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 la 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;