Gourdon’s poem entitled “Ode to the Cup-and-Ball” obeyed the poetic rules which governed these works, rules that were invariable in their application.  Each poem contained in the first canto a description of the “object sung,” preceded (as in the case of Gourdon) by a species of invocation, of which the following is a model:—­

  I sing the good game that belongeth to all,
  The game, be it known, of the Cup and the Ball;
  Dear to little and great, to the fools and the wise;
  Charming game! where the cure of all tedium lies;
  When we toss up the ball on the point of a stick
  Palamedus himself might have envied the trick;
  O Muse of the Loves and the Laughs and the Games,
  Come down and assist me, for, true to your aims,
  I have ruled off this paper in syllable squares. 
  Come, help me—­

After explaining the game and describing the handsomest cup-and-balls recorded in history, after relating what fabulous custom it had formerly brought to the Singe-Vert and to all dealers in toys and turned ivories, and finally, after proving that the game attained to the dignity of statics, Gourdon ended the first canto with the following conclusion, which will remind the erudite reader of all the conclusions of the first cantos of all these poems:—­

  ’Tis thus that the arts and the sciences, too,
  Find wisdom in things that seemed silly to you.

The second canto, invariably employed to depict the manner of using “the object,” explaining how to exhibit it in society and before women, and the benefit to be derived therefrom, will be readily conceived by the friends of this virtuous literature from the following quotation, which depicts the player going through his performance under the eyes of his chosen lady:—­

  Now look at the player who sits in your midst,
  On that ivory ball how his sharp eye is fixt;
  He waits and he watches with keenest attention,
  Its least little movement in all its precision;
  The ball its parabola thrice has gone round,
  At the end of the string to which it is bound. 
  Up it goes! but the player his triumph has missed,
  For the disc has come down on his maladroit wrist;
  But little he cares for the sting of the ball,
  A smile from his mistress consoles for it all.

It was this delineation, worthy of Virgil, which first raised a doubt as to Delille’s superiority over Gourdon.  The word “disc,” contested by the opinionated Brunet, gave matter for discussions which lasted eleven months; in fact, until Gourdon the scientist, one evening when all present were on the point of getting seriously angry, annihilated the anti-discers by observing:—­

“The moon, called a disc by poets, is undoubtedly a ball.”

“How do you know that?” retorted Brunet.  “We have never seen but one side.”

The third canto told the regulation story,—­in this instance, the famous anecdote of the cup-and-ball which all the world knows by heart, concerning a celebrated minister of Louis XVI.  According to the sacred formula delivered by the “Debats” from 1810 to 1814, in praise of these glorious words, Gourdon’s ode “borrowed fresh charms from poesy to embellish the tale.”