Page:French Poets and Novelists.djvu/82

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Elle me soignera dans mes quintes de toux, Et près d'elle couché, je me rirai de vous, Les Amadis transis, les coureurs de fortune, Gelant sous le balcon par un beau clair de lune! Et, quand j'apercevrai mon coquin de neveu, De deux ou trois seaux d'eau j'arroserai son feu!

The little piece called "Une Larm du Diable," to which the author has affixed the half-apologetic qualification of "Mystère," is one of his cleverest and most characteristic performances. None illustrates better, perhaps, what we have called the simplicity of his mind—the way in which he conceived the most exalted ideas as picturesque and picturesque only. "Une Larme du Diable" is a light pastiche of a mediæval miracle-play, just as the "Tricorne Enchanté" is an imitation of a seventeenth-century farce. The scene is alternately in heaven and on earth. Satanas is the hero, and le Bon Dieu and Christus, grotesquely associated with Othello and Desdemona, are among the minor characters. Christus himself, conversing in heaven, manifests a taste for the picturesque. "Ce matin je me suis déguisé en mendiant, je leur (the two heroines) ai demandé l'aumône; elles ont déposé dans ma main lépreuse, chacune à leur tour, une grosse pièce de cuivre, toute glacée de vert-de-gris." These copper coins, glazed with verdigris, are a sort of symbol of the drama—a drama in which the celestial