live like fools"; whereby she meant that she should work with her own
fervent brain for both, and take the while her rest in Ondine. If this
living and unshortened love was sad, it must be owned that so, too, was
the story. Eugenie and Maurice de Guerin were both to die soon, and
Marceline was to lose this daughter and another.

But set free from the condition and occasion of pain and sorrow, this
life without boundaries which mothers have undergone seems to suggest and
to portend what the progressive charity of generations may be--and is, in
fact, though the continuity does not always appear--in the course of the
world. If a love and life without boundaries go down from a mother into
her child, and from that child into her children again, then
incalculable, intricate, universal, and eternal are the unions that
seem--and only seem--so to transcend the usual experience. The love of
such a mother passes unchanged out of her own sight. It drops down ages,
but why should it alter? What in her daughter should she make so much
her own as that daughter's love for her daughter in turn? There are no
lapses.

Marceline Valmore, married to an actor who seems to have "created the
classic genre" in vain, found the sons and daughters of other women in
want. Some of her rich friends, she avers, seem to think that the
sadness of her poems is a habit--a matter of metre and rhyme, or, at
most, that it is "temperament." But others take up the cause of those
whose woes, as she says, turned her long hair white too soon.
Sainte-Beuve gave her his time and influence, succoured twenty political
offenders at her instance, and gave perpetually to her poor. "He never
has any socks," said his mother; "he gives them all away, like Beranger."
"He gives them with a different accent," added the literary Marceline.

Even when the stroller's life took her to towns she did not hate, but
loved--her own Douai, where the names of the streets made her heart leap,
and where her statue stands, and Bordeaux, which was, in her eyes, "rosy
with the reflected colour of its animating wine"--she was taken away from
the country of her verse. The field and the village had been dear to
her, and her poems no longer trail and droop, but take wing, when they
come among winds, birds, bells, and waves. They fly with the whole
volley of a summer morning. She loved the sun and her liberty, and the
liberty of others. It was apparently a horror of prisons that c