It’s not enough to drink from the water that I’ve consecrated To that fair Helen, in order to be in love: You must also sleep in a shaded cave Which has, adjoining a riverbank, its entry in a hillside. You must with eager foot dance over the meadow, And turn nine times around a hollow willow-tree; You must walk the plank, you must make vows To the Father St. Germain who watches over the countryside. That done, when her heart is a frozen icicle, It will feel fire, in some strange way, Inflaming its coldness. Believe this writing! Love, stained with the red blood of the Giants, Making clean in this water his fair body stripped bare, Left there forever his fires and his colour. A spell with which to win your beloved, apparently. St. Germain is the patron saint of Paris (no surprise to football fans), and I guess by extension France. Love, in the final tercet, is Cupid again. Blanchemain offers a variant in line 2, “A ceste belle Grecque …” (‘To that fair Greek…’), obviously still pointing to Helen. A tiny detail: only the 8th poem on the blog whose first line begins with an ‘I’; however bizarre that seems.