whole volley of a summer morning. She loved
the sun and her liberty, and the liberty of oth-
ers. It was apparently a horror of prisons that
chiefly inspired her public efforts after certain
riots at Lyons had been reduced to peace. The
dead were free, but for the prisoners she worked,
wrote, and petitioned. She looked at the senti-
nels at the gates of the Lyons gaols with such
eyes as might have provoked a shot, she thinks.

During her lifetime she very modestly took
correction from her contemporaries, for her
study had hardly been enough for the whole
art of French verse. But Sainte-Beuve, Baude-
laire, and Verlaine have praised her as one of
the poets of France. The later critics--from
Verlaine onwards--will hold that she needs no
pardon for certain slight irregularities in the
grouping of masculine and feminine rhymes,
for upon this liberty they themselves have
largely improved. The old rules in their com-
pleteness seemed too much like a prison to her.
She was set about with importunate conditions
--a caesura, a rhyme, narrow lodgings in strange
towns, bankruptcies, salaries astray--and she
took only a little gentle liberty.

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