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M. de Mazade, editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, said of Ma Bigno that it was one of Jasmin's best works, and that the style and sentiments were equally satisfactory to the poetical mind and taste. M. Rodiere, of Toulouse, in his brief memoir of Jasmin, says that "it might be thought that so great a work as Franconnette would have exhausted the poet.
Ah! take my life, unless indeed you do not fear to carry a remorse all through your own..." It was his own letter, written to the Marquise as she set out for Geneva nine years before. At the foot of it Claire de Bourgogne had written, "Monsieur, you are free." M. de Nueil went to his mother at Manerville. In less than three weeks he married Mlle. Stephanie de la Rodiere.
She would not deprive him of a piece of pleasurable routine-work, such as women always wish for their husbands, and even for their lovers. A Mlle. de la Rodiere, twenty-two years of age, an heiress with a rent-roll of forty thousand livres, had come to live in the neighborhood. Gaston always met her at Manerville whenever he was obliged to go thither.
"What a pity," says M. Rodiere, "that Jasmin did not continue to write his impressions until the end of his life! What trouble he would have saved his biographers! For how can one speak when Jasmin ceases to sing?" It is unnecessary to return to the autobiography and repeat the confessions of Jasmin's youth.
She called his attention to the fact that it was a flattering distinction to be preferred by Mlle. de la Rodiere, who had refused so many great matches; it was quite time, she urged, that he should think of his future, such a good opportunity might not repeat itself, some day he would have eighty thousand livres of income from land; money made everything bearable; if Mme. de Beauseant loved him for his own sake, she ought to be the first to urge him to marry.
And while the unhappy Marquise awaited her doom, M. de Nueil, reading her letter, felt that he was "in a very difficult position," to use the expression that young men apply to a crisis of this kind. By this time he had all but yielded to his mother's importunities and to the attractions of Mlle. de la Rodiere, a somewhat insignificant, pink-and-white young person, as straight as a poplar.
All at once the immensity of the misery became apparent to him, and he thought it necessary and charitable to deaden the deadly blow. He hoped to bring Mme. de Beauseant to a calm frame of mind by gradually reconciling her to the idea of separation; while Mlle. de la Rodiere, always like a shadowy third between them, should be sacrificed to her at first, only to be imposed upon her later.
"Since your mother came, since you paid a visit to Mlle. de Rodiere, I have been gnawed by doubts dishonoring to us both. Make me suffer for this, but do not deceive me; I want to know everything that your mother said and that you think!
M. Rodiere, Professor of Law at Toulouse, was of opinion that during the four years during which Jasmin produced no work of any special importance, he was carefully studying Gascon; for it ought to be known that the language in which Godolin wrote his fine poems is not without its literature.
"The fact," says Rodiere, "that Jasmin used some of his time in studying the works of Godolin is, that while in Lou Charibari there are some French words ill-disguised in a Gascon dress, on the other hand, from the year 1830, there are none; and the language of Jasmin is the same as the language of Godolin, except for a few trifling differences, due to the different dialects of Agen and Toulouse."
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