AMIENS AND 'VERT-VERT'

HOW many happy hours have I spent in that delightfullest of French hotels at Amiens with the umbrageous garden and the storks!  The storks, alas! perished during a severe winter some years ago, but pretty foreign ducks sport in the basin, and the hotel is still a very haven of rest with the thermometer at ninety degrees, a breathable, almost cool retreat.

    During the heat wave of the present year (August 1906) I betook myself with a friend to the capital of the Somme, not bent upon again revelling in its treasures, revisiting its matchless cathedral with Ruskin for guide, not minded even to stroll through its magnificent museums, historic collections, and art schools.  My errand was to visit the tomb of its one, its unique poet.

    For Vert-Vert stands absolutely alone in French literature.  Nothing like it, or approaching to it, is to be found throughout the successive stages of that vast treasure-house.  The history of the parrot, every line of which produces our unreluctant smile, has secured for its author an imperishable niche in the national Valhalla, and, for the bustling, prosperous, industrial city of his birth and residence, poetic lustre.

    That quiet, shady hotel garden was not to be quitted last August during the day, but as the sun declined we exchanged its comparative refreshingness and shadow for the cathedral.  Here all was greyness and a temperature requiring discarded wraps.  The tropical climate of the streets was left completely behind!

    Only two or three worshippers knelt here and there in the vast space; but, as is always the case, a priest with breviary in hand slowly paced backwards and forwards, keeping, I presume, an eye upon intruders.  When I ventured to ask him the local of Gresset's tomb, to my surprise he replied in very good English.

    'Yonder,' he said with an affable smile as he pointed to a tablet on one of the side pillars, 'is the monument; the Latin inscription is short, but very'—hesitating, he finished with a French word—'very spirituel.'

    'Very witty,' I added, giving the first synonym that entered my head.  'Elegant,' I think, were the better word.  The inscription is to the effect that Gresset, a son of Amiens and splendid follower of the Muses, born in 1709, died on the 16th June 1777, was interred elsewhere, and re-interred here on the 16th of August 1811.  A verse from the 118th Psalm followed the figures.

    Poor Gresset!  How happy would he have been could he have known that his memory would be thus gloriously perpetuated, generation after generation of the devout having this tribute before their eyes, the commemorative tablet forming part of the cathedral itself!

    And of perverse necessity the poet would have prided himself more on the monument than the works to which he owed it.  Like Pascal, Gresset could not overcome the dogmatic teachings of early youth.  In his later years he repudiated all claims to literary fame.  His story shows how persistently and how remorselessly theological narrowness here waged war against intellectual originality.  There is not a line in Vert-Vert, nor even in the little jeu d'esprit, Le Lutrin Vivant (The Live Lectern), that can be twisted into real disrespect to religion or the Church.  But unfortunately Gresset had exercised wit and pleasantry in dealing with ecclesiastical objects and formulas, and but for tardy recantation he would doubtless have died under clerical ban.

    When only twenty-four, Jean Baptiste Louis Gresset, at that time a student of the Jesuit College of Louis le Grand, Paris, composed Vert-Vert.  The poem, handed about in manuscript, took the public by storm; the clerical world was scandalised, and the young author was sent in disgrace to the Jesuit College of La Flèche in the Sarthe.  Soon after, he threw up alike theology and seminarist's garb, cast in his lot with letters, established himself in Paris, and wrote play after play, a series of successes culminating in that of Le Méchant, a piece that to this day holds its own in the repertory of the Comédie Française.

    Gresset, then in the prime of life, returned to Amiens in 1749, there, with the royal permission, founding a literary academy.  Unfortunately for his peace of mind, he was of a vacillating nature, and falling under the influence of Lamotte, Bishop of Amiens, was induced to burn all his unpublished manuscripts, and publicly repudiate his entire works.

    But the bishop's action only damaged himself and his unfortunate pupil.  Gresset died a morbid, deluded, self-deluding devotee.  Vert-Vert will delight the world as long as the tongue survives in which it is penned.  Did leisure permit, and did the task look at all feasible, how delightful were it to translate into English the serio-comic story of the immortal parrot who travelled from Nevers to Nantes, falling into bad company on the way, and, as will happen to mortals, thereby losing all the good habits acquired in early youth.

    Vert-Vert, then, was a parrot, young, splendid to behold, vivacious, and the most insatiable picker-up of unconsidered trifles; in other words, imitating every syllable that fell upon his ears.  But as he was the cherished darling of a convent, that of the Visitandines, he could of course learn only what was good and seemly; hence his reputation.  Indeed, so far did his fame spread that the abbess of a sister-convent at Nantes insisted upon having a visit from him.  So, amid tears and kisses of his friends, and heaps of bonbons being supplied for his journey, Vert-Vert was put on board a barge bound for the city on the Loire, among the passengers being three dragoons, two Gascons, with others not likely to be choice in their topics or words.  So, when poor Vert-Vert reached his destination, what was the horror of the pious sisters when, instead of deferentially repeating the Benedicite, the Oremus, and canticles, he broke forth into terrible oaths and expletives never before profaning such walls.  The novices, as they well might, thought the bird was speaking Greek!  Bundled back to Nevers with a flea in his ear, Vert-Vert underwent a term of seclusion and bread and water, and when it came to an end, overjoy and an overdose of sugar-plums causing his death, all his faults were straightway forgiven.  He was buried with every mark of grief, and an epitaph was composed by the nuns, ending thus--

'Here lies Vert-Vert; here lie all our hearts.'