Note 2 — PART ONE FOUR LANDSCAPES

“Gringoire.” This is not of course, our poet’s name, but a nickname earned actually at school. There is a story by Alphonse Daudet, in “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” called the “Chèvre de M. Séguin,” which relates how in the end the wolf ate Mr. Séguin’s goat. This story, in the form of a letter, is addressed to a poet, one Gringoire, and is meant to show that though a poet may struggle all his life against poverty, in the end the wolf, starvation, will get him. At Gringoire’s school the Sixth Form were studying French from the “Lettres de Mon Moulin,” and since even at that date Gringoire wrote poems, his kindly schoolmates learned the name and so bestowed it upon him—as it has been bestowed on many out-at-elbowed literati.