To Madame Sand

“This art-vaulted rock, masterwork of a past age,

This rock of Tarascon, lodged in times foregone

Giants descended one and all from the mountains of Foix,

Whose so many excessive bones sure witness gage.”

O Seigneur Du Bartas! I am of your lineage,

I who knit my verse to yours of times forgone:

But the true descendants of the old Counts de Foix

Have need of witnesses to speak in this our age.

I have passed by Salzburg under quaking peaks;

The Stork of Austria there fed the Milanese.

Barbarossa and Richard both have blessed that refuge.

Snow rules on the brows of their summits never traveled,

And they are, so I’ve been told, the very boneyards pallid

Of the old mountains gnawed by the sea of the Deluge.

Gérard de Nerval