They are full of fine railleries; they
delight in diminutives, ondelette, fontelette, doucelette, Cassandrette.
Their loves are only half real, a vain effort to prolong the imaginative
loves of the middle age beyond their natural lifetime. They write
love-poems for hire. Like that party of people who tell the tales in
Boccaccio's Decameron, they form a circle which in an age of great
troubles, losses, anxieties, amuses itself with art, poetry, intrigue.
But they amuse themselves with wonderful elegance; and sometimes their
gaiety becomes satiric, for, as they play, real passions insinuate
themselves, and at least the reality of death; their dejection at the
thought of leaving this fair abode of our common daylight--le beau
sejour du commun jour--is expressed by them with almost wearisome
reiteration. But with this sentiment too they are able to trifle: the
imagery of death serves for delicate ornament, and they weave into the
airy nothingness of their verses their trite reflexions on the vanity of
life; just as the grotesques of the charnel-house nest themselves,
together with birds and flowers and the fancies of the pagan mythology,
in the traceries of the architecture of that time, which wantons in its
delicate arabesques with the images of old age and death.
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