Poetry was getting a little worn out, but to restore its freshness there were the poets of the people.  Charles Poncy, of Toulon, a bricklayer, published a volume of poetry, in 1842, entitled Marines.  George Sand adopted him.  He was the demonstration of her theory, the example which illustrated her dream.  She congratulated him and encouraged him.  “You are a great poet,” she said to him, and she thereupon speaks of him to all her friends.  “Have you read Baruch?” she asks them.  “Have you read Poncy, a poet bricklayer of twenty years of age?” She tells every one about his book, dwells on its beauties, and asks people to speak of it.

As a friend of George Sand, I have examined the poems by Poncy of which she specially speaks.  The first one is entitled Meditation sur les toits.  The poet has been obliged to stay on the roof to complete his work, and while there he meditates.

"Le travail me retient bien tard sur ces toitures. . . .”

He then begins to wonder what he would see if, like Asmodee in the Diable boiteux, he could have the roof taken off, so that the various rooms could be exposed to view.  Alas! he would not always find the concord of the Golden Age.

Que de fois contemolant cet amas de maisons Quetreignent nos remparts couronnes de gazons, Et ces faubourgs naissants que la ville trop pleine Pour ses enfants nouveaux eleve dans la plaine.  Immobiles troufieaux ou notre clocher gris Semble un patre au milieu de ses blanches brebis, Jai pense que, malgre notre angoisse et nos peines, Sous ces toits paternels il existait des haines, Et que des murs plus forts que ces murs mitoyens Separent ici-bas les coeurs des citoyens.

This was an appeal to concord, and all brothers of humanity were invited to rally to the watchword.

The intention was no doubt very good.  Then, too, murs mitoyens was an extremely rich and unexpected rhyme for citoyens.  This was worthy indeed of a man of that party.

Another of the poems greatly admired by George Sand was Le Forcat.

     Regarder le forcat sur la poutre equarrie
     Poser son sein hale que le remords carie. . .

Certainly if Banville were to lay claim to having invented rhymes that are puns, we could only say that he was a plagiarist after reading Charles Poncy.

In another poem addressed to the rich, entitled L’hiver, the poet notices with grief that the winter

     . . . qui remplit les salons, les Watres,
     Remplit aussi la Morgue et les amphitheatres.

He is afraid that the people will, in the end, lose their patience, and so he gives to the happy mortals on this earth the following counsel: