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Updated: May 31, 2025
I saw Talleyrand at Lansdowne House like a corpse, with his hair dressed "ailes de pigeon" bien poudre. As Lord Lansdowne drolly said, "How much those ailes de pigeon have gone through unchanged! How many revolutions have they seen! how many changes of their master's mind!" Talleyrand has less countenance than any man of talents I ever saw.
Mon ame est l'arbre ou tous les soirs, comme elles, De blancs essaims de folles visions Tombent des cieux, en palpitant des ailes, Pour s'envoler des les premiers rayons. Finally, the effort to detach poetry from the inner world and make it an expression of outer things, is incompatible with its musical character.
Sometimes, it is the light flutter of glistening ephemeridæ that wheel and skim delightfully through the limpid azure. Sometimes it is the passionate fanning of wings preparing themselves for swift sharp ascents. Sometimes, it is the drooping of pinions that sink brokenly. For all these pieces are "Poèmes ailés," flights toward some island of the blest.
Bernard had published a volume of odes: 'Plus Deuil que Joie' , which was not much noticed, but a series of stories in the same year gained him the reputation of a genial 'conteur'. They were collected under the title 'Le Noeud Gordien', and one of the tales, 'Une Aventure du Magistrat, was adapted by Sardou for his comedy 'Pommes du voisin'. 'Gerfaut', his greatest work, crowned by the Academy, appeared also in 1838, then followed 'Le Paravent', another collection of novels ; 'Les Ailes d'Icare ; La Peau du Lion and La Chasse aux Amants ; L'Ecueil ; Un Beau-pere ; and finally Le Gentilhomme campagnard, in 1847.
"I have been told I cannot tell you what for here's the bell-man. I don't wonder 'the choleric man' knocked down the postman for blowing his horn in his ear. "Abruptly yours, Alfred had good reason to desire to be acquainted with this lord chief justice. Some French writer says, "Qu'il faut plier les grandes ailes de l'eloquence pour entrer dans un salon."
Let us give an instance: it is from the amusing novel called "Les Ailes d'Icare," and contains what is to us quite a new picture of a French fashionable rogue. The fashions will change in a few years, and the rogue, of course, with them. Let us catch this delightful fellow ere he flies.
It is, perhaps, as a psychologist that Racine has achieved his most remarkable triumphs; and the fact that so subtle and penetrating a critic as M. Lemaître has chosen to devote the greater part of a volume to the discussion of his characters shows clearly enough that Racine's portrayal of human nature has lost nothing of its freshness and vitality with the passage of time. On the contrary, his admirers are now tending more and more to lay stress upon the brilliance of his portraits, the combined vigour and intimacy of his painting, his amazing knowledge, and his unerring fidelity to truth. M. Lemaître, in fact, goes so far as to describe Racine as a supreme realist, while other writers have found in him the essence of the modern spirit. These are vague phrases, no doubt, but they imply a very definite point of view; and it is curious to compare with it our English conception of Racine as a stiff and pompous kind of dancing-master, utterly out of date and infinitely cold. And there is a similar disagreement over his style. Mr. Bailey is never tired of asserting that Racine's style is rhetorical, artificial, and monotonous; while M. Lemaître speaks of it as 'nu et familier, and Sainte-Beuve says 'il rase la prose, mais avec des ailes, The explanation of these contradictions is to be found in the fact that the two critics are considering different parts of the poet's work. When Racine is most himself, when he is seizing upon a state of mind and depicting it with all its twistings and vibrations, he writes with a directness which is indeed naked, and his sentences, refined to the utmost point of significance, flash out like swords, stroke upon stroke, swift, certain, irresistible. This is how Agrippine, in the fury of her tottering ambition, bursts out to Burrhus, the tutor of her son: Prétendez-vous longtemps me cacher l'empereur? Ne le verrai-je plus qu'
Des rires ailés peuplèrent le jardin; Souriants des caresses brèves, Des oiseaux joyeaux, jaunes, incarnadins Vibrèrent aux ciels de rêve." But to the devil with literature! Who cares if Gustave Kahn writes well or badly? I met a chappie yesterday whose views of life coincide with mine.
In the characteristic stanzas entitled "L'amitié est l'amour sans ailes," we feel as if between them the qualifying phrase might have been omitted: for their letters, carefully preserved on either side, are a record of the jealous complaints and the reconciliations of lovers.
In the first place, he had just completed the destruction of the Jesuits, and this was entitling him to no small thanks and praises from encyclopedists. Every one knows those two lines of Voltaire's "Aranda dans l'Espagne instruisant les fideles, A l'inquisition vient de rogner les ailes." *
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