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Deems Taylor wrote in 1953, "In a Paris bookshop about twenty-five years ago, I ran across a volume entitled "Anthologie Libertine, ou La Fleur Francaise de la Satire Galante," a collection of upwards of two hundred pieces of light verse devoted mainly to that subject so dear to the Gallic heart, l'amour. . . . the majority were written during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries." "Those were the times of Henry IV, of Louis XIV and Louis XV; of Watteau, Boucher, and Fragonard; of Pompadour and du Barry. Society centered about Fontainebleau and Versailles. It was an era not much more dissolute than our own, but very much more outspoken. Marriages were generally contracted for any but sentimental reasons, and it was taken almost for granted that husbands and wives would cheerfully cuckold one another. "The love poems of the day might be low on morality, but they abounded in imagination and good humor. Their day ended when nineteenth-century romanticism wiped the smile from the face of l'amour.. . .I have chosen what seemed to me the best fifty-odd out of the two hundred. The translations are as literal as I could make them, and for those who would like to check their degree of literalness, every English version accompanies the French original--including the archaic French spelling.""
