Page:Biographical and critical studies by James Thomson ("B.V.").djvu/66

50 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES works, and especially his ' Solitude,' which is the best of all. His sonnet which commences, Assis sur un fagot, une pipe ci la main (' Seated upon a faggot, pipe in hand '), was written in a wine shop {cabaret), in the borough of Sauzon, in Belle-Isle, kept by a man named La Plante, whose posterity still exist. Saint-Amant was a debauchee. Nature alone had made him a poet ; wine gave him enthusiasm. Often the marshal of Belle-Isle and he mounted to an old buttery-hatch {credence), where they had a table loaded with bottles of wine. There, each on his chair, they made sittings of four-and-twenty hours. The Duke de Retz came to see them from time to time in this attitude. Sometimes the table, the pots, the glasses, the chairs, the topers all rolled down together from the top to the bottom." So that these truly Gargan- tuan orgies of full twenty-four hours at a time are not so fabulous as Mr. Besant seems to imply, and not the Marquis but the marshal of Belle-Isle was the boon companion of our poet. Sometime after 1620 he returned to Paris, where he charmed again with his high spirits, his lute, and his poems, all the prodigal friends whom he names so tenderly in his various pieces : the Baron de St. Brice, Chassaingrimont, Maricourt, Butte, La Motte, Chateaupers, Marigny-Mallenoe. It was a wild time, when men revelled and made love and fought duels at a rate which may well make our puny and decorous generations incredulous with astonishment. It was a riot of social lawlessness, soon to be scared and repressed by Richelieu, and then to be chained and gagged, stark and dumb, by the morose despotism of Louis XIV., which, in its turn, prepared the way for