A certain languor mixed with fervour ran in his blood. He had inherited Creole traditions. His grandfather, the doctor, and his grand-uncle had emigrated from Béarn to Guadeloupe, and had settled there, had died there; his father was sent back to France to be educated at seven years of age; his dim memories of the Antilles, his stories of the cousins in Martinique, and the little chair in rare colonial wood that the child had used on the passage, were, a generation later, to set a-dreaming another child, our poet, whose first heroine will belong, like him, to a family dispersed among the Atlantic Islands and the Pyrenees. I suppose that a doctor would describe Clara d’Ellébeuse as a victim of the _maladie du scrupule_. She is a girl of sixteen; a dear little old-fashioned girl, living in a dear little old-fashioned manor, sheltered among the foothills of the Pyrenees, towards 1848. She has that dread of sin, of impurity, as a sort of quagmire into which one may fall unawares and be lost for ever, which the practice of confession may exaggerate, or palliate, according to the wisdom of the confessor. (Our poet Cowper was no Catholic.) Poor Clara d’Ellébeuse, because one day the young poet she secretly adored had wiped away her nervous tears and laid upon her bowed nape a pitiful, respectful hand, imagines that she has fallen into the sin of unchastity and that she is with child! (And we think of Renan who, in his twelfth year, I think, accused himself in confession of ‘the sin of simony.’) The mischief with Clara is that she does not confess; she tells no kind elder of her secret fear; she lets concealment feed, like a worm in the bud, upon her damask cheek. And we know how that ends. Clara does not pine away. One day in March, overcome by horror and remorse for her imaginary crime, she drinks a dose of laudanum and quits this unkind world. In telling the pathetic history of Clara d’Ellébeuse, Francis Jammes left unhampered that half of his soul which is that of a young girl; but in narrating the fate of _Almaïde d’Etremont, jeune fille passionnée_, that other half (which belongs to a Faun) shows the cloven foot. More tenderly does he commemorate the sad life of _Pomme d’anis, jeune fille infirme_. But it is not to be supposed that a poet who, by his own showing, partakes so largely of the nature of Silenus and his Sylvans, should frequent exclusively the society of virgins. Some of his earlier poems betray an ardent sensuality. One cannot read either these or the _Notes_ printed in the volume called _Le Roman du Lièvre_ (or even, perhaps, that most touching idyll of a play: _La Brebis Égarée_) without feeling that the poet’s experience has lain also among the lost sheep ... among the lost sheep, and perhaps among the swine; for there was a moment when he was even as the Prodigal Son!