Saverne, cf. page 55, note

5. embarquement pour Cythère, apainting by Watteau (cf. page 69, note 3). The island of Cythera (ancient) just off S. Greece, was sacred to Venus and to love.

Page 73. — 1. Saint-Germain-des-Prés, an abbey dating from the sixth century, located in Paris, long the home of the Bénédictine friars of Saint-Maur, who carried on in its rich library their vast learned investigations.

2. Beaumarchais (1732-1799), oneof the most restless, versatile, and adventurous spirits in ail literature. His chequered life finds him at one moment sustaining the noisiest law-suits of the âge, at another exporting arms and ammunition to the American Revolutionists, at another acting as secret envoy of Marie-Antoinette, and at another editing Voltaire's works and satirizing the court and the government in the two gayest comédies written since Molière : the Barbier de Séville and the Mariage de Figaro (cf. pages 169^.).

Page 74. — 1. rosières, an immémorial /<?&?, in certain villages, was the annual crowning with roses of the village girl chosen as the most worthy and virtuous. In the hey-day of eighteenth century sensibility, this pretty custom attracted the attention of literary and polite society, and many a dame of fashion masqueraded as a rosière, who would hardly hâve been awarded the distinction by any more disinterested suffrage than her own.

Page 75. — 1. Chantilly, a town about 25 miles north of Paris, the seat of a splendid palace, which, in the eighteenth century, belonged to the Condé family.

2. jardin d'Alcine, the garden of the enchantress Armida (not Alcina, who figures in Ariosto), is one of the numerous Bowers of Bliss suggested to the modem poet by Homer's épisodes of Circe and Calypso. It figures as a retreat of inglorious and degrading ease in the great epic, the Jérusalem Delivered, of the Italian poet Tasso — in French Le Tasse — (1544-95).

3. Petit Trianon, a tiny palace in the parle of Versailles. Marie- Antoinette was very fond of this résidence, which was the scène of her Swiss village. Le Grand Trianon was a royal palace in the vicinity ; cf. page 82.