The subjects are such as these:  “The Poet in the Times of Revolution”; “La Vendee”; “The Maidens of Verdun,” which chants the martyrdom of three young royalist sisters who were put to death for sending money and supplies to the emigres; “Quibiron,” where a royalist detachment which had capitulated under promise of being treated like prisoners of war, were shot down in squads by the Convention soldiery; “Louis XVII.”; “The Replacement of the Statue of Henry IV.”; “The Death of the Duke of Berry”; “The Birth of the Duke of Bourdeaux” and his “Baptism”; “The Funeral of Louis XVIII.”; “The Consecration of Charles X.”; “The Death of Mlle. de Sombreuil,” the royalist heroine who saved her father’s life by drinking a cupful of human blood in the days of the Terror; and “La Bande Noire,” which denounces with great bitterness the violation of the tombs of the kings of France by the regicides, and pleads for the preservation of the ruins of feudal times: 

  “O murs! o creneaux! o tourelle! 
  Remparts, fosses aux ponts mouvants! 
  Lourds faisceaux de colonnes freles! 
  Fiers chateaux! modestes couvents! 
  Cloitres poudreux, salles antiques,
  Ou gemissaient les saints cantiques,
  Ou riaient les banquets joyeux! 
  Lieux ou le coeur met ses chimeres! 
  Eglises ou priaient nos meres
  Tours ou combattaient nos aieux!”

In these two ode collections, though the Catholic and legitimist inspiration is everywhere apparent, there is nothing revolutionary in the language or verse forms.  But in the “Odes et Ballades” of 1826, “the romantic challenge,” says Saintsbury, “is definitely thrown down.  The subjects are taken by preference from times and countries which the classical tradition had regarded as barbarous.  The metres and rhythm are studiously broken, varied, and irregular; the language has the utmost possible glow of colour, as opposed to the cold correctness of classical poetry, the completest disdain of conventional periphrasis, the boldest reliance on exotic terms and daring neologisms.”  This description applies more particularly to the Ballades, many of which, such as “La Ronde du Sabbat,” “La Legende de la Nonne,” “La Chasse du Burgrave,” and “Le Pas d’Armes du Roi Jean” are mediaeval studies in which the lawless grotesquerie of Gothic art runs riot.  “The author, in composing them,” says the preface, “has tried to give some idea of what the poems of the first troubadours of the Middle Ages might have been; those Christian rhapsodists who had nothing in the world but their swords and their guitars, and went from castle to castle paying for their entertainment with their songs.”  To show that liberty in art does not mean disorder, the author draws an elaborate contrast between the garden of Versailles and a primitive forest, in a passage which will remind the reader of similar comparisons in the writings of Shenstone, Walpole, and other English romanticists of the eighteenth century.  There