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138 doucelette, Cassandrette. Their loves are only half real, a vain effort to prolong the imaginative loves of the middle age beyond their natural lifetime. They write love-poems for hire. Like the people in Boccaccio's 'Decameron,' they form a party who in an age of great troubles, losses, anxieties, amuse themselves with art, poetry, intrigue; but they amuse themselves with wonderful elegance, and sometimes their gaiety becomes satiric, for as they play, real passions insinuate themselves, at least the reality of death; their dejection at the thought of leaving le beau sejour du commun jour is expressed by them with almost wearisome reiteration. But with this sentiment too they are able to trifle; the imagery of death serves for a delicate ornament, and they weave into the airy nothingness of their verses their trite reflections on the vanity of life; just as the grotesques of the charnel-house nest themselves together with birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan mythology in the traceries of the architecture of that time, which wantons in its delicate arabesques with the images of old age and death.

Ronsard became deaf at sixteen, and it was this which finally determined him to be a man of letters instead of a diplomatist; and it was significant, one might fancy, of a certain premature agedness, and of the tranquil temperate sweetness appropriate to that,