THE LANGUAGE OF FLOWERS. 
97 
She caused the Jeux Floraux to be celebrated again 
each year, with renewed splendor, and with her own 
hand bestowed a golden eglantine on a competitor 
of her own sex, Antoinette Villeneuve. 
Clemence, in spite of the most brilliant offers, 
never married. She died, aged about fifty, at the 
beginning of the sixteenth century, and by her will 
left nearly all her property to her native city, t,o be 
applied to the encouragement of intellectual develop¬ 
ment. She ordained three golden flowers as prizes — 
the violet, the eglantine, and the marigold. As the 
old romance prettily says, — 
“ Eglantine est la fleur que j’aime, 
La violette est ma couleur; 
Dans le souci tu vois 1’embleme 
Des chagrins de mon triste coeur.” 
This Festival of Flowers, as it is called, survives 
still, four hundred years after its foundation ; though 
the contests of the present day are in modern French, 
which scarcely equals, for poetical purposes, the more 
flexible and impassioned Provencal. It is celebrated 
on the third of May. The ceremonies begin with a 
eulogy of Clemence Isaure, after which the commis¬ 
sioners go in pomp to take the prize flowers from 
the high altar of the church of Our Lady de la 
Daurade, where Isaure was interred. Meantime the 
Secretary reports on the pieces offered by the concur¬ 
rents, and on the return of the commissioners the 
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