Théophile de Viau

Théophile de Viau (1590 – 25 September 1626) was a French Baroque poet and dramatist.

• Cette femme a fait comme Troie:
  De braves gens sans aucun fruit
  Furent dix ans à cette proie
  Un cheval n'y fut qu'une nuit.
  • This woman has behaved like Troy:
    It took brave men ten years of fight
    To ply without success this prey,
    Which one horse brought down in a night.
  • Epigramme, La Quintescence satyrique (1622), p. 22 (tr. J. R. Theobald, 1980)

• Geoffrey Brereton (ed.) The Penguin Book of French Verse, vol. 2 (1964 [1958]), p. 171
• Norbert Guterman (ed.) The Anchor Book of French Quotations (1990 [1965]), pp. 72, 73; originally published as A Book of French Quotations (Doubleday, 1963)
• John R. Theobald, The Lost Wine: Seven Centuries of French into English Lyrical Poetry (1980), p. 123