Just a quickie, honest.
When I was about sixteen I was tutored in the necessary skills involved in reading French poetry in national competitions for the glory of our boys' grammar school, and when I didn't win, after KEGS had paid for my train ticket to Londres, I was coventrated for a while by the staff (silly buggers.) But the tutoring was done by an assistant, Bernard Dick, who was on the school's payroll for perhaps no more than a year, and I don't know, perhaps he saw something that wasn't really there in me - but if it wasn't there before, it was there when he'd finished with me - an abiding love for French poetry and the glorious sound it makes, and I'm still a bit of a dab hand at the old liaisons, however dangereuses at my time of life (though Pierre Bernac's treatise is still the best guide to the vagaries of French pronunciation at different times and in different circonstances, not that I know anything about it, not being French, mind.)
The nub of this quickie is that it has taken me nearly fifty years to find the poem I read that day in Londres in the true competitive spirit of the English School - win, and then forget it, or you're no gentleman. My memory of it was that it was de Musset. It wasn't. I seemed to remember, later, that it was a conversation between a lute-enabled poet and a philosopher (been to Montmartre lately? It's changed a bit.) So Victor Hugo leapt to mind, and it took me a very long time to read all the poetry Hugo wrote only to find that it wasn't by him (nice journey, though.)
Anyroadup, to cut a very long story short, last year the web came up with the goods. The line I had remembered a bit, from rhythm and a repetition of "J'ai trop... j'ai trop... j'ai trop", was this:
J'ai trop vu, trop senti, trop aimé dans ma vie...
I won't do your work for you, for the joy of exploration and discovery is its own reward, but here's two hints - Lamartine. Vallon. (And another - Byron.)
Bonne nuit, chers amis. Maintenant, c'est à vous.
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