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The profligate Madame du Deffand, who occupies so conspicuous a place in the annals of the French court in the days of its greatest corruption, has little sympathy with a situation of this kind, and is led to exclaim: Le fade personnage que votre Pétrarque! que sa Laure était sotte et précieuse!
All traces of them have long since vanished, but a simple column, bearing the inscription; "À PETRARQUE," stands beside the Sorgues. We ascended into the defile by a path among the rocks, overshadowed by olive and wild fig trees, to the celebrated fountains of Vaucluse.
The only very definite conviction I arrived at was that Vaucluse is indeed cockneyfied, but that I should have been a fool, all the same, not to come. I mounted into my diligence at the door of the Hotel de Petrarque et de Laure, and we made our way back to Isle-sur-Sorgues in the fading light.
All at once Crillon cries, "There's Pétrarque!" and darts outside on the track of a big body, which, having seen him, opens its long pair of compasses and escapes obliquely. "And to think," says Brisbille, with a horrible grimace, when Crillon has disappeared, "that the scamp is a town councilor! Ah, by God!"
Over and above these are many other scribblings; and hanging over the door of the poet's little nook was a criminal French lithograph likeness of "Pétrarque" when young. At any rate, I care to believe that while Cesarotti sat "composing" his tribute comfortably at the table, Alfieri's impetuous soul was lifting his tall body on tiptoe to scrawl its inspirations on the plastering.
We walked along the Sorgues which is quite as beautiful and worthy to be sung as the Clitumnus to the end of the village to take the road to Vaucluse. Beside its banks stands the "Hotel de Petrarque et Laure." Alas that names of the most romantic and impassioned lovers of all history should be desecrated to a sign-post to allure gormandizing tourists!
All traces of them have long since vanished, but a simple column bearing the inscription. "A Petrarque" stands beside the Sorgues. We ascended into the defile by a path among the rocks, overshadowed by olives and wild fig-trees, to the celebrated fountains of Vaucluse.
II . For the spirit of early humanism see H. C. Hollway-Calthrop, Petrarch: his Life and Times ; J. H. Robinson and H. W. Rolfe, Petrarch, the First Modern Scholar and Man of Letters, 2d ed. , a selection from Petrarch's letters to Boccaccio and other contemporaries, translated into English, with a valuable introduction; Pierre de Nolhac, Petrarque et l'humanisme, 2d ed., 2 vols. in 1 . Of the antecedents of humanism a convenient summary is presented by Louise Loomis, Mediaeval Hellenism . A popular biography of Erasmus is that of Ephraim Emerton, Desiderius Erasmus ; the Latin Letters of Erasmus are now in course of publication by P. S. Allen; F. M. Nichols, The Epistles of Erasmus, 2 vols.
The only very definite conviction I arrived at was that Vaucluse is indeed cockneyfied, but that I should have been a fool, all the same, not to come. Mounted into my diligence at the door of the Hôtel de Pétrarque et de Laure, and we made our way back to Isle-sur-Sorgues in the fading light.
He sweeps me along to the side of the street, sets my back against the porch and says to me, in a low voice, but with heated conviction, "That Pétrarque chap, he's really a bad lot." He takes off his cap, and while the crescendo nodding of his bristly head seems to brush the night, he adds: "I've mended him his purse. It had become percolated.
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