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She could understand that; and Villon's famous verses, "Ou sont les neiges d'antan?" were as familiar to her as Herrick's "Come, my Corinna, let us go a-maying." But, on the whole, she was strangely and poorly equipped for the battle of life.
Antam ante annum is a word of Thunes slang, which signified the past year, and by extension, formerly. Thirty-five years ago, at the epoch of the departure of the great chain-gang, there could be read in one of the cells at Bicetre, this maxim engraved with a nail on the wall by a king of Thunes condemned to the galleys: Les dabs d'antan trimaient siempre pour la pierre du Coesre.
Zadig and Zaïre, Mérope and Charles XII. still linger, perhaps, in the schoolroom; but what has become of Oreste, and of Mahomet, and of Alzire? Où sont les neiges d'antan? Though Voltaire's reputation now rests mainly on his achievements as a precursor of the Revolution, to the eighteenth century he was as much a poet as a reformer.
I have never loved." "You!" And all those stories those countrymen of his had spread abroad, all his own love-poems were in that exclamation. "No never mortal woman. Only statues and the beautiful dead dream-women, vanished with the neiges d'antan. What did it matter whom I married? Perhaps you would have had me aspire higher than a grisette? To a tradesman's daughter? Or a demoiselle in society?
He sees it as the melancholy, inevitable end of all that is beautiful, all that is lovely on earth. Dictes moi où, n'en quel pays Est Flora, la belle Rommaine; Archipiada, ne Thaïs and so through the rest of the splendid catalogue with its sad, unanswerable refrain Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
We can appreciate more beauty, but do we appreciate any quite as much as in those old days when we were such passionate monotheists of the beautiful? Alas! We are priests no more, are we even lovers? But we are wonderful connoisseurs. It is our souls. Mais où sont les neiges d'antan?
Over the door appeared the name, "Villa d'Antan," in small gold letters. I asked myself what poet or what fairy was living there, what inspired, solitary being had discovered this spot and created this dream house, which seemed to nestle in a nosegay. A workman was breaking stones up the street, and I went to him to ask the name of the proprietor of this jewel.
Now and then a single poem rises above the tedious and hideous barbarism of the general level of this monkish literature, either from a more intensely personal feeling in the poet, or from an occasional grace or beauty in his verse. Mais ou sont les neiges d'antan? "Where are the snows of yester year?"
"Capitaine," he said, "les vieux canons!" Two or three days later came his chief of staff on some errand or other. That discharged, when I was accompanying him to his boat at the gangway, he stopped in the same spot as the admiral. His gaze was meditative, reminiscent, perhaps even sentimental. "Où sont les neiges d'antan?"
Sings our poet in the silver-fire verse of L'Imitation de Notre-Dame la Lune, wherein he asks Mais où sont les Lunes d'Antan.
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