The gloomy vigor of this poem, running to about six hundred lines, and serving as a powerful foil, to use a painter’s word, to the two seguidillas at the beginning and end, the masculine utterance of inexpressible grief, alarmed the woman who found herself admired by three departments, under the black cloak of the anonymous.  While she fully enjoyed the intoxicating delights of success, Dinah dreaded the malignity of provincial society, where more than one woman, if the secret should slip out, would certainly find points of resemblance between the writer and Paquita.  Reflection came too late; Dinah shuddered with shame at having made “copy” of some of her woes.

“Write no more,” said the Abbe Duret.  “You will cease to be a woman; you will be a poet.”

Moulins, Nevers, Bourges were searched to find Jan Diaz; but Dinah was impenetrable.  To remove any evil impression, in case any unforeseen chance should betray her name, she wrote a charming poem in two cantos on The Mass-Oak, a legend of the Nivernais: 

“Once upon a time the folks of Nevers and the folks of Saint-Saulge, at war with each other, came at daybreak to fight a battle, in which one or other should perish, and met in the forest of Faye.  And then there stood between them, under an oak, a priest whose aspect in the morning sun was so commanding that the foes at his bidding heard Mass as he performed it under the oak, and at the words of the Gospel they made friends.”—­The oak is still shown in the forest of Faye.

This poem, immeasurably superior to Paquita la Sevillane, was far less admired.

After these two attempts Madame de la Baudraye, feeling herself a poet, had a light on her brow and a flash in her eyes that made her handsomer than ever.  She cast longing looks at Paris, aspiring to fame —­and fell back into her den of La Baudraye, her daily squabbles with her husband, and her little circle, where everybody’s character, intentions, and remarks were too well known not to have become a bore.  Though she found relief from her dreary life in literary work, and poetry echoed loudly in her empty life, though she thus found an outlet for her energies, literature increased her hatred of the gray and ponderous provincial atmosphere.

When, after the Revolution of 1830, the glory of George Sand was reflected on Le Berry, many a town envied La Chatre the privilege of having given birth to this rival of Madame de Stael and Camille Maupin, and were ready to do homage to minor feminine talent.  Thus there arose in France a vast number of tenth Muses, young girls or young wives tempted from a silent life by the bait of glory.  Very strange doctrines were proclaimed as to the part women should play in society.  Though the sound common sense which lies at the root of the French nature was not perverted, women were suffered to express ideas and profess opinions which they would not have owned to a few years previously.