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Et en danger, si en Yver je meurs (moriam)
De ne veoir pas les premiers raisins meurs (maturos).
(Cl. Marot, Euvres, p. 76.)

Mais quand le ciel est triste et tout noir d'espesseur,
Et qu'il ne fait aux champs ny plaisant ny bien seur.
(Ronsard, Poés. Chois., p. 376.)

Ou quelque autre venin, dont après avoir beu,
Nous sentons nos esprits nous laisser peu à peu.

(Du Bellay, Euvres Chois., p. 81.)

These rimes were still admitted in the beginning of the seventeenth century:

Empereur, Capitaine, on ne vit pas plus seur
De tromper les ciseaux de la fatale sœur.

(Montcrestien, Tragédies, Hector, p. 68.)

Elle s'y resoudra de force ou de douceur.
De ces deux le dernier est toujours le plus seur.

(Mairet, Silvanire, Act i. Sc. 3.)

Even Malherbe, who blamed1 such rimes in the works of Desportes, employed rimes de Chartres, as they were then called, in the Ode à Monsieur de la Garde:

Non, Malherbe n'est pas de ceux
Que l'esprit de l'enfer a déceus.

(Euvres, i. p. 288.)

16. Final was invariably pronounced in the sixteenth century, whether before another consonant, another vowel (liaison), or before a stop of any kind. Th. de Bèze (1584), speaking of the letters 9 and r, says: Hae literae nunquam quiescunt 2. Hence rimes such as the following, which occur at every page in the poets of the sixteenth century:

Le soleil. . . . dardant à la ronde

Ses rayons sur la terre et sur la grande mer
En tous les animaux vient la vie alumer.

(Baïf.)

Thus,

In the seventeenth century a part of the words in -ier and -er, especially the infinitives of the first conjugation, dropped their r sound, except in liaison, and as a consequence the or è preceding the sounded r became closed (ié, é). in so far as the r goes, seventeenth-century ordinary pronunciation was as it is now. But in sustained prose and in verse the pronunciation of the sixteenth century still persisted, i. e. r was sounded, and the preceding ie or e had the open sound.

1 Cf. Œuvres, iv. pp. 382, 419, 462.

De Francica lingua recta pronunciatione, ed. Tobler, p. 79.

Thus the following seventeenth-century rimes are quite correct to the ear:

Mais sans être savant, et sans philosopher,
Amour en soit loué, je n'en suis point en peine:
Où Caliste n'est point, c'est là qu'est mon enfer.

(Malherbe, Euvres, i. p. 129.)

L'honneur est un miroir si fragile et si cher,
Que le moindre soupçon ne le doit pas toucher.

(Mairet, Silvanire, Act iii. Sc. 2.)

Hé bien! brave Acomat, si je leur suis si cher,
Que des mains de Roxane ils viennent m'arracher.

(Racine, Bajazet, 1. 627.)

Malgré tout son orgueil, ce monarque si fier
A son trône, à son lit daigne l'associer.
Que serviroit, Seigneur, de vous y hasarder?
Suis-je moins que ma sœur fille de Lysander?

(Ibid. 1. 467.)

(Corneille, Agésilas, 1. 1295.)

The fact that such words are also found in the seventeenth century riming with words in -air in which the ai è shows clearly the nature of the e:

Je voy maint tourbillon sur ma teste rouler,
Maint esclair flamboyant fendre l'obscur de l'air.

=

(Montcrestien, Tragédies, Aman, p. 275.)

Etoient-ce impressions qui pussent aveugler
Un jugement si clair?

(Malherbe, Euvres, i. p. 30.)

Examiner sa taille, et sa mine, et son air,

Et voir quel est l'époux que je veux vous donner.

(Corneille, Menteur, l. 391.)

The fact that Malherbe and Corneille, both Normans, were the first to carry on the sixteenth-century pronunciation of r into the seventeenth century, and in addition a somewhat obscure remark of Ménage in a note to his edition of Malherbe (1666), seem to have led writers to attribute this pronunciation of r to a dialectical peculiarity of those two poets, and since then those rimes in which now one of the words has a sounded r and the other a silent r have been known as rimes normandes. That the sixteenth-century pronunciation of r was continued during the seventeenth century in sustained prose and in verse is proved by an important remark of Vaugelas1, who notes that the majority of people who speak in public pronounce not only the of the inRemarques sur la Langue Française, ii. p. 163.

1

finitives of the first conjugation, but also the preceding e very open. An observation of the grammarian Van der Aa (1622), in which he says that the final consonants can be pronounced at will before a pause, also tends the same way. At the end of the seventeenth century the modern usage was adopted in verse in every case.

In his Remarques sur Corneille Voltaire calls attention to the fact that these so-called rimes normandes were justified in the seventeenth century only because they corresponded to the pronunciation of the time, which pronunciation has since changed, and yet, strange to say, he makes use himself of such rimes:

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which only existed for the eye in the eighteenth century as they do now, not only because the r was silent in légers and arracher, but because the e's were of a different nature according as the r was sounded or not.

Such rimes are a fortiori indefensible in the Romantic poets:

Et c'est pourquoi j'étais le voisin de la mer,
J'y regardais laissant les vagues écumer.

(V. Hugo, Légende des Siècles, i. p. 47.)

Pour l'erreur, éclairer, c'est apostasier,
Aujourd'hui ne naît pas impunément d'hier.

(Id., Contemplations, ii. p. 74.)

O prêtre à t'écouter, c'est un fleuve d'enfer
Où l'homme ne saurait tomber sans étouffer!

(De Laprade, Odes et Poèmes, p. 147.)

17. Towards the end of the thirteenth century the group oi, whatever its origin, which was then pronounced as now in English (royal, poison), passing through the stages de, oè, became at the end of the fifteenth century wè1, which itself from the beginning of the sixteenth century became, by a double and parallel development, on the one hand è and on the other wa in pronunciation. Although there are traces of the change of wè to è earlier, it was only in the

This pronunciation is attested by the orthographic symbols oe and oue, which occur as early as the thirteenth, and which are quite common in the sixteenth century-miroer, mirouer, savoer, savouer, &c. It is interesting to note that it still survives in Canadian French.

2 Thurot, i. p. 352 ff.

sixteenth century that it became general, especially at court. In the seventeenth century è was the usual pronunciation in conversation, and wè in more sustained style. The pronunciation è has prevailed definitely in the imperfects and conditionals of verbs, in some names of nations and countries (anglais, français, milanais, &c., but danois, suédois, &c.), and in the following words: claie, craie, épais, frais, monnaie, paraître, connaître. Also in the suffix -aie in aunaie, futaie, &c. The sound was still expressed

by the mediaeval or till Voltaire's time, who was the first to use the graphic sign ai to render it-in Zaïre 1732-though it had previously been proposed by Nicolas Berain in his Nouvelles Remarques sur la Langue Française (1675). It was not, however, officially recognized by the Academy till 1835.

In other cases the group wè has changed to wa (still written oz), which goes back to the end of the fifteenth century, and seems at first to have been peculiar to the lower Parisian classes. Although it was combated by successive grammarians as vulgar, it was fully admitted in the eighteenth century, and finally prevailed with the Revolution and the rise of democracy. It has even introduced itself into a few words, such as moelle and poêle, which originally represented a dissyllabic oë.

These remarks explain the following rimes, which go back to a time when or was pronounced wè in all the cases concerned. These rimes are of two kinds.

Rimes of two words with oi (pronounced wè), the or of which did not ultimately follow the same development:

Quand printemps fault et l'esté comparoit,
Adoncques l'herbe en forme et force croist.

(Clément Marot, Euvres, p. 335.)

Et me suffit vous avoir fait cognoistre

Que par le temps mon amour ne peut croistre.

(Du Bellay, Euv. Chois., p. 284.)

Ma colère revient, et je me reconnois:
Immolons, en partant, trois ingrats à la fois.

(Racine, Mithridate, 1. 1385.)
Sous leurs pas diligents le chemin disparoît;
Et le pilier, loin d'eux, déjà baisse et décroit.

Trop resserré dans les
Un tel mérite au loin

(Boileau, Le Lutrin, Canto v. 1. 91.) bornes d'un cloître, se fait connoître.

(Gresset, Ver-Vert, Canto ii. 1. 34.)

Rimes between two words one of which had oi (pronounced wè), which later resulted in wa, and the other an old ai (pronounced è) or è or ei:

Le jardinier ne pourra faire croistre

Herbe ne fleur sans voir l'œil de leur maistre.

(Ronsard, Poés. Chois., p. 237.)

Peste! les grands talents que votre esprit possède!
Dirait-on qu'elle y touche avec sa mine froide?

(Molière, Dépit Amour., 1. 463.)

Au-dessous des Césars, je suis ce qu'on peut être ;
A moins que de leur rang le mien ne sauroit croître.

(Corneille, Théodore, 1. 12.)

Quel plaisir d'élever un enfant, qu'on voit croître
Non plus comme un esclave élevé par son maître!

(Racine, Andromaque, 1. 1069.)

Quel parti prendre? où suis-je, et qui dois-je être?
Sur quel terrain puis-je espérer de croître?

(Voltaire, Le Pauvre Diable, 11. 1 and 4.)

Such rimes, occasionally found in poets of the nineteenth century, only exist for the eye:

J'ai foulé le bon goût et l'ancien vers françois

Sous mes pieds, et, hideux, j'ai dit à l'ombre: Sois!

(V. Hugo, Contemplations, i. p. 20.)

Comme pour réchauffer ses membres déjà roides,
Hélas! ce que la mort touche de ses mains froides
Ne se réchauffe plus

...

(Id., Châtiments, p. 81.)

The character of the play excuses the archaism in Rostand's Cyrano de Bergerac :

Et se dire sans cesse: oh, pourvu que je sois
Dans les petits papiers du Mercure François.

(Act ii. Sc. 7.)

XXXI. Finally a word may be said of the treatment of Latin and foreign words by modern French poets.

The final consonant of Latin words is generally ignored, in order to facilitate the coupling of such words with the large majority of French masculine rimes:

Marguilliers aux regards vitreux; curés camus
Hurlant à vos lutrins: Dæmonem laudamus.

(V. Hugo, Châtiments, p. 114.)

Approchez-vous; ceci, c'est le tas des dévots.
Cela hurle en grinçant un benedicat vos.'

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(Ibid., p. 35.)

English words are pronounced as far as possible as if they

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