This strange production caused a great ferment in the departments of the Allier, the Nievre, and the Cher, proud to possess a poet capable of rivalry with the glories of Paris. Paquita la Sevillane, by Jan Diaz, was published in the Echo du Morvan, a review which for eighteen months maintained its existence in spite of provincial indifference.  Some knowing persons at Nevers declared that Jan Diaz was making fun of the new school, just then bringing out its eccentric verse, full of vitality and imagery, and of brilliant effects produced by defying the Muse under pretext of adapting German, English, and Romanesque mannerisms.

The poem began with this ballad: 

  Ah! if you knew the fragrant plain,
  The air, the sky, of golden Spain,
  Its fervid noons, its balmy spring,
  Sad daughters of the northern gloom,
  Of love, of heav’n, of native home,
  You never would presume to sing!

  For men are there of other mould
  Than those who live in this dull cold. 
  And there to music low and sweet
  Sevillian maids, from eve till dawn,
  Dance lightly on the moonlit lawn
  In satin shoes, on dainty feet.

  Ah, you would be the first to blush
  Over your dancers’ romp and rush,
  And your too hideous carnival,
  That turns your cheeks all chill and blue,
  And skips the mud in hob-nail’d shoe—­
  A truly dismal festival.

  To pale-faced girls, and in a squalid room,
  Paquita sang; the murky town beneath
  Was Rouen whence the slender spires rise
    To chew the storm with teeth. 
  Rouen so hideous, noisy, full of rage—­

And here followed a magnificent description of Rouen—­where Dinah had never been—­written with the affected brutality which, a little later, inspired so many imitations of Juvenal; a contrast drawn between the life of a manufacturing town and the careless life of Spain, between the love of Heaven and of human beauty, and the worship of machinery, in short, between poetry and sordid money-making.

Then Jan Diaz accounted for Paquita’s horror of Normandy by saying: 

  Seville, you see, had been her native home,
    Seville, where skies are blue and evening sweet. 
  She, at thirteen, the sovereign of the town,
    Had lovers at her feet.

  For her three Toreadors had gone to death
  Or victory, the prize to be a kiss—­
  One kiss from those red lips of sweetest breath—­
    A longed-for touch of bliss!

The features of the Spanish girl’s portrait have served so often as those of the courtesan in so many self-styled poems, that it would be tiresome to quote here the hundred lines of description.  To judge of the lengths to which audacity had carried Dinah, it will be enough to give the conclusion.  According to Madame de la Baudraye’s ardent pen, Paquita was so entirely created for love that she can hardly have met with a knight worthy of her; for