76 BIOGRAPHICAL STUDIES Que ce borgne * a bien plus Fortune pour amie Qu'un de ces curieux qui, soufflant I'alchimie, De sage devient fol, et de riche indigent ! Cestuy-la sent enfin sa vigueur consumee, Et voit tout son argent se resoudre en fumee ; Mais lui, de la fumee il tire de I'argent." As will appear directly, I have no need to try my hand at the first. I give the following version of the second in default of a better : —
- ' Of careless souls this is the meeting-place,
Which sometimes I frequent for my delight, The master calls himself La Plante with right, For to a plant his fortune he can trace. You see there Bilot pale as in sad case, From both whose nostrils vapour takes its flight. While Sallard tickles at the servant light. Who laughs with nose up and foreshortened face. How much this one-eyed better friends must be With Fortune than those alchemists we see From wise becoming mad, from rich quite poor ! They find at length their health and strength decay. Their money all in smoke consumed away ; But he from smoke gels money more and more." Of a truth, it may be remarked, parenthetically, save in the fact that he was singular with respect to eyes, this La Plante was the very fore-ordained prototype of Cope, with his opulent Tobacco Plant of the two- fold leaves, literary and nicotian ! Now, in the Tobacco Platitiox August 1874, under the heading, " Who wrote it ? " Mr. Besant's transla- tion of the first of these sonnets is cited from the " French Humourists " (p. 184), together with a sonnet
- La Plante was " un cabaretier borgne qui tenait un cabaret
borgne," the one-eyed host of a low wine-shop, or, as we should say, pot-house.
