Like other French poets, M. De Banville has occasionally deigned to
write feuilletons and criticisms. Not many of these scattered
leaves are collected, but one volume, "La Mer de Nice" (Poulet-
Malassis et De Broise, Paris, 1861), may be read with pleasure even
by jealous admirers of Gautier's success as a chronicler of the
impressions made by southern scenery.
To De Banville (he does not conceal it) a journey to a place so far
from Paris as the Riviera was no slight labour. Even from the
roses, the palms, the siren sea, the wells of water under the fronds
of maiden-hair fern, his mind travels back wistfully to the city of
his love.
"I am, I have always been, one of those devotees of Paris who visit
Greece only when they gaze on the face, so fair and so terrible, of
the twice-victorious Venus of the Louvre. One of those obstinate
adorers of my town am I, who will never see Italy, save in the glass
that reflects the tawny hair of Titian's Violante, or in that dread
isle of Alcinous where Lionardo shows you the mountain peaks that
waver in the blue behind the mysterious Monna Lisa. But the Faculty
of Physicians, which has, I own, the right to be sceptical, does not
believe that neuralgia can be healed by the high sun which Titian
and Veronese have fixed on the canvas. To me the Faculty prescribes
the real sun of nature and of life; and here am I, condemned to
learn in suffering all that passes in the mind of a poet of Paris
exiled from that blessed place where he finds the Cyclades and the
islands blossoming, the vale of Avalon, and all the heavenly homes
of the fairies of experience and desire.
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