happened there and nothing ever would, free of the perpetual greyness which seemed to cling to the place even on bright summer days.

He wondered if other people felt this. His best friend at Oxford had been fond of quoting the remark that ‘the world of the happy man is other than the world of the unhappy man’. Perhaps, he thought, this was the world he carried with him and would go on carrying no matter where he lived. Nevertheless, the idea of Paris continued to haunt him, its streets and cafés, its old houses, its gardens and squares, its cathedral and its river. He liked to stroll along the quais, stopping to browse in the little bookstalls set up against the wall, occasionally picking up a copy of the poems of  Nerval or the essays of  Georges Bataille. It was there he had come across the Regrets of du Bellay, and the title had immediately struck a chord in him. There was so much to regret, so much that could have been different.

The opening words enchanted him. The volume begins with a dedicatory poem to a Monsieur d’Avanson, who was, according to the notes, ‘Counsellor to the King in his Private Council’. But instead of the expected effusions there is only a series of bleak quatrains, the first of which sets the tone for the whole volume.

Si je n’ay plus la faveur de la Muse, Et si mes vers se trouvent imparfaits, Le lieu, le temps, l’aage ou je les ay faits, Et mes ennuis leur serviront d’excuse.

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