As for myself, were I encouraged by Apollo himself, I could not compose four lines without paper and ink." "Only give way boldly to your genius, madam, and you will produce poetry worthy of heaven." "That--is my opinion, too," said the cardinal.

"I entreat you to give me permission to skew your ten stanzas to the abbe." "They are not very good, but I have no objection provided it remains between us." The cardinal gave me, then, the stanzas composed by the marchioness, and I read them aloud with all the expression, all the feeling necessary to such reading.
"How well you have read those stanzas!" said the marchioness; "I can hardly believe them to be my own composition; I thank you very much.

But have the goodness to give the benefit of your reading to the stanzas which his eminence has written in answer to mine.

They surpass them much." "Do not believe it, my dear abbe," said the cardinal, handing them to me.
"Yet try not to let them lose anything through your reading." There was certainly no need of his eminence enforcing upon me such a recommendation; it was my own poetry.

I could not have read it otherwise than in my best style, especially when I had before me the beautiful woman who had inspired them, and when, besides, Bacchus was in me giving courage to Apollo as much as the beautiful eyes of the marchioness were fanning into an ardent blaze the fire already burning through my whole being.
I read the stanzas with so much expression that the cardinal was enraptured, but I brought a deep carnation tint upon the cheeks of the lovely marchioness when I came to the description of those beauties which the imagination of the poet is allowed to guess at, but which I could not, of course, have gazed upon.