had Jong been the dear and intimate friend of Voltaire, had represented with extraordinary effect most of his heroines, and had played Jocasta only five days before her death. He had been summoned to her deathbed, and she died in his arms. Such was the woman to whom the clergy of Paris refused Christian burial, because of her profession. Her body was taken secretly by night in a hackney-coach to the bank of the Seine, not very far from where is now the Pont de la Concorde, and there hastily interred. It may be imagined with what feelings Voltaire, bringing with him from England a tenfold horror of fanaticism, beheld this outrage; and those feelings, which he himself describes as "indignation, tenderness, and pity," found expression in verse;[1]—
"On the Death of the Renowned Actress, Mademoiselle le Couvreur.
The lovely eyes, so eloquently bright,
With livid horrors of the grave o'erspread!
O Muses, Graces, Loves, whose looks she wore,
Whom we both worshipped, your own work restore!
Too late—tis o'er—one kiss, and she is dead.
Is dead!—and as the dismal tidings fly,
All hearers stand transfixed with grief, as I.
I hear the sorrowing Arts their loss deplore;
Weeping, they cry, 'Melpomene's no more!"
- ↑ In poems of this class he seeks compensation for the severe restrictions to which writers of French poetry must submit, in frequently varying the order of the rhymes and the measure; and in these particulars the translation follows the original with sufficient closeness to preserve the external resemblance. In translating pieces of similar versification the same rule is observed in this volume.
