e author, too early snatched from
the world of letters, which was amusing to those who were in the secret,
but which even then had not the merit of novelty. Such practical jokes,
capital so long as the author remains unknown, fall rather flat if
subsequently the poet stands confessed.

From this point of view, however, the memoir of Jan Diaz, born at
Bourges in 1807, the son of a Spanish prisoner, may very likely some
day deceive the compiler of some _Universal Biography_. Nothing is
overlooked; neither the names of the professors at the Bourges College,
nor those of his deceased schoolfellows, such as Lousteau, Bianchon, and
other famous natives of the province, who, it is said, knew the dreamy,
melancholy boy, and his precocious bent towards poetry. An elegy called
_Tristesse_ (Melancholy), written at school; the two poems _Paquita la
Sevillane_ and _Le Chene de la Messe_; three sonnets, a description of
the Cathedral and the House of Jacques Coeur at Bourges, with a tale
called _Carola_, published as the work he was engaged on at the time
of his death, constituted the whole of these literary remains; and the
poet's last hours, full of misery and despair, could not fail to wring
the hearts of the feeling public of the Nievre, the Bourbonnais, the
Cher, and the Morvan, where he died near Chateau-Chinon, unknown to all,
even to the woman he had loved!

Of this little yellow paper volume two hundred copies were printed;
one hundred and fifty were sold--about fifty in each department. This
average of tender and poetic souls in three departments of France is
enough to revive the enthusiasm of writers as to the _Furia Francese_,
which nowadays is more apt to expend itself in business than in books.

When Monsieur de Clagny had given away a certain number of copies,
Dinah still had seven or eight, wrapped up in the newspapers which had
published notices of the work. Twenty copies forwarded to the Paris
papers were swamped in the editors' offices. Nathan was taken in as well
as several of his fellow-countrymen of Le Berry, and wrote an article on
the great man, in which he credited him with all the fine qualities we
discover in those who are dead and buried.

Lousteau, warned by his fellow-schoolfellows, who could not remember Jan
Diaz, waited for information from Sancerre, and learned that Jan Diaz
was a pseudonym assumed by a woman.

Then, in and around Sancerre, Madame de la Baudraye became the rage; she
was the futur