The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister once more in France.  This time, however, not at Croisic but Saint Aubin—­the primitive hamlet on the Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his attachment to Joseph Milsand.  At a neighbouring village was another old friend, Miss Thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place.  They walked along a narrow cliff-path:  “The sea-coast far below our feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow snapdragon lining the paths....  We entered the Brownings’ house.  The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond—­a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table.”  A misunderstanding, now through the good offices of Milsand happily removed, had clouded the friendship of Browning and Miss Thackeray; and his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem which he dedicated to his “fair friend.”  The very title is jest—­an outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake—­“British man with British maid”; the country of the “Red-cotton Night-cap” being in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already nicknamed “White-cotton Night-cap Country,” from the white lawn head-dress of the Norman women.  Nothing so typical and everyday could set Browning’s imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white, innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be “wrong and red and picturesque,” and vary “by a splotch the righteous flat of insipidity.”

The story of Miranda the Paris jeweller and his mistress, Clara de Millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently.  Time had not mellowed the raw crudity of this “splotch,” which Browning found recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French newspapers of that very August; the final judgment of the court at Caen ("Vire”) being actually pronounced while he wrote.  The poet followed on the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a little of his methods.  If any poem of Browning’s may be compared to versified special correspondence, it is this.  He tells the story, in his own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which every pretence of poetry is usually remote.  What was it in this rather sordid tale that arrested him?  Clearly the strangely mingled character of Miranda.  Castile and Paris contend in his blood; and his love adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an ecstasy of fantastic devotion.  His sins are commonplace and prosaic enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners—­confused and violent gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself from the bonds of his own impurity.  “The heart was wise according to its lights”; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom into coherent practice.  A parallel piece of analysis presents Clara as a finished