Being apparently infatuated herself, Maupin resumed woman’s dress and gained entry to the convent as a novice for the purpose of manoeuvering her friend’s escape. The means which presented themselves were macabre enough. A nun died and was buried within the convent enclosure; Maupin exhumed the body, put it in her friend’s bed, and set fire to the cell; during the resulting confusion the two young women escaped. But their subsequent precarious vagabondage apparently cured the girl of her taste for bohemian freedom and for Maupin; she returned to her parents. Maupin’s later career was comparatively seamy and unromantic.) * * * * * In 1851 Lamartine included in _Nouvelles Confidences_[26] an innocent infatuation between two adolescent girls which is reminiscent of Wollstonecraft’s Mary and Balzac’s _Seraphita_. (Though a reference in Havelock Ellis seems to place Regina among Lamartine’s poetic works, it is actually prose. His statement that here the theme is treated with “more or less boldness”[27] also appears unjustified.) Although the initial attachment between the heroine, Regina, and her school friend, Clothilde, might be considered “normal,” since it occurs between the ages of fourteen and seventeen, its later effects compel attention. The two girls, thrown together in a declining Roman convent school where supervision is lax, contrive regularly to spend their nights together. Lamartine describes their hours of long talk and tenderness with such skill and delicacy that one can doubt neither the basic innocence of both girls nor the ultimate passion in their embraces. During their years together Clothilde talks so much of a twin brother Saluse that Regina falls half in love with him vicariously, but at seventeen she is married unwillingly to a titled dotard. In the same year Clothilde’s mother dies, and Clothilde does not long survive this double loss of her only parent and beloved friend. At Clothilde’s grave Regina and Saluse meet and fall in love at sight. Their passion runs a stormy but blameless course, which leads eventually to Regina’s seeking formal release from her marriage. While she is away from Rome her petition is granted by the church, but only on condition of Saluse’s permanent exile from the city. Saluse decides in her absence on exile for her sake rather than on elopement and public scandal. On learning of his decision the girl cries out that he who would sacrifice love to conscience cannot be the brother of Clothilde. ‘At Clothilde’s tomb it was not she I found again, it was a phantom.... He had her features but not her heart.’[28]