Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/65

 SAINT-AMANT 49 tionist, reciting his own compositions so well that an epigram, attributed to Gombaud, remonstrates — " Your verse is fine when you declaim, But, when I read it, very tame : You can't continually recite ; So such as I can read, pray write." But we must not accept an epigram au pied de la lettre, as our neighbours say. We are told that three times in his youth he was nearly drowned in the Seine ; and he certainly had a holy horror of fresh water ever after. While yet quite young he became distinguished as a passionate lover of good eating, and yet more of good drinking ; and his society was much sought after by the jolly nobles of Louis XIII., not yet cowed by the stern discipline of Richelieu. Although he was very free in his speech, he never abused their familiarity, and they held him in singular esteem. He was soon attached to the household of one of the greatest of these, the Duke de Retz, with whom he retired to the domain of Belle-Isle, which the duke's father, backed by his relative, Catherine de Medici, with whom he had come from Florence, had forced the monks to sell to him at a low price. Here Saint-Amant lived truly in clover, as, indeed, he managed, without any managerrient or forethought, to live nearly all his life. M. Livet cites a letter, to which I shall have to refer again when I come to speak of the poems, from a M. Roger, Commissary of the Navy at Belle-Isle, to Desforges-Maillard. The writer had in his family old relatives, to whom one of his ancestors, seneschal of the isle, had communicated the following details : " The poet lived at Belle-Isle several years. He there composed a great part of his D