XV.

He had lost the small income he had lived on when I first knew him, and had sunk into great poverty, but to set the balance right remembered a title Louis XV. had conferred upon a Jacobite ancestor who had fought at Pondicherry and called himself Comte de Glenstrae, and gathered about him Frenchmen and Spaniards whose titles were more shadowy perhaps, an obscure claimant to the French throne among the rest, the most as poor as he and some less honest, and in that dream-Court cracked innumerable mechanical jokes—to hide discoragement—and yet remained to the end courageous in thought and kind in act.

Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume III Autobiographies W.B. Yeats 1965

He had lost the small income he had lived on when I first knew him, and had sunk into great poverty, but to set the balance right remembered a title Louis XV. had conferred upon a Jacobite ancestor who had fought at Pondicherry and called himself Comte de Glenstrae, and gathered about him Frenchmen and Spaniards whose titles were more shadowy perhaps, an obscure claimant to the French throne among the rest, the most as poor as he and some less honest, and in that dream-Court cracked innumerable mechanical jokes—to hide discoragement—and yet remained to the end courageous in thought and kind in act.

Collected Works of W. B. Yeats Volume III Autobiographies W.B. Yeats 1965