he Abbe Duret.

Paquita, on reaching the limits set to real love, did not, like Julie
and Heloise, throw herself into the ideal; no, she rushed into the paths
of vice, which is, no doubt, shockingly natural; but she did it without
any touch of magnificence, for lack of means, as it would be difficult
to find in Rouen men impassioned enough to place Paquita in a suitable
setting of luxury and splendor. This horrible realism, emphasized by
gloomy poetic feeling, had inspired some passages such as modern poetry
is too free with, rather too like the flayed anatomical figures known to
artists as _ecorches_. Then, by a highly philosophical revulsion, after
describing the house of ill-fame where the Andalusian ended her days,
the writer came back to the ballad at the opening:

Paquita now is faded, shrunk, and old,
But she it was who sang:

"If you but knew the fragrant plain,
The air, the sky, of golden Spain," etc.

The gloomy vigor of this poem, running to about six hundred lines,
and serving as a powerful foil, to use a painter's word, to the two
_seguidillas_ at the beginning and end, the masculine utterance of
inexpressible grief, alarmed the woman who found herself admired by
three departments, under the black cloak of the anonymous. While she
fully enjoyed the intoxicating delights of success, Dinah dreaded the
malignity of provincial society, where more than one woman, if the
secret should slip out, would certainly find points of resemblance
between the writer and Paquita. Reflection came too late; Dinah
shuddered with shame at having made "copy" of some of her woes.

"Write no more," said the Abbe Duret. "You will cease to be a woman; you
will be a poet."

Moulins, Nevers, Bourges were searched to find Jan Diaz; but Dinah was
impenetrable. To remove any evil impression, in case any unforeseen
chance should betray her name, she wrote a charming poem in two cantos
on _The Mass-Oak_, a legend of the Nivernais:

"Once upon a time the folks of Nevers and the folks of Saint-Saulge, at
war with each other, came at daybreak to fight a battle, in which one or
other should perish, and met in the forest of Faye. And then there stood
between them, under an oak, a priest whose aspect in the morning sun was
so commanding that the foes at his bidding heard Mass as he performed it
under the oak, and at the words of the Gospel they made friends."--The
oak is still shown in the forest of Faye.

This poem, immeasura