"Mais Florise n'est pas une femme. Je suis L'harmonieuse voix que berce vos ennuis;Je suis la lyre aux sons divers que le poete Fait resonner et qui sans lui serait muette -Une comedienne enfin. Je ne suis pas Une femme."An actress who was not a woman had little to do in the company of Scarron's Angelique and Mademoiselle de l'Estoile. Florise, in short, is somewhat too allegorical and haughty a creature; while Colombine and Nerine (Vaudeville, June 1864) are rather tricksy imps than women of flesh and blood. M. De Banville's stage, on the whole, is one of glitter and fantasy; yet he is too much a Greek for the age that appreciates "la belle Helene," too much a lyric dramatist to please the contemporaries of Sardou; he lends too much sentiment and dainty refinement to characters as flimsy as those of Offenbach's drama.
Like other French poets, M. De Banville has occasionally deigned to write feuilletons and criticisms. Not many of these scattered leaves are collected, but one volume, "La Mer de Nice" (Poulet-Malassis et De Broise, Paris, 1861), may be read with pleasure even by jealous admirers of Gautier's success as a chronicler of the impressions made by southern scenery.
To De Banville (he does not conceal it) a journey to a place so far from Paris as the Riviera was no slight labour. Even from the roses, the palms, the siren sea, the wells of water under the fronds of maiden-hair fern, his mind travels back wistfully to the city of his love.
"I am, I have always been, one of those devotees of Paris who visit Greece only when they gaze on the face, so fair and so terrible, of the twice-victorious Venus of the Louvre. One of those obstinate adorers of my town am I, who will never see Italy, save in the glass that reflects the tawny hair of Titian's Violante, or in that dread isle of Alcinous where Lionardo shows you the mountain peaks that waver in the blue behind the mysterious Monna Lisa. But the Faculty of Physicians, which has, I own, the right to be sceptical, does not believe that neuralgia can be healed by the high sun which Titian and Veronese have fixed on the canvas. To me the Faculty prescribes the real sun of nature and of life; and here am I, condemned to learn in suffering all that passes in the mind of a poet of Paris exiled from that blessed place where he finds the Cyclades and the islands blossoming, the vale of Avalon, and all the heavenly homes of the fairies of experience and desire."Nice is Tomi to this Ovid, but he makes the best of it, and sends to the editor of the Moniteur letters much more diverting than the "Tristia." To tell the truth, he never overcomes his amazement at being out of Paris streets, and in a glade of the lower Alps he loves to be reminded of his dear city of pleasure. Only under the olives of Monaco, those solemn and ancient trees, he feels what surely all men feel who walk at sunset through their shadow--the memory of a mysterious twilight of agony in an olive garden.
"Et ceux-ci, les pales oliviers, n'est-ce pas de ces heures desolees ou, comme torture supreme, le Sauveur acceptait en son ame l'irreparable misere du doute, n'est-ce pas alors qu'il ont appris de lui e courber le front sous le poids imperieux des souvenirs?"The pages which M. De Banville consecrates to the Villa Sardou, where Rachel died, may disenchant, perhaps, some readers of Mr.
