LOVE AS IT WAS IN THE TIME OF LOUIS XIV
I
Thrice on the lips and twice on the eyes
I kiss you or ever I kiss your bosom.—
When love is young would you have it wise,
Wise as the world goes?—No! 'tis a blossom
Lovely and wise since it's lovely; content
To live or to die as its folly pleases:
Life is a rose and the rose's scent
Is love, that grows as the rose increases.
II
If I tell you the Marquis will die, will you smile?
And laugh when he's dead?—This powder, my lily,
That seems but an innocent sweet in this phial—
Do not touch it! breathe distant!—a poison Exili
Used a life to discover. Its formula left
To a pupil (well worthy the master!), the prudent
And pious Sainte Croix. Him, of teacher bereft,
The Devil, I deem, must have taken as student.
III
Quite a dealer in death. And ours was a case
That those difficult drugs of his laboratory
Demanded. I visited; found him; his face,
Bent over a sublimate,—safe from the hoary
Light particles,—masked with a mask of fine glass.
I told him your danger, Marie, and expounded
Our passion, despair, with many an “Alas!”
He smiled while a paste in a mortar he pounded.
IV
Three fistfuls of Louis!—“He'd do it,” he said.—
A delicate dust, gum, liquid and metal
Crushed, crucibled. . . . “Stay! tie this mask on your head.
You see, but a grain on your rose's pink petal
Has shriveled and blasted it—look, how it dries!—
A perilous pulver . . . could Satan make better? . . .
To mix with that present of perfumes—she dies,
And who is the wiser? Or, say in a letter
V
“To the husband of her who has smiled on you since
Another grows bald?”—And he poured in a bottle
The subtlety.—“Bah! be he beggar or prince,
If he kiss but the seal the venom will throttle.”—
“Well,” I thought, “I will test ere I risk.” Slyly drew
My dagger; approached to the bandlet, that tightly
Supported his mask, its keen point. . . . It was true!—
When it cracked he fell dead; he but breathed of it lightly.
VI
Your letter is sealed and is sent. You are mine!—
By now he has broken the wax. . . . If there flutters
Some dust in his nostrils, who, who will divine
That thus it was poisoned?—Our alchemist utters
No word!—You are happy? and I?—Oh, I feel
That I love and am loved.—The tidings comes heavy
To-night to the King; you are there; you will reel—
Will faint!—Now away to the royal levee.
[1]
Note.—In this poem, which originally appeared in a
volume of mine entitled Lyrics and Idylls, published in
1890, some hypercritical critic in the New York Nation
accused me of imitating Browning's The Laboratory.
The truth of the matter is that the poem was written
ten months before I had ever read Browning's Dramatic
Lyrics, and was suggested to me by the reading
of the following passage in one of E. T. W. Hoffman's
(the German Poe's) stories. The passage occurs in
Mademoiselle De Scuderi and is as follows: “The
poisons which Sainte Croix prepared were of so subtle
a nature that if the powder (called by the Parisians
Poudre de Succession, or Succession Powder) were
prepared with the face exposed, a single inhalation of
it might cause instantaneous death. Sainte Croix
therefore, when engaged in its manufacture, always
wore a mask of fine glass. One day, just as he was
pouring a prepared powder into a phial, his mask fell
off, and inhaling the fine particles of the poison, he fell
dead on the spot.”
