Vingt ans, trente ans: cela duroit un monde
Au bon vieulx temps.

Or est perdu ce qu'amour ordonnoit:
Rien que pleurs fainctz, rien que changes on n'oyt
Qui vouldra donc qu'à aymer ie me fonde,
Il faut premier que l'amour on refonde,
Et qu'on la meine ainsi qu'on la menoit
Au bon vieulx temps,

which George Wyndham has translated as

In good old days a mode of loving reigned
With no great art nor offerings sustained,
So that a nosegay given of love sincere,
Was an endowment with the whole earth's sphere,
For save the heart all else was then disdained.

And if by chance the joys of love were gained,
Know you how such good hap was entertained?
It lasted on and on, from year to year

In good old days.

Now all is lost that love of old ordained.
We have but changes and tears falsely feigned.
If then ye will that love I should revere,
You first must furnish love with other gear
And use the manner of it men maintained
In good old days.

Vincent Voiture shares with Marot the distinction of excelling in the rondeau. He was so fluent in the form. that he was not afraid to say

Si vous vouliez qu'on vous parlast d'Amour,
Je vous ferois cent Rondeaux chaque jour."

There are twenty-five rondeaus in his works printed at Brussels in 1687. He was past master of the art of playing with the meaning of the refrain and giving it new and daring significances, as this altogether delicious example of his work shows:

Cinq ou six fois cette nuit en dormant,
Je vous ay vue en un accoustrement
Au prix duquel rien ne me sçauroit plaire,
La juppe estoit d'une opale tres-claire,
Et vostre robe estoit un diamant.

Rien n'est si beau dessous le firmament.
L'astre du jour brille moins clairement,
Et vous passiez sa lumiere ordinaire.
Cinq ou six fois.

Que le sommeil nous trompe vainement!
Par l'aventure en ce mesme moment,
Vous-vous trouviez en estat bien contraire,
Mais à propos, comment va cette affaire?
Avez vous bien esté tout doucement,
Cinq ou six fois?

In the days of the Pléiade, the rondeau, having earned the scorn of Du Bellay and his colleagues, was banished. Guillaume Colletet tells us in the final pages of his treatise on the sonnet that when the Palinode of Rouen was reorganized under the authority vested in the princes and members, by a bull of Pope Leo X, in 1597, it was ordered that henceforth the sonnet should take the place of honor previously enjoyed by the rondeau, and that the rondeau was no longer to be considered in order in the Puy de Rouen. This was so much the case, that Voiture, writing to a friend in 1638, said in his letter, "I can't be sure whether you know what a rondeau is. I've done three or four that have fired the wits to try their hand at them. It's a kind of verse that lends itself very well to raillery." About this date the rondeau was reintroduced, Voiture himself carrying on the tradition of light verse handed down by the trouvères. Voiture used the thirteen-line form, which has been considered, as has been before observed, a standard form in France. The rondeau flourished in the salons, in a society much like that described in Molière's Les Femmes Savantes.

Corneille, the great dramatist himself, composed two. In 1676, a writer by the name of Benserade actually turned the Metamorphoses of Ovid into rondeaus, putting even his table of errata into that form. He cannot be held solely responsible for this enormity, since the idea is said to have originated with the King. A few rondeaus were written in the reign of Louis XIV, but the form fell into disuse again at the end of the eighteenth century, and none were written during the first Empire.

In general, the rondeau was neglected in France in the latter part of the seventeenth century and during the whole of the eighteenth century. Marot had, however, one follower in the art of the rondeau, an Englishman, Anthony Hamilton (1646-1720), who wrote admirable French rondeaus.

At the beginning of the nineteenth century de Musset made excellent use of the form. There is something provocative about the very name of Manon in French literature.

Fut-il jamais douceur de coeur pareille
A voir Manon dans me bras sommeiller?

Son front coquet parfume l'oreiller;

Dans son beau sein j'entends son coeur qui veille.
Un songe passe, et s'en vient l'égayer.

Ainsi s'endort une fleur d'énglantier,
Dans son calice enfermant une abeille.
Moi, je la berce; un plus charmant métier
Fut-il jamais?

Mais le jour vient, et l'Aurore vermeille
Effeuille au vent son bouquet printanier
La peigne en main et la perle à l'oreille,
A son miroir Manon court m'oublier.
Hélas! l'amour sans lendemain ne veille
Fut-il jamais?

IX

THE RONDEAU REDOUBLÉ

The rondeau redoublé, which is only very remotely related to the rondeau proper, was devised by Jean de la Fontaine (1624-1695). It is a poem of twenty-four lines which is divided into six stanzas. Each line of the first stanza appears in turn as the last line of one of the four following stanzas. The first words of the first line are repeated after the conclusion of the sixth stanza as an unrhymed refrain, as may be seen in this original example of the form:

Qu'un vain scrupule à ma flamme s'oppose,
Je ne le puis souffrir aucunement,
Bien que chacun en murmure et nous glose:
Et c'est assez pour perdre votre amant.
Si j'avois bruit de mauvais garnement,
Vous me pourriez bannir à juste cause;
Ne l'ayant point, c'est sans nul fondement
Qu'un vain scrupule à ma flamme s'oppose.

Que vous m'aimiez c'est pour moi lettre close;
Voire on diroit que quelque changement
A m'alleguer ces raisons vous dispose:
Je ne le puis souffrir aucunement.

Bien moins pourrois vous cacher mon tourment,
N'ayant pas mis au contract cette clause;
Toujours ferai l'amour ouvertement,
Bien que chacun en murmure et nous glose.
Ainsi s'aimer est plus doux qu'eau de rose;
Souffrez-le donc, Phyllis; car autrement,
Loin de vos yeux je vais faire une pose;
Et c'est assez pour perdre votre amant.
Pourriez-vous voir ce triste éloignement?
De vos faveurs doublez plutôt la dose.
Amour ne veut tant de raisonnement:
Ce point d'honneur, ma foi, n'est autre chose
Qu'un vain scrupule.

The rondeau redoublé has never enjoyed the slightest popularity in France.

X

THE TRIOLET

The early eight-line form of the rondeau was later given the name of triolet, possibly because, in the first place, it was originally a three-part song. It was only in the fifteenth century, after the creation of the two variant types that the eight-line poem became known as the triolet. In the fifteenth century, besides those authors that have been mentioned in connection with the rondeau, the poets who wrote triolets were Jean Regnier, Octavien de Saint-Gelais, and in the sixteenth century, Michel d'Amboise and François Sagon. More and more, the triolet came to be devoted to satire and burlesque. After going out with the coming of the Pléiade, the triolet was revived again at the time of the wars of the Fronde. At this time there was no connection recognized between the triolet and the rondeau. It was not until 1720 that a French critic bracketed the triolet and the rondeau, but he was ignorant of the real connection between them. The feud between the Fronde and Cardinal Mazarin produced numerous triolets. To a popular tune of the day the literary partisans of both sides composed triolets in which they attacked on another. Mazarin himself, the Prince of Condé, and other lesser political lights gave and took in the wordy battle. The sufferings of the poor during the dlockade found expression in this triolet by Marc Antoine de Gérard, Sieur de Saint-Amant (1594-1661), in his Nobles Triolets, in which curses are heaped on the high price of bread and on the military operations which caused the scarcity.