Page:Hoffmann's Strange Stories - Hoffman - 1855.djvu/310

 Louis might be led into this arrangement. Accordingly, at the apartments of the Marquis de Maintenon, where he used to spend his afternoons, and even to hold councils with his ministers till late in the night, a poem was one day handed to him, purporting to be the joint production of certain perplexed lovers, and complaining that where gallantry dictated they should carry a rich present to some favorite lady, they must now-a-days always risk their lives in the undertaking. It was, no doubt, as they alleged, a delight as well as a duty to encounter all dangers for the sake of a beloved and beautiful mistress, at a knightly tournament—but it was quite a different affair as to the malicious and cowardly attack of an assassin, against whom one could not always be armed, nor have any fair chance. But king Louis, forsooth, was the gleaming pole-star of gallantry and knighthood,—whose rays were to break through the nocturnal darkness, and bring to light these mysterious crimes which had been so long concealed. Moreover, this idolized hero, who had crushed his enemies to the earth, would now, too, brandish his victorious sword, and like Hercules with the Lernæan serpent, or Theseus with the Minotaur, would oppose the horrid demon of assassination which destroyed all the raptures of mutual love, and changed all innocent delights into sorrow and hopeless lamentation.

Such, for the most part, was the overstrained and absurd style of the poem, which, however, was just as praiseworthy as French heroics generally are. Serious as the matter might seem, there was yet no want of humorous delineation, how the lovers, gliding cautiously and in secret to the habitations of their mistresses, were unavoidably subjected to the influence of fear and apprehension, and how they came pale and trembling into her presence, before whom they should only have appeared bold and buoyant in spirit. There was here, also, a good spicing of double entendre, and when, over and above these merits, the whole was rounded off with a high-flown panegyric on King Louis, nothing less could be expected, but that he would, at all events, read it through with satisfaction.