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Updated: June 3, 2025
For once 'put your trust in princes, for her husband will be there, and do you think he would suffer her to be insulted or wronged?" Ronsard's sunken eyes looked wild, his aged frame trembled violently, and he gave a hopeless gesture. "I do not know I do not know!" he said incoherently; "I am an old man, and I have always found it a wicked world!
"Which of the many villas that overlook the bay and are visible from my window, with their white walls and dark-green gardens, which is yours?" he questioned. "All day I have been wondering. That is the single thing that really stirs me here, that really gives me a feeling its association with you. All day I have been hearing a sonnet of Ronsard's do you remember it? Voicy le bois.
His eyes followed the smooth rhythm of Ronsard's ardent love-songs and stately sonnets, but his thoughts were wandering far afield, and he soon threw the book from him with an impatient gesture, and began slowly unfastening his garments, with the air of a man who is not sleepy, but only goes to bed because he does not know what else to do with himself, and has perhaps a faint hope of forgetting his troubles in the embrace of Morpheus, most blessed of all the gods.
After a moment of silent thought, he went on into his own chamber, and put down the small lamp he carried, upon the little table, where still lay the stray volume of Ronsard's poems that he had been reading or rather trying to read on that tempestuous night when the old pedant knocked at his door. And there was his bed, where Isabelle had slept the very pillow upon which her dear head had rested.
She agreed to this, though with some little hesitation, then they ascended the cliff, and walking by way of the pine-wood through which the King had come, arrived at Ronsard's house, to find the old man quite alone, and peacefully engaged in tying up the roses and jessamine on the pillars of his verandah.
They will strike off the last gyves that fetter the noble art of romance, and in five or six years we shall have only about a tenth of the present number of romances, but that tenth will pass through as many editions as "The Pilgrim's Progress," which, by the way, was probably, like Ronsard's poems, the work of an amateur.
He fell in love in the grand manner three times, and from these three passions most of his good poetry flowed. First there was Cassandre, the beautiful girl of Florentine extraction, whom he saw singing to her lute, when he was only twenty-two, and loved to distraction. She married another and became the star of Ronsard's song.
Near one of these luxurious seats was a low carved table upon which lay an open volume of Ronsard's poems, and close by it, thrown carelessly on the carpet, was a lute with a cluster of streaming ribbons, and a black and white satin sling attached to it.
It is difficult nowadays to conceive that, within half a century of his death, Ronsard's fame suffered so dark an eclipse that no new edition of his works was called for between 1629 and 1857. When he died, he was, as M. Jusserand reminds us, the most illustrious man of letters in Europe. He seemed, too, to have all those gifts of charm charm of mood and music which make immortality certain.
Nothing remained for him to do but to resign himself passively to whatsoever calamity the Omnipotent Forces above him chose to inflict, and utterly weary, baffled and helpless, he sank into Ronsard's vacant chair, unconscious that tears were rolling down his face from the excess of his anxiety and exhaustion.
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