Abstract
Daniel Heller-Roazen, professor at Princeton University, has shown that metrics, which is a matter of music and numerical relationships, endures when languages collapse and survives their obsolescence and oblivion. In other words, the arts of the trivium are threatened by oblivion, but the art of verse, the only art of language, is also part of the quadrivium and survives because of it. He has clarified and illustrated this idea by following the lecture of the Middle Ages, from Saint Augustine to Boèce, Jean de Garlande, Evrard de Conty and Eustache Deschamps ("Le Gai savoir des vers vieillis").
