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There are who rest not; who think long

Till they discern as from a hill

At the sun’s hour of morning song.

Known of souls only, and those souls free,

The sacred spaces of the sea.

A. C. Swinburne (Prelude—Songs before Sunrise).

The sea typifies the wider, nobler life of the soul.

Je prends mon bien où je le trouve.

(I take my property wherever I find it.)

Molière (1622-1673).

This famous saying is quoted in French literature as though Molière had said, “I admit plagiarism, but I so improve what I borrow from others that it becomes my own” (see Larousse, under “Bien”).

“Tho’ old the thought and oft expressed,

’Tis his at last who says it best.”

It is, however, an interesting question whether this was the true meaning intended by Molière.

The story is told by Grimarest, the first biographer of the great dramatist. In 1671 Molière produced Les Fourberies de Scapin, in which he had inserted two scenes taken from Le Pedant Joué, of Cyrano de Bergerac (1619-1655). (They are the amusing scenes where Geronte repeatedly says, Que diable allait-il faire dans cette galère, “What the deuce was he doing in that Turkish galley?”) Grimarest says that Cyrano had used in these scenes what he had overheard from Molière, and that the latter, when taxed with the plagiarism, replied, “Je reprends mon bien où je le trouve” (“I take back my property, wherever I find it”). That is to say, he definitely denied the plagiarism.