Et toi, grande Sappho, reine de Mitylène! Lionne que l’Amour furieux enchaîna. Près de la mer grondante, avec son Erinna, Elle enseignait le rhythme et ses délicatesses Au troupeau triomphal des jeunes poétesses, Et glacée et brûlante, au bruit amer des flots Elle mêlait ses cris de rage et ses sanglots. O toi qui nous atteins avec des flèches sûres, De quels feux tu brûlas et de quelles blessures Son chaste sein meurtri par le baiser du vent! Mais comme rien ne meurt de ce qui fut vivant, Sa colère amoureuse et de souffrance avide, Plus tard devait dicter sa plainte au fier Ovide, Qui, choisissant l’amour, eût la meilleure part, Et frémir dans les vers d’Horace et de Ronsard.
Baudelaire (1821-1867), the morbid realist, uses the story of the Leucadian Leap in his _Lesbos_:
—L’oeil d’azur est vaincu par l’oeil noir que tachète Le cercle ténébreux tracé par les douleurs De la mâle Sapho, l’amante et le poète! Plus belle que Vénus se dressant sur le monde.
In a literary fragment (1845), entitled _Sapho_, he refers to a famous and remarkable tragedy on Sappho which was to be published soon afterwards by Arsène Houssaye. He quotes some verses which are reminiscent of Sappho’s second ode:
Oui, Phaon, je vous aime; et, lorsque je vous vois, Je perds le sentiment et la force et la voix. Je souffre tout le jour le mal de votre absence, Mai qui n’égale pas l’heur de votre présence; Si bien que vous trouvant, quand vous venez le soir, La cause de ma joie et de mon désespoir, Mon âme les compense, et sous les lauriers roses Etouffe l’ellébore et les soucis moroses.
In 1873 we have a translation by Etienne Prosper Dubois-Gucham, _La Grecque Pléiade_; in 1878 that of P. L. Courier; in 1882, the verses of de la Roche. About this time J. Richepin published in his undated romance, _Grandes Amoureuses_, prose translations of several fragments, and in 1889 Paul Lenois made a prose version. In 1884, Alphonse Daudet, after writing a novel on French life and customs as a warning to young men, and picturing a courtesan carried upstairs in the arms of her lover, gave the courtesan and the novel the title of _Sapho_. Soon afterwards appeared anonymously Madame E. Caro’s _Sapho_. In 1895 were heard the songs of Pierre Louys, who in _Les chansons de Bilitis traduites du Grec pour la première fois_[176] transforms Mytilene into a modern Sodom and Sappho into the mistress of a band of _hetaerae_. He pretends that he is translating Greek poems that were found in excavating the poetess’ grave on Amathus. He even represents them as published by a Doctor Heim of Leipzig. Further to mystify the reader Louys tells of some of the poems that have not been translated and marks restorations in the text, as if these songs had actually been found marred and mutilated and as if the archaeologist had restored the missing words. He even uses, to give a Greek atmosphere, many Greek expressions such as _Kypris Philommeïdès_. Many of his Greek forms, such as Dzeus, are absurd. Charming as are these _Bucoliques en Pamphylie_, _Élégies à Mitylène_, _Épigrammes dans l’île de Chypre_, they belong rather to pornographic literature, as does his romance called _Aphrodite_, in which the pseudo-Lesbian idea of two girls marrying one another is to be found. Such bits of perverted Sapphism as appear in many other French writers have no place in the literature of the real Sappho, who can now, after the discovery of all the new papyri, easily be distinguished from the Sappho of romance and legend. Unfortunately the last French translation by Meunier (1911) does not include these recent relics.