The Muse of the Department by Honoré de Balzac
page 47 of 249 (18%)
page 47 of 249 (18%)
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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; |
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