is, in reality, only a feeble adaptation of his “Priez pour feu le vrai tresor de vie.” But although Jean Francois was not unknown during his lifetime, and although, as his verse testifies, he knew his name would live among those of the enduring poets after his death, his life was one of rough hardship, brief pleasures, long anxieties, and constant uncertainty. Sometimes for a few days at a time he would live in riotous luxury, but these rare epochs would immediately be succeeded by periods of want bordering on starvation. Besides which he was nearly always in peril of his life; the shadow of the gallows darkened his merriment, and the thought of the wheel made bitter his joy. Yet in spite of this hazardous and harassing life, in spite of the sharp and sudden transitions in his career, in spite of the menace of doom, the hint of the wheel and the gallows, his fund of joy remained undiminished, and this we see in his verse, which reflects with equal vividness his alternate moods of infinite enjoyment and unmitigated despair. For instance, the only two triolets which have survived from his “Trente deux Triolets joyeux and tristes” are an example of his twofold temperament. They run thus in the literal and exact translations of them made by an eminent official:-- I wish I was dead, And lay deep in the grave. I’ve a pain in my head, I wish I was dead. In a coffin of lead-- With the Wise and the Brave-- I wish I was dead, And lay deep in the grave. This passionate utterance immediately preceded, in the original text, the following verses in which his buoyant spirits rise once more to the surface:-- Thank God I’m alive In the light of the Sun! It’s a quarter to five; Thank God I’m alive! Now the hum of the hive Of the world has begun, Thank God I’m alive In the light of the Sun!