Red Cotton Night-Cap Country is a story of real life, true in all its facts, and studied at the place where it had occurred a few years before:  St. Aubin, in Normandy (the St. Rambert of the poem).  It is the story of the life of Antoine Mellerio, the Paris jeweller, whose tragic death occurred at St. Aubin on the 13th April 1870.  A suit concerning his will, decided only in the summer of 1872, supplied Browning with the materials of his tragedy.  In the first proof of the poem the real names of persons and places were given; but they were changed before publication, and are now in every case fictitious.  The second edition of Mrs. Orr’s Handbook contains a list of the real names, which I subjoin.[49]

The book is dedicated to Miss Thackeray (Mrs. Richmond Ritchie), and the whole story is supposed to be told to her (as in substance it was) by Browning, who has thus given to the poem a tone of pleasant colloquialism.  Told as it is, it becomes in part a dramatic monologue of which the dramatis persona is Robert Browning.  It is full of quiet, sometimes grim, humour; of picturesque and witty touches; of pungency and irony.  Its manner, the humorous telling of a tragic tale, is a little after the pattern of Carlyle.  In such a setting the tragic episodes, sometimes all but heroic, sometimes almost grotesque, have all the impressiveness of contrast.

The story itself, in the main, is a sordid enough tragedy:  like several of Browning’s later books, it is a study in evil.  The two characters who fill the stage of this little history are tragic comedians; they, too, are “real creatures, exquisitely fantastical, strangely exposed to the world by a lurid catastrophe, who teach us that fiction, if it can imagine events and persons more agreeable to the taste it has educated, can read us no such furrowing lesson in life.”  The character of Miranda, the sinner who would reconcile sin with salvation, is drawn with special subtlety; analysed, dissected rather, with the unerring scalpel of the experienced operator.  Miranda is swayed through life by two opposing tendencies, for he is of mixed Castilian and French blood.  He is mastered at once by two passions, earthly and religious, illicit love and Catholic devotion:  he cannot let go the one and he will not let go the other; he would enjoy himself on the “Turf” without abandoning the shelter of the “Towers.”  His life is spent in trying to effect a compromise between the two antagonistic powers which finally pull down his house of life.  Clara, his mistress-wife, is a mirror of himself; she humours him, manages him, perhaps on his own lines of inclination.

      “‘But—­loved him?’ Friend, I do not praise her love! 
      True love works never for the loved one so,
      Nor spares skin-surface, smoothening truth away,
      Love bids touch truth, endure truth, and embrace
      Truth, though, embracing truth, love crush itself. 
      ‘Worship not me, but God!’ the angels urge!”