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Link to an image of this page  Link to an image of this page  [L4v p88]

D’UN SEUL ATTOUCHEMENT
Volupté soüille l’ame.

D’Un simple frayement, bien qu’il semble petit,
La poix colle à nos doigts une soüillante bave:
Et l’eau, qui purge tout, difficillement lave
La tache, qui long temps y paroit un petit.

La glus de Volupté, qui le bon subvertit,
Plus que la poix encor visqueusement entrave:
Car, pour peu qu’on la touche, une marque elle engrave,
Que l’eau de la raison à grand peine amortit.

Si tost que derogeant aux coustumes antiques
La Volupté flestrit les façons Laconiques,
Sparte en un temps perdit & l’Empire, & son los.

La poix souîlle le corps, la Volupté nostre ame:
Celle là nous ternit, ceste cy nous diffame:
Et par elle nous pend l’ire Divine au dos.

Link to an image of this page  Link to an image of this page  [M1r p89]

Ad Anatolium Tydaeum.[1]

Solo tactu inquinat.[2]

It pollutes by touch alone.

Group of women and one man standing in a temple. Man is touching a lump of pitch on a plinth which has greek and latin inscriptions.
[Click on image to enlarge]

PIx tractata manum solo tactu inquinat: Et dat
Difficilem, quam non eluat unda, notam.
Sic semel, & modicum quamvis gustata Voluptas
Inficit, & turpi stigmate tacta nocet.

Pitch, once touched, defiles the hand by one touch alone and produces a difficult mark which water does not wash away. So in the same way, however little Voluptas may have been tasted, she infects and harms what she has touched with a filthy stain.

Notes:

1.  Anatolius Tydaeus: unidentified; he is also referred to in Boissard’s Disticha in icones..., p. 52, in which context it seems he was somehow connected to the Rye family, prominent nobles in the Franche-Comté.

2.  A reference (supported by the pictura and the quatrain) to Ecclesiaticus 13:1 - ‘Qui tetigerit picem inquinabitur’ (He that toucheth pitch shall be defiled).

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