Riches, a vos plaisirs faites participer L’homme que les malheurs s’acharnent a frapper Oh, faites travailler le pere de famille, Pour qu’il puisse arbiter la pudeur de sa fille, Pourqu’aux petits enfants maigris par les douleurs Il rapporte, le soir, le pain et non des pleurs, Afin que son epouse, au desespoir en proie, Se ranime a sa vue et l’embrasse avec joie, Afin qua l’Eternel, a l’heure de sa mort.  Vous n’offriez pas un coeur carie de remords.

The expression certainly leaves much to be desired in these poems, but they are not lacking in eloquence.  We had already had something of this kind, though, written by a poet who was not a bricklayer.  He, too, had asked the rich the question following: 

Dans vos fetes d’hiver, riches, heureux du monde, Quand le bal tournoyant de ses feux vous inonde. . .  Songez-vous qu’il est la, sous le givre et la neige, Ce pere sans travail que la famine assiege?

He advises them to practise charity, the sister of prayer.

     “Donnez afin qu’un jour, a votre derniere heure,
     Contre tous vos peches vous ayez la Priere
     D’un mendiant puissant au ciel.”

We cannot, certainly, expect Poncy to be a Victor Hugo.  But as we had Victor Hugo’s verses, of what use was it for them to be rewritten by Poncy?  My reason for quoting a few of the fine lines from Feuilles d’automne is that I felt an urgent need of clearing away all these platitudes.  Poncy was not the only working-man poet.  Other trades produced their poets too.  The first poem in Marines is addressed to Durand, a poet carpenter, who introduces himself as “Enfant de la foret qui ceint Fontainebleau.”

This man handled the plane and the lyre, just as Poncy did the trowel and the lyre.

This poetry of the working-classes was to give its admirers plenty of disappointment.  George Sand advised Poncy to treat the things connected with his trade, in his poetry.  “Do not try to put on other men’s clothes, but let us see you in literature with the plaster on your hands which is natural to you and which interests us,” she said to him.

Proud of his success with the ladies of Paris, Poncy wanted to wash his hands, put on a coat, and go into society.  It was all in vain that George Sand beseeched Poncy to remain the poet of humanity.  She exposed to him the dogma of impersonality in such fine terms, that more than one bourgeois poet might profit by what she said.

“An individual,” she said, “who poses as a poet, as a pure artist, as a god like most of our great men do, whether they be bourgeois or aristocrats, soon tires us with his personality. . . .  Men are only interested in a man when that man is interested in humanity.”

This was all of no use, though, for Poncy was most anxious to treat other subjects rather more lively and—­slightly libertine.  His literary godmother admonished him.