head-dress of the Norman women. Nothing so typical and everyday could
set Browning's imagination astir, and among the wilderness of white,
innocent and flavourless, he caught at a story which promised to be
"wrong and red and picturesque," and vary "by a splotch the righteous
flat of insipidity."

The story of Miranda the Paris jeweller and his mistress, Clara de
Millefleurs, satisfied this condition sufficiently. Time had not
mellowed the raw crudity of this "splotch," which Browning found
recorded in no old, square, yellow vellum book, but in the French
newspapers of that very August; the final judgment of the court at Caen
("Vire") being actually pronounced while he wrote. The poet followed on
the heels of the journalist, and borrowed, it must be owned, not a
little of his methods. If any poem of Browning's may be compared to
versified special correspondence, it is this. He tells the story, in his
own person, in blank verse of admirable ease and fluency, from which
every pretence of poetry is usually remote. What was it in this rather
sordid tale that arrested him? Clearly the strangely mingled character
of Miranda. Castile and Paris contend in his blood; and his love
adventures, begun on the boulevards and in their spirit, end in an
ecstasy of fantastic devotion. His sins are commonplace and prosaic
enough, but his repentances detach him altogether from the herd of
ordinary penitents as well as of ordinary sinners--confused and violent
gesticulations of a visionary ascetic struggling to liberate himself
from the bonds of his own impurity. "The heart was wise according to its
lights"; but the head was incapable of shaping this vague heart-wisdom
into coherent practice. A parallel piece of analysis presents Clara as a
finished artist in life--a Meissonier of limited but flawless perfection
in her unerring selection of means to ends. In other words, this not
very attractive pair struck Browning as another example of his familiar