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 chiefly
inspired her public efforts after certain riots at Lyons had been reduced
to peace. The dead were free, but for the prisoners she worked, wrote,
and petitioned. She looked at the sentinels at the gates of the Lyons
gaols with such eyes as might have provoked a shot, she thinks.

During her lifetime she very modestly took correction from her
contemporaries, for her study had hardly been enough for the whole art of
French verse. But Sainte-Beuve, Baudelaire, and Verlaine have praised
her as one of the poets of France. The later critics--from Verlaine
onwards--will hold that she needs no pardon for certain slight
irregularities in the grouping of masculine and feminine rhymes, for upon