Verlaine

Paul Verlaine, famed French poet, loved a girl "with a long, pale face, a lisp and a threat of embonpoint." She had, he said, a capacity for incurable grudges. When Verlaine, jugged for drunkenness, lay in prison in Paris in 1870, she brought him a meat pie. He ate, praised. She had always understood, she said, that rats made savoury eating if a man were hungry. Verlaine divorced her.

Long before this untoward incident, he had loved her truly, had written for her a group of deathless love poems, La Bonne Chanson. One of these, a lover's serenade in the dawn, which begins "Avant que tu ne t'en ailles," was set to music 23 years ago by C. M. Loeffler, an Alsatian-American. It was played by the Boston Symphony in 1902, revised, played again by the same orchestra in 1918. Last week, in Manhattan, it was performed by the Philharmonic under the direction of Willem Van Hoogstraten. Once more the marvelously skilful orchestration, the beauty of the music, cold as the fires of Verlaine's "pale etoile du matin," was lauded by critics.