dancers' romp and rush,
And your too hideous carnival,
That turns your cheeks all chill and blue,
And skips the mud in hob-nail'd shoe--
A truly dismal festival.

To pale-faced girls, and in a squalid room,
Paquita sang; the murky town beneath
Was Rouen whence the slender spires rise
To chew the storm with teeth.
Rouen so hideous, noisy, full of rage--

And here followed a magnificent description of Rouen--where Dinah had
never been--written with the affected brutality which, a little later,
inspired so many imitations of Juvenal; a contrast drawn between the
life of a manufacturing town and the careless life of Spain, between
the love of Heaven and of human beauty, and the worship of machinery, in
short, between poetry and sordid money-making.

Then Jan Diaz accounted for Paquita's horror of Normandy by saying:

Seville, you see, had been her native home,
Seville, where skies are blue and evening sweet.
She, at thirteen, the sovereign of the town,
Had lovers at her feet.

For her three Toreadors had gone to death
Or victory, the prize to be a kiss--
One kiss from those red lips of sweetest breath--
A longed-for touch of bliss!

The features of the Spanish girl's portrait have served so often as
those of the courtesan in so many self-styled _poems_, that it would be
tiresome to quote here the hundred lines of description. To judge of the
lengths to which audacity had carried Dinah, it will be enough to give
the conclusion. According to Madame de la Baudraye's ardent pen, Paquita
was so entirely created for love that she can hardly have met with a
knight worthy of her; for

.... In her passionate fire
Every man would have swooned from the heat,
When she at love's feast, in her fervid desire,
As yet had but taken her seat.

"And yet she could quit the joys of Seville, its woods and fields of
orange-trees, for a Norman soldier who won her love and carried her away
to his hearth and home. She did not weep for her Andalusia, the Soldier
was her whole joy.... But the day came when he was compelled to start
for Russia in the footsteps of the great Emperor."

Nothing could be more dainty than the description of the parting between
the Spanish girl and the Normandy Captain of Artillery, who, in the
delirium of passion expressed with feeling worthy of Byron, exacted from
Paquita a vow of absolute fidelity, in the Cathedral at Rouen in front
of the alter of the