Made for madrigals and catches, Not for heart-wounds, but for scratches, O Marquise ! Just a pinky porcelain trifle, "Belle Marquise!" Wrought in rarest rose-Dubarry, Quick at verbal point and parry, Clever, doubtless ;—but to marry, No, Marquise! IV For your Cupid, you have clipped him, Rouged and patched him, nipped and snipped him, And with chapeau-bras equipped him, "Belle Marquise !" Just to arm you through your wife-time, And the languors of your life-time, "Belle Marquise!" Say, to trim your toilet tapers, Or, to twist your hair in papers, Or, to wean you from the vapours ;- You are worth the love they give you, Or a younger grace shall please; "Belle Marquise !” Till your frothed-out life's commotion Or a dainty sham devotion, "Belle Marquise !” V No: we neither like nor love you, "Belle Marquise !" Lesser lights we place above you,— Milder merits better please. We have passed from Philosophe-dom Without malice whatsoever,- Just one little thought, Marquise! "Belle Marquise!" creeping, Carries a basket, whence a billet peeps, To lay beside a silk-clad Oread sleeping Under an urn; yet not so sound she sleeps But that she plainly sees his graceful act; "He thinks she thinks he thinks she sleeps," in fact. One hardly needs the "Peint par François Boucher." All the sham life comes back again,-one sees Alcôves, Ruelles, the Lever, and the Coucher, Patches and Ruffles, Roues and Marquises; The little great, the infinite small thing That ruled the hour when Louis Quinze was king. For these were yet the days of halcyon weather,A "Martin's summer," when the nation swam, Aimless and easy as a wayward feather, Down the full tide of jest and epigram ;— A careless time, when France's bluest blood Beat to the tune of "After us the Flood." Plain Roland still was placidly "inspecting," Corday unborn, and Lamballe in Savoie ; And far afield were sun-baked savage creatures, Female and male, that tilled the earth, and wrung Want from the soil; - lean things with livid features, Shape of bent man, and voice that never sung: These were the Ants, for yet to Jacques Bonhomme Tumbrils were not, nor any sound of drum. But Boucher was a Grasshopper, and painted,— Rose-water Raphael,-en couleur de rose, The crowned Caprice, whose sceptre, nowise sainted, Swayed the light realm of ballets and bons Ruled the dim boudoir's demi-jour, or drove grove. A laughing Dame, who sailed a laughing cargo To Rameau's notes, in dances by Gardel ;— Her Boucher served, till Nature's self betraying, not, Made of his work a land of languid Maying, Filled with false gods and muses misbegot ;— A Versailles Eden of cosmetic youth, Wherein most things went naked, save the Truth. Once, only once,-perhaps the last night's revels Palled in the after-taste,-our Boucher sighed For that first beauty, falsely named the Devil's, Young-lipped, unlessoned, joyous, and cleareyed; Flung down his palette like a weary man, And sauntered slowly through the Rue SainteAnne. Wherefore, we know not; but, at times, far nearer Things common come, and lineaments half-seen Grow in a moment magically clearer ; Perhaps, as he walked, the grass he called "too green " Rose and rebuked him, or the earth "ill-lighted" Silently smote him with the charms he slighted. |