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louage). Variations from ordinary spelling are sometimes used to make words satisfy this rule of rhyming for the eye (je vien_, _je voi), but they are hardly approved. The ear seems even sometimes to play the subordinate rôle in the rhyme, for words are found in rhyme which satisfy the eye but not the ear (_Vénus: nus_). Rhyme as above described is called sufficient (suffisante); if it also involve identity of the consonant preceding the rhyming vowel (consonne d'appui) it is called rich (riche); (examples: _étoiles: toiles_, bandit;
The French ear is unlike the English in considering rime riche an additional beauty; the Romanticists especially have cultivated it, and there are whole poems where simply sufficient rhyme is the exception. A word may not rhyme with itself, but words identical in form but different in meaning may rhyme with each other (cf. first, fifth, and eleventh stanzas of les Djinns, p. 95.
By the use of lines of different length and especially by the arrangement of the rhymes a great variety of stanza forms has been created, as well as certain definite forms for complete short compositions, known as fixed forms. The most common are the ballade, rondel_, _rondeau_, and _triolet, developed especially in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and revived in our own, and the sonnet, introduced from Italy during the Renaissance.
The ballade consists of three stanzas, of eight or ten lines each, that repeat exactly the same rhyme arrangement, and of a shorter stanza of four or five lines, called the envoy, which repeats the rhyme arrangement of the second part of the other stanzas. The line of the ballade has generally eight syllables, but may have ten or twelve (see pp. 1, 4, 5, 235).
The rondel, as usually printed, consists of three parts, the first of four lines, the second of four, the last two of which are the first two of the first part