rs divine by night allowed, by
day anathematized." In 1817 she married an actor, M. Valmore, who
subsequently disappeared into obscure official life, accepting with joy
a position as catalogue-maker in the National Library. Her relatives,
and even her eldest daughter, received small government favors, while
her own little pension, when it came, was so distasteful that for a
long time she could not bring herself to apply for the payments. She was
a confirmed patriot, shrank from the favors of the throne, was ill for
six weeks after Waterloo, and hailed with delight the revolution of '48,
which for some time stopped her pension and impoverished her. After
twenty years of the stage she retired into the greater privacy of
literature, and published various collections of verse which struck a
note of pure transparent sentiment rare in the epoch of Louis Philippe.
She had, in an uncommon degree, the gift of intelligent admiration: her
addresses to the great men of her time appear to be as far as possible
from a spirit of calculation or self-interest, but they secured her an
answering sympathy all the more valuable as it was never bargained for.
Michelet said, "My heart is full of her;" Balzac wrote a drama at her
solicitation; Lamartine, taking to himself a published compliment which
she had intended for another, replied with twenty beautiful stanzas;
Victor Hugo wrote to her, "You are poetry itself;" Mademoiselle Mars,
when past the age of public favor, took from her the plain counsel to
retire with kindness and actual thanks; Dumas wrote a preface for her;
Madame Recamier obtained her pension; the brilliant Sophie Gay, now
Madame Emile de Girardin, wrote of her poetry, "How could one depict
better the luxury of grief?" M. Raspail, the austere republican, called
her the tenth muse, the muse of virtue; and Sainte-Beuve himself,
thinking less of her literary life than of her family life and manifold
compassions, terms her the "Mater Dolorosa of poetry." His memoir,
however, is valuable for its own grace as much as for the modest
sweetness of its subject: without his friendly eloquence the name of
Madame Desbordes-Valmore would not have got beyond a kind of personal
circle of native admirers, nor the present translator have rendered for
foreign ears the whispering story of her pure deeds and the plaintive
numbers of her verse.

Memoir of a Brother. By Thomas Hughes, Author of "Tom Brown's
School-days." London: Macmillan & Co.