Forbear to criticise my perfect prose--
Painting on vellum is my weakest point.

Again, the _ballade_ of which the "Envoi" runs:--

Prince, when you light your pipe with radium spills,
Especially invented for the King--
Remember this, the worst of human ills:
Life without matches is a dismal thing,

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:--