“Fiddle-de-dee’s not English.”

Here’s my last quote for WG #17, still from the book Checkmate by Dorothy Dunnett (and omitting names and a few phrases for the sake of avoiding spoilers). Lymond is saying he’s already pledged to someone, something his companion doesn’t expect:

She saw that, looking ahead in the fog, his profile contained a curious and suspended calm, the smiling mask of a state far from peaceful. “Not her,” he said. “But for my lifetime.” And walking still he offered her, smiling again, four lines of verse, lightly spoken.

“Tant que je vive, mon cueur ne changera
Pour nulle vivante, tant sout elle bonne ou sage
Forte et puissante riche de hault lignaige
Mon chois est fait, aultre ne se fera.”

“I didn’t know,” she said. It was a half-truth. Subconsciously, she had always known. She said, “It’s my turn to beg your pardon. I only wanted to assure you that I have nothing to tender but friendship. But if you want it, there is a great deal of that, going cheaply.”

That verse has to be the most famous one in the series. Or infamous. I don’t know any more. It makes an appearance again (among other places) in an incident that involves an oboe in a flowerbed, but of course you have to go read that yourself.

It’s also one of those rare verses where the author actually gives a translation. (I can read fluently only in two languages. French is not one of them.) Pages later, but still a translation:

Long as I live, my heart will never vary
For no one else, however fair and good
Brave, resolute or rich, of gentle blood.
My choice is made, and I will have no other.

The last line is emphasised in bold in my copy, and I found that both touching and a teeny bit ridiculous at the same time. The original source (which contains more than this one verse) is unknown, but they appear in the poetry album of Margaret of Austria.

And this is the end of WG #17 for me! Just in case anyone wants to go through the previous quotes, a summary:

1. gems of lapis lazuli
2. strange birds cry Today! Today!
3. horns of unicorns
4. snails within the shell
5. free of all shadow
6. perfume of cedars
7. tant que je vive

Hopefully I’ll get more inspired to post after doing this for seven straight days! All posts for WG #17 are tagged as misc: weekly geeks #17. Yes, I’m a bit anal like that.

I didn’t actually mean to do this at the start, but I ended up quoting passages with quotes in them, either in the narrative itself or where the characters (notably Lymond, since he has a barrage of quotes stored in his head) are quoting something. Also ended up with quite a few verses of poetry and a lot of links.

All quotes are from Dorothy Dunnett’s Checkmate, the sixth and last book in her Lymond Chronicles. The first book in the series is titled The Game of Kings — if you like historical fiction, you might want to give the books a go. Even if you’re not much of a fan of historical fiction, you might still want to give it a try; nothing beats good storytelling, people!

Extra information appended to the quotes I either found through Google or Wikipedia or through the Yahoo Groups Game of Kings and Marzipan, though I didn’t take anything directly from the groups. (It’s just hard to attribute stuff when groups aren’t public. You should join if you have any interest in discussion — some of the stuff there is just fascinating. A warning, though: GoK especially is a minefield when it comes to spoilers, so you might want to tread carefully.)