a 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 future rival of George Sand. From Sancerre to Bourges a poem was
praised which, at any other time, would certainly have been hooted. The
provincial public--like every French public, perhaps--does not share the
love of the King of the French for the happy medium: it lifts you to the
skies or drags you in the mud.

By this time the good Abbe, Madame de la Baudraye's counselor, was dead;
he would certainly have prevented her rushing into public life. But
three years of work without recognition weighed on Dinah's soul, and
she accepted the clatter of fame as a substitute for her disappointed
ambitions. Poetry and dreams of celebrity, which had lulled her grief
since her meeting with Anna Grossetete, no longer sufficed to exhaust
the activity of her morbid heart. The Abbe Duret, who had talked of the
world when the voice of religion was impotent, who understood Dinah, and
pro