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So to the New Exchange, where I find my wife, and so took her to Unthanke's, and left her there, and I to White Hall, and thence to Westminster, only out of idleness, and to get some little pleasure to my 'mauvais flammes', but sped not, so back and took up my wife; and to Polichinelli at Charing Crosse, which is prettier and prettier, and so full of variety that it is extraordinary good entertainment.
So to the New Exchange, where I find my wife, and so took her to Unthanke's, and left her there, and I to White Hall, and thence to Westminster, only out of idleness, and to get some little pleasure to my 'mauvais flammes', but sped not, so back and took up my wife; and to Polichinelli at Charing Crosse, which is prettier and prettier, and so full of variety that it is extraordinary good entertainment.
The rigid system of their rhyme, which makes it much harder to manage than in English, has accustomed them to inaccuracies of thought which would shock them in prose. For example, in the "Cinna" of Corneille, as originally written, Emilie says to Augustus, "Ces flammes dans nos coeurs des longtemps etoient nees, Et ce sont des secrets de plus de quatre annees."
I say nothing of the second verse, which is purely prosaic surplusage exacted by the rhyme, nor of the jingling together of ces, des, etoient, nees, des, and secrets, but I confess that nees does not seem to be the epithet that Corneille would have chosen for flammes, if he could have had his own way, and that flames would seem of all things the hardest to keep secret.
But in revising, Corneille changed the first verse thus, "Ces flammes dans nos coeurs sans votre ordre etoient nees." Can anything be more absurd than flames born to order? Yet Voltaire, on his guard against these rhyming pitfalls for the sense, does not notice this in his minute comments on this play.
For Scriabine, the awakening of that aërial palpitant sensibility was such. It devoured him like a fire. One shudders as well as marvels at the destiny of one who came to feel life as it is felt in those last quivering poems "Guirlandes," "Flammes sombres," he entitles them, or in the mysterious Tenth Sonata, that glows with the feverish light of the dream, or in those last haunted preludes.
But, wonder of wonders! this scarecrow strategy struck terror into the heart of a real Rear-Admiral, and, as a French historian somewhat lugubriously, but quite candidly, acknowledges: "Les ruses de Dance reussirent; les flammes bleues, les canons de bois, les batteries peintes, produisirent leur effet."
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