. And then, in nasal voice, well-trained
to Latin intonation, giving a quite medieval amplitude to the poet's
sonorities of rhythm and vocabulary, the Sub-prior was bidden to
sing, after the notation of Goudimel, the "Elegy of the Rose"; the
author girding cheerily at the clerkly man's assumed ignorance of
such compositions.
It was but a half-gaiety, in truth, that awoke in the poet even now,
with the singing and the good wine, as the notes echoed windily along
the passages. On his forty-sixth year the unaffected melancholy of
his later life was already gathering. The dead!--he was coming to be
on their side. The fact came home to Gaston that this evocator of
"the eternally youthful" was visibly old before his time; his work
being done, or centered now for the most part on amendments, not
invariably happy, of his earlier [69] verse. The little panelled
drawers were full of them. The poet pulled out one, and as it stood
open for a moment there lay the first book of the Franciade, in
silken cover, white and gold, ready for the king's hands, but never
to be finished.
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