The French disasters moved him deeply; he had many personal ties with France, and was sharing with his dearest French friend, Joseph Milsand, as near neighbour, a primitive villeggiatura in a Norman fishing-village when the stupendous catastrophe of Sedan broke upon them.

Sympathy with the French sufferers induced Browning to do violence to a cherished principle by offering the poem to George Smith for publication in _The Cornhill_.

Most of its French readers doubtless heard of Herve Riel, as well as of Robert Browning, for the first time.
His English readers found it hard to classify among the naval ballads of their country, few of which had been devoted to celebrating the exploits of foreign sailors, or the deliverance of hostile fleets.

But they recognised the poet of _The Ring and the Book_, Herve has no touch of Browning's "philosophy." He is none the less a true kinsman, in his homely fashion, of Caponsacchi,--summoned in a supreme emergency for which the appointed authorities have proved unequal.
A greater tale of heroic helpfulness was presently to engage him.
_Balaustion's Adventure_ was, as the charming dedication tells us, the most delightful of May-month amusements; but in the splendid proem which enshrines the story of Herakles and Alkestis, we still feel the thrill of the deadly conflict; the agony of France may be partly divined in the agony of Athens.

Thirty years before, he had shown, in the noble fragmentary "prologue" to a _Hippolytus (Artemis Prologizes)_, a command of the majestic, reticent manner of Greek tragedy sufficiently remarkable in one whose natural instincts of expression were far more Elizabethan than Greek.