Laudator Temporis Acti

D.B. Wyndham Lewis (1891-1969), Ronsard (London: Sheed & Ward, 1944), pp. 116-117:

Spring and high summer melting into the mists of vintage-time along the Loire—not even Progress and the internal-combustion engine, Caliban's noblest invention, not even the last corruptions and omens of impending doom of the Third Republic could destroy the bloom of this garden of France, as Panurge rightly called it. The soft blissful skies of Touraine; the "quiet kindness of the Angevin air"; the fragrant noyers grolliers, Rabelais' walnuts, murmuring on a clear June or September night by his smooth-sliding Vienne; the wide Loire flowing royally past the towers of Tours among pale golden sands; those sumptuous and shining Renaissance sonnets in stone and glass, Amboise, Chenonceaux, Chambord, Langeais, Villandry, Azay-le-Rideau, whose names are like sunlight seen through claret, like the names of all that countryside, Vendôme, Marmoutiers, Chinon, Rochecorbon, Vouvray—all these things remain to-day as when Innocent the pastrycook thumped his dough and Rabelais tippled in the Painted Cellar at Chinon, and the shepherds of Lerné were set "to keep the Vines, and hinder the Starlings from eating up the Grapes", and any old woman met hobbling along by the river at Porthuaux might be the same "old Lourpidon Hag" who dispersed such frigid comfort to Picrochole, world-dictator, after his downfall. When Ronsard rode out, cocking his bonnet and humming an air of De Lassus or Janequin, to meet la petite Angevine at St. Cosme-lez-Tours or Bourgueil, that gigantic laughter with which Rabelais had shaken the air of Touraine twenty years before cannot have died away, for it has not quite died away yet. Those sunlit smiling fields and woodlands of the Chinonnais remember the Picrocholian War, and the Doctor's farmhouse of La Devinière still stands a witness on the battlefield, though the Tavern of the Moon has long since vanished from the plains of Valmy, terrain of a conflict hardly less memorable.

"The quiet kindness of the Angevin air" — last line of G.K. Chesterton's translation of Joachim du Bellay's sonnet "Heureux qui, comme Ulysse, a fait un beau voyage." La Devinière, Birthplace of Rabelais