The "dream figures" of the famous ladies pass before us like a gorgeous tapestry,--some rich Venetian rendering of a medieval _ballade du temps jadis_; then Venice itself opens before us, all moving life and colour, under the enchantment of Schumann's _Carnival_, only to resolve itself into a vaster pageant of the world, with its mighty fanes of art and science, which, seemingly "fixed as fate, not fairy-work," yet "tremblingly grew blank From bright, then broke afresh in triumph,--ah, but sank As soon, for liquid change through artery and vein O' the very marble wound its way." The August of 1872 found Browning and his sister once more in France.
This time, however, not at Croisic but Saint Aubin--the primitive hamlet on the Norman coast to which he had again been drawn by his attachment to Joseph Milsand.

At a neighbouring village was another old friend, Miss Thackeray, who has left a charming account of the place.
They walked along a narrow cliff-path: "The sea-coast far below our feet, the dried, arid vegetation of the sandy way, the rank yellow snapdragon lining the paths....

We entered the Brownings' house.

The sitting-room door opened to the garden and the sea beyond--a fresh-swept bare floor, a table, three straw chairs, one book upon the table." A misunderstanding, now through the good offices of Milsand happily removed, had clouded the friendship of Browning and Miss Thackeray; and his joyous revulsion of heart has left characteristic traces in the poem which he dedicated to his "fair friend." The very title is jest--an outflow of high spirits in an exuberantly hearty hand-shake--"British man with British maid"; the country of the "Red-cotton Night-cap" being in fact, of course, the country which her playful realism had already nicknamed "White-cotton Night-cap Country," from the white lawn 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.