“Ma constitution n’est pas forte; j’ai contracte une toux opiniatre, il y a plus de deux ans, qui ne me quitte point.  Cependant j’espere mettre la main a l’oeuvre bientot.  Je ne peux dire, mademoiselle, combien votre affection—­car vous les aimez, votre livre et votre lettre en temoignent assez—­pour mes compatriotes et mon pays me touche; et je suis fiere de pouvoir le dire que les heroines de nos grandes epopees sont dignes de tout honneur et de tout amour.  Y a-t-il d’heroine plus touchante, plus aimable que Sita?  Je ne le crois pas. Quand j’entends ma mere chanter, le soir, les vieux chants de notre pays, je pleure presque toujours.  La plainte de Sita, quand, bannie pour la seconde fois, elle erre dans la vaste foret, seule, le desespoir et l’effroi dans l’ame, est si pathetique qu’il n’y a personne, je crois, qui puisse l’entendre sans verser des larmes.  Je vous envois sous ce pli deux petites traductions du Sanscrit, cette belle langue antique.  Malheureusement j’ai ete obligee de faire cesser mes traductions de Sanscrit, il y a six mois.  Ma sante ne me permet pas de les continuer.”

These simple and pathetic words, in which the dying poetess pours out her heart to the one friend she had, and that one gained too late, seem as touching and as beautiful as any strain of Marceline Valmore’s immortal verse.  In English poetry I do not remember anything that exactly parallels their resigned melancholy.  Before the month of March was over, Toru had taken to her bed.  Unable to write, she continued to read, strewing her sick-room with the latest European books, and entering with interest into the questions raised by the Societe Asiatique of Paris, in its printed Transactions.  On the 30th of July she wrote her last letter to Mlle. Clarisse Bader, and a month later, on August 30, 1877, at the age of twenty-one years six months and twenty-six days, she breathed her last in her father’s house in Maniktollah street, Calcutta.

In the first distraction of grief it seemed as though her unequalled promise had been entirely blighted, and as though she would be remembered only by her single book.  But as her father examined her papers, one completed work after another revealed itself.  First a selection from the sonnets of the Comte de Grammont, translated into English, turned up, and was printed in a Calcutta magazine; then some fragments of an English story, which were printed in another Calcutta magazine.  Much more important, however, than any of these was a complete romance, written in French, being the identical story for which her sister Aru had proposed to make the illustrations.  In the meantime Toru was no sooner dead than she began to be famous.  In May, 1878, there appeared a second edition of the “Sheaf gleaned in French Fields,” with a touching sketch of her death, by her father; and in 1879 was published, under the editorial care of Mlle. Clarisse Bader, the romance of “Le Journal de Mlle. D’Arvers,”