Page:The spirit of place, and other essays, Meynell, 1899.djvu/98

84 Marceline Valmore, married to an actor who seems to have "created the classic genre" in vain, found the sons and daughters of other women in want. Some of her rich friends, she avers, seem to think that the sadness of her poems is a habit—a matter of metre and rhyme, or, at most, that it is "temperament." But others take up the cause of those whose woes, as she says, turned her long hair white too soon. Sainte-Beuve gave her his time and influence, succoured twenty political offenders at her instance, and gave perpetually to her poor. "He never has any socks," said his mother; "he gives them all away, like Béranger." "He gives them with a different accent," added the literary Marceline.

Even when the stroller's life took her to towns she did not hate, but loved—her own Douai, where the names of the streets made her heart leap, and where her statue stands, and Bordeaux, which was, in her eyes, "rosy with the reflected colour of its animating wine"—she was taken away from the country of her verse. The field and the village had been dear to her, and her poems no longer trail and droop, but take wing, when they come among winds, birds, bells, and waves. They fly with the