It was in a promotion of this sort that she exalted Henri IV.
It was thus that the people's king, purified by M.Legouve, found his "ventre-saint-gris" ignominiously banished from his mouth by two sentences, and that he was reduced, like the girl in the old _fabliau_, to the necessity of letting fall from those royal lips only pearls and sapphires and rubies: the apotheosis of falsity, in very truth.
The fact is that nothing is so commonplace as this conventional refinement and nobility.

Nothing original, no imagination, no invention in this style; simply what one has seen everywhere--rhetoric, bombast, commonplaces, flowers of college eloquence, poetry after the style of Latin verses.

The poets of this school are eloquent after the manner of stage princes and princesses, always sure of finding in the costumer's labelled cases, cloaks and pinchbeck crowns, which have no other disadvantage than that of having been used by everybody.

If these poets never turn the leaves of the Bible, it is not because they have not a bulky book of their own, the _Dictionnaire de rimes_.

That is the source of their poetry--_fontes aquarum_.
It will be seen that, in all this, nature and truth get along as best they can.