Blessed Virgin, who

Though a Maid is a woman, and never forgives
When lovers are false to their vows.

A large part of the poem was devoted to describing Paquita's sufferings
when alone in Rouen waiting till the campaign was over; she stood
writhing at the window bars as she watched happy couples go by; she
suppressed her passion in her heart with a determination that consumed
her; she lived on narcotics, and exhausted herself in dreams.

Almost she died, but still her heart was true;
And when at last her soldier came again,
He found her beauty ever fresh and new--
He had not loved in vain!

"But he, pale and frozen by the cold of Russia, chilled to the very
marrow, met his yearning fair one with a melancholy smile."

The whole poem was written up to this situation, which was worked out
with such vigor and boldness as too entirely justified the Abbe Duret.

Paquita, on reaching the limits set to real love, did not, like Julie
and Heloise, throw herself into the ideal; no, she rushed into the paths
of vice, which is, no doubt, shockingly natural; but she did it without
any touch of magnificence, for lack of means, as it would be difficult
to find in Rouen men impassioned enough to place Paquita in a suitable
setting of luxury and splendor. This horrible realism, emphasized by
gloomy poetic feeling, had inspired some passages such as modern poetry
is too free with, rather too like the flayed anatomical figures known to
artists as _ecorches_. Then, by a highly philosophical revulsion, after
describing the house of ill-fame where the Andalusian ended her days,
the writer came back to the ballad at the opening:

Paquita now is faded, shrunk, and old,
But she it was who sang:

"If you but knew the fragrant plain,
The air, the sky, of golden Spain," etc.

The gloomy vigor of this poem, running to about six hundred lines,
and serving as a powerful foil, to use a painter's word, to the two
_seguidillas_ at the beginning and end, the masculine utterance of
inexpressible grief, alarmed the woman who found herself admired by
three departments, under the black cloak of the anonymous. While she
fully enjoyed the intoxicating delights of success, Dinah dreaded the
malignity of provincial society, where more than one woman, if the
secret should slip out, would certainly find points of resemblance
between the writer and Paquita. Reflection came too late; Dinah
shuddered with shame at having made "