bly superior to _Paquita la Sevillane_, was far less
admired.

After these two attempts Madame de la Baudraye, feeling herself a poet,
had a light on her brow and a flash in her eyes that made her handsomer
than ever. She cast longing looks at Paris, aspiring to fame--and fell
back into her den of La Baudraye, her daily squabbles with her husband,
and her little circle, where everybody's character, intentions, and
remarks were too well known not to have become a bore. Though she found
relief from her dreary life in literary work, and poetry echoed loudly
in her empty life, though she thus found an outlet for her energies,
literature increased her hatred of the gray and ponderous provincial
atmosphere.

When, after the Revolution of 1830, the glory of George Sand was
reflected on Le Berry, many a town envied La Chatre the privilege of
having given birth to this rival of Madame de Stael and Camille Maupin,
and were ready to do homage to minor feminine talent. Thus there arose
in France a vast number of tenth Muses, young girls or young wives
tempted from a silent life by the bait of glory. Very strange doctrines
were proclaimed as to the part women should play in society. Though the
sound common sense which lies at the root of the French nature was not
perverted, women were suffered to express ideas and profess opinions
which they would not have owned to a few years previously.

Monsieur de Clagny took advantage of this outbreak of freedom to
collect the works of Jan Diaz in a small volume printed by Desroziers at
Moulins. He wrote a little notice of the 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 l