On the 8th June, 1876, George Sand, the great French novelist, died at her chÂteau of Nohant in Berri. The strong right hand that for forty years had been used in the service of her countrymen, sometimes to delight, sometimes to admonish, had dropped the pen in death; the noble heart that, with all its faults and all its deviations from the strict line of social conventionality, had yet ever sided with the weak against the strong, the oppressed against the oppressor, had ceased to beat, and even in the frivolous, heartless capital where she had lived, men went about knowing they had sustained an irreparable loss and that a blank had been made in their lives that would never be filled.

She was the last of that illustrious fraternity of chosen spirits that flourished fifty years ago in France, of whom Victor Hugo is the sole survivor. Lamartine, ThÉophile Gautier, Michelet, Alfred de Musset, Balzac, George Sand, were the names that then resounded in the literary world of Paris, while now Emile Zola and Alexandre Dumas fils are its principal adornments. George Sand and Balzac’s novels form as it were the connecting link between the world of romance of the eighteenth century and our own. She has carried the idealism of Jean Jacques’ “Nouvelle HÉloÏse,” and the poetry of Chateaubriand’s “RenÉe” into our prosaic nineteenth century, while Balzac presented to his contemporaries as vivid reflections of life as any to be found in the pages of “Manon Lescaut” or “Gil Blas.” The authoress of “Indiana” is the high-priestess of the romantic school; the author of “Le PÈre Goriot” the exponent of the realistic.

“Love must be idealised in fiction,” she says in the “Histoire de ma Vie.” “We must give it all the force, and all the aspirations we have felt ourselves, besides all the pain we have seen and suffered. Under no circumstances must it ever be debased; it must triumph or die, and we must not be afraid to invest it with an importance in life, which lifts it altogether above ordinary sentiments.”

Balzac, her fellow-worker, used to say: “You seek men as they ought to be; I take them as they are. I idealise and exaggerate their vices; you their virtues.”

By further study of her life and correspondence, we shall know how true this observation is, and how this striving after ideal perfection not only influenced her literary work, but caused so much of that eccentricity and rebellion against social laws which shocked her contemporaries and has made her name a by-word in the mouths of those who could not appreciate her genius, or realise the tenderness and nobility of soul that were hidden under her unfeminine exterior.

The publication of her letters (looked forward to with so much impatience) has recently taken place, and the veil has been still further torn from those domestic relations well known to have been unhappy. Were they written by any one but the authoress of “Elle et Lui,” we should have regretted their appearance as indiscreet, and wanting in loyalty towards one no longer able to protest against the secrets of her life being dragged forth to amuse the crowd. A frequent charge however brought against George Sand is the want of delicacy she has shown in taking the world into her confidence. “Charity towards others, dignity towards myself, sincerity before God,” is the motto prefixed to the “Histoire de ma Vie.” She certainly is both charitable and sincere, but we must agree with her enemies in thinking it an open question whether, so far as concerns herself, she has observed a dignified reserve. Indeed, on various occasions she defiantly proclaimed, “That all hypocrisy was distasteful to her, and that it would have been the recognition of those acts as irregularities which were but the legitimate exercise of her liberty, had she been ashamed of them or endeavored to keep them secret.”

The autobiography was unfortunately revised and corrected in 1869, and considerably spoilt in the process. These letters are the more interesting, therefore, as throwing sudden lights on varying moods, and showing the rejection of many heterodox opinions at first, which were afterwards accepted without hesitation.

“La vie ressemble bien plutÔt À un roman, qu’un roman À la vie,” she says, and certainly no heroine of one of her own romances could be more interesting as a study than she is, with her gentleness and “bavardages de mÈre” one moment, and her violent casting off of all domestic duties the next. Touching appeals are made to Jules Boucoiran, the tutor, to tell her whether her children ever mention her name, and directly after there is the following exultant declaration:

“Ainsi, À l’heure qu’il est, À une lieue d’ici, quatre mille bÊtes me croient À genoux dans le sac, et dans la cendre, pleurant mes pÉchÉs comme Madeleine. Le rÉveil sera terrible. Le lendemain de ma victoire, je jette ma bÉquille, je passe au galop de mon cheval aux quatre coins de la ville.”

The first letter of the “Correspondence” is written in 1812, when Mademoiselle Aurore Dupin was a happy child of eight, living at her ancestral home, the old chÂteau of Nohant.

Already she is insubordinate and high-spirited, delighted at being able to deceive her grandmother by carrying on a secret correspondence with her mother, and hiding the letters behind the portrait of the old Dupin in the entrance-hall. “Que j’ai de regret de ne pouvoir te dire adieu. Tu vois combien j’ai de chagrin de te quitter. Adieu; pense À moi, et sois que je ne t’oublierai point.—Ta Fille. Tu mettras la rÉponse derriÈre le portrait du vieux Dupin.”

The last letter of the first volume is dated “La ChÂtre, 1836,” when what she herself called the crisis of the “sixth lustrum” was over. The celebrated voyage to Venice with Alfred de Musset had already been made, the romance of “Elle et Lui” had been lived through and written—the immortal passion which has been told and sung by both sides for the benefit of the world, and which has now become a part of the poetry of the nineteenth century, was already a thing of the past; and she had come to the point, as she writes to her friend Madame d’Agoult, of finding her greatest happiness in a state of being where she neither thinks nor feels. “You, perhaps, are too happy and too young to envy the lot of those shining white stones which lie so cold, so calm, so dead, under the light of the moon. I always salute them as I pass along the road in my solitary midnight ride.” This volume comprises, therefore, all the most eventful periods of her life, and whatever has since been published is only of secondary interest.

George Sand was born in Paris in 1804. She was descended on her father’s side from Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II., King of Poland. Her father died in 1808, and she was brought up at the chÂteau of Nohant close to La ChÂtre in Berri. She lived there until she was thirteen, passing her days in the open air, sometimes wandering through the woods and fields, with the peasant children of the neighboring village, or more often sitting alone, under some great tree, listening to the murmur of the river close by, and the whisper of the wind amidst the leaves. Here she learnt that kindness and simplicity of manner which always characterised her, and here she contracted that love for communion with Nature which in her wildest and most despairing moments never forsook her.

“Ah, that I could live amidst the calm of mountain solitudes,” she exclaims, “morally and materially above the region of storms! There to pass long hours in contemplation of the starry heavens, listening to the mysterious sounds of nature, possessing all that is grandest in creation united with the possession of myself.”

At twelve she began to write, composing long stories about a hero to whom, under the name of Corambe, she raised an altar of stones and moss in the corner of the garden. For years she remained faithful to Corambe and cherished the project of constructing a poem or romance to celebrate his illustrious exploits.

At thirteen, her mother and grandmother, unable to agree upon the subject of her education, determined to send her to a convent in Paris.

“Conceive,” one of her biographers says, “the sadness of this wild bird shut up in the cage of the English Augustines in the ‘Rue des FossÉs-Saint-Victor.’ She wept tears of bitter regret for the cool depths of woods, the sunny mornings, and dim quiet evenings of her home.”

Comfort was soon found however in her work, and in the schoolgirl friendships that she formed, some of which lasted her lifetime.

In 1820, when sixteen, she returned to Nohant. Her grandmother died in the following year; and then, although often suffering from her mother’s irritable and capricious temper, she seems to have enjoyed perfect liberty: riding, walking, and reading; devouring everything that came into her hands, from Thomas À Kempis to Jean Jacques Rousseau. On one occasion, kneeling before the altar in the chapel, she was seized with a paroxysm of devotion and talked of becoming a nun. To this succeeded complete emancipation in her religious opinions, and a refusal even to conform to the observances of her Church. A quarrel with her confessor accomplished the separation from orthodoxy. She became a deist, and remained so for the rest of her life, making art her religion, and passing through all the phases of pessimism and Saint-Simonianism that prevailed in her day.

In 1822, to escape the solicitations of her mother, she consented to marry Monsieur Dudevant, son of one of the barons of the Empire.

She describes in her autobiography how one evening, when sitting outside Tortoni’s eating ices after the theatre, she heard a friend (Madame Duplessis) say to her husband: “See, there is Casimir!” Whereupon a slight, elegant young man of military bearing came up to salute them. Her fate was sealed from that day. They were married in September 1822, she being only eighteen. After paying a few visits they returned to live at Nohant. The letters begin consecutively after the birth of her first child, and are written at odd times, and from different places—sometimes in the middle of the night, while all the household were asleep, the lightning flashing and the thunder rolling; sometimes in a garret overlooking a narrow little street of the town of ChÂtre, at six o’clock in the morning, the nightingales singing outside and the scent of a lilac-tree pervading the air; sometimes at her grandmother’s old bureau in the hall at Nohant, with all her family round her.

The portion of the “Correspondence” which will take readers most by surprise is that describing the first years of her married life. There is no desire here “to lose her identity in the great conscience of humanity!” her heart seems perfectly satisfied bending over her cradle, and her mind entirely occupied with the “concrete duties” of manufacturing soothing syrups and amusing her children.

“My son is splendidly fat and fresh,” she writes to her mother. “He has a bright complexion and determined expression, which I must say is borne out by his character. He has six teeth which he uses with great vigor, and he stands beautifully on his feet, though too young to run alone.”

Casimir is mentioned now and then, and always with a certain amount of affection. She is evidently attached to him through the children, and relates how fond he is of her and them.

She describes a carnival at Nohant in 1826, four years after her marriage, when she sits up three nights a week dancing, “Obligations which have to be accepted in life.” Obligations which seem to be grateful enough to her, although she only amuses herself by the light of three candles, with an orchestra composed of a hurdy-gurdy and bagpipes.

Certain disturbing elements seem however, as the year goes on, to agitate the domestic barometer. They make a journey to Bordeaux, and there the society, although not brilliant, is more attractive than that of Nohant—the prospect of returning to the “three candles and the hurdy-gurdy” seems to frighten her—and she complains of Casimir’s want of “intellectual” energy: “Paresseux de l’esprit, et enragÉ des jambes.”

“Cold, wet, nothing keeps him at home; whenever he comes in it is either to eat or to snore.” In writing about some commissions which her mother has executed for her in Paris, she says: “Casimir asks me to express his gratitude; it is a sentiment which we can still feel in common.” Rustic duties pall upon her, her appetite and health fail, she is reduced to “looking at the stars, instead of sleeping.” “My existence is passed in a complete state of mental solitude surrounded by unsympathetic, commonplace people, some of whom deface their lives by coarse inebriety.” She here alludes to her brother, Hippolyte, who destroyed his own and his wife’s happiness by his drunken habits.

The only event that brightened her sadness was the arrival of a young tutor for her children, M. Jules Boucoiran, who always, as she says, remained her devoted friend and ally.

She thus whimsically relates an incident small in itself, but one that made an impression on her owing to the existing circumstances:

“I was living in what used to be my grandmother’s boudoir, because there was only one door, and no one could come in unless I liked. My two children sleep in the room next to me. The boudoir was so small that I could hardly fit into it with all my books. I therefore slept in a hammock, and wrote at an old bureau, which I used in company with a cricket, who seeing me so often had become perfectly tame. It lived on my wafers, which I purposely chose white for fear of poisoning it. After eating its meal on my paper as I wrote, it always went and sang in its favorite drawer. One evening, not hearing it move, I searched everywhere, but the only remains I found of my poor friend were his hind legs. He never told me that he went out for a walk every day, and the maid had crushed him when shutting the window. I buried him in a datura flower, which I kept for some time as a sacred relic. I could not get rid of a strange foreboding that with the song of this little cricket my domestic happiness had fled for ever.”

Meantime the artistic leaven was working within her. On one of her flying visits to Paris she entered the Louvre and felt singularly “taken possession of” by the beautiful pictures around her.

“I returned,” she says, “again and again, arriving early in the morning and going away late in the evening. I was transported into another world, and was haunted day and night by the grand figures created by genius. The past and present were revealed to me, I became classical and romantic at the same time, without understanding the struggle between the two that agitated the artistic world. I seemed to have acquired a treasure, the existence of which I had never been aware of. My spirit expanded, and when I left the gallery I walked through the streets as in a dream.”

After this awakening of her intellectual nature she returned to Nohant, more determined than ever to escape from her wretched life, and to save her children from influences that might destroy them in the future. Her first object was to endeavor to make money enough to procure the means of existence. She tried everything, translating, drawing, needlework, and at last discovered that she could earn an humble pittance by painting flowers on wooden boxes. To this pursuit she devoted herself for some time, believing it to be the only trade for which she was fitted.

Meantime her domestic affairs came to a crisis sooner than she expected. The cause is thus related to Jules Boucoiran:

“You know my home life, and how intolerable it is! You yourself have often been astonished to see me raise my head the day after I had been crushed to the earth. But there is a term to everything. Events latterly have hastened the resolution which otherwise I should not have been strong enough to take. No one suspects anything; there has been no open quarrel. When seeking for something in my husband’s desk I found a packet addressed to myself. On it were written these words: ‘To be opened after my death.’ I opened it however at once. What did I find? imprecations, anathemas, insulting accusations, and the word ‘perversity.’”

This discovery, she tells him, decided her to come to an arrangement with her husband at once, by which she was to live the greater part of the year in Paris with her children, spending a month or two of the summer at Nohant. There were, no doubt, faults on both sides. She herself confesses in her autobiography “that she was no saint, and was often unjust, impetuous in her resolves, too hasty in her judgments.” Wherever there are strong feelings and desires there must be discord at times.

“Happy he who plants cabbages,” says she. “He has one foot on the earth, and the other is only raised off it the height of the spade. Unfortunately for me, I fear if I did plant cabbages I should ask for a logical justification for my activity, and some reason for the necessity of planting cabbages.”

Hers is not a nature that must be judged coldly. What right have we to say that she was to clip the wings of her genius, pass her years in the service of conventionality, and never seek the full development of her artistic nature? When she left the home of her childhood with pilgrim’s staff and scrip to start along the thorny path that led to the shrine of art, she was not actuated by any weak and wayward desire of change, but by the vehement and passionate desire to give forth to the world what was locked within her breast.

The beginning of her life in Paris was one of considerable poverty and privation. She lived au cinquiÈme in a lodging, which cost her a yearly rent of £12; she had no servant, and got in her food from an eating-house close by for the sum of two francs a day. Her washing and needlework she did herself. Notwithstanding this rigid economy, it was impossible to keep within the limits of her husband’s allowance of £10 a year, especially as far as her dress was concerned.

After some hesitation therefore she took the resolution, which caused so much scandal then and afterwards, of adopting male attire.

“My thin boots wore out in a few days,” she tells us in the autobiography. “I forgot to hold up my dress, and covered my petticoats with mud. My bonnets were spoilt one after another by the rain. I generally returned from the expeditions I took, dirty, weary, and cold. Whereas my young men acquaintances—some of whom had been the companions of my childhood in Berri—had none of these inconveniences to submit to. I therefore had a long gray cloth coat made with a waistcoat and trousers to match. When this costume was completed by a gray felt hat and a loose woollen cravat, no one could have guessed that I was not a young student in my first year. My boots were my particular delight. I should like to have gone to bed with them. On their little iron heels I wandered from one end of Paris to the other; no one took any notice of me, or suspected my disguise.”

George Sand was twenty-seven years of age at this time. Without being beautiful she was striking and sympathetic-looking. Sainte-Beuve thus describes his first interview with her:

“I saw, as I entered the room, a young woman with expressive eyes and a fine open brow, surrounded by black hair, cut rather short. She was quiet and composed in manner, speaking little herself, but listening attentively to all I had to say.”

In an engraving of Calmatta’s from a picture done by Ary Scheffer, we see that her features were large but regular, her eyes magnificent, and her face distinguished by an expression of strength and calm that was very remarkable. Her hair, dressed in long bandeaux, increases this expression of peace so belied by the audacity of her genius.

She began her life of independence with very fixed opinions on abstract ideas, but with complete ignorance, so far as material necessities were concerned:

“I know nothing about the world, and have no prejudices on the subject of society, to which the more I see of it, the less I desire to belong. I do not think I can reform it, I do not interest myself enough about it to wish to do so. This reserve and laziness is perhaps a mistake, but it is the inevitable result of a life of isolation and solitude. I have a basis of ‘nonchalance’ and apathy in my disposition which, without any effort on my part, keeps me attached to a sedentary life, or, as my friends would call it, ‘an animal one.’”

A great many of these friends were so shocked at her eccentric proceedings, that she made up her mind to withdraw voluntarily from intercourse with them, leaving them the option of continuing it if they liked.

“What right had I to be angry with them, if they gave me up? How could I expect them to understand my aims or my desires? Did they know? Did I know myself, when burning my vessels, whether I had any talent, any perseverance?

“I never told any one my real intentions; and whenever I talked of becoming an authoress, it was in joke, making fun of the idea, and of myself.”

Still her destiny urged her forward, and she was more than ever resolved, in spite of the difficulty, to follow a literary career:

“My life is restricted here, but I feel that I now have an object. I am devoted to one task, and indeed to one passion. The love of writing is a violent, almost an indestructible one; when once it has taken possession of an unfortunate brain it never leaves it again.... I have had no success: my work has been found unnatural by people whose opinion I have asked.... Better known names must take precedence of mine, that is only fair: patience, patience.... Meantime I must live on. I am not above any work. I write even articles for Figaro. I wish you knew what that meant; but at least they pay me seven francs a column; and with that I can eat, drink, and go to the play, which is an opportunity for me to make the most useful and amusing observations.

“If one wishes to write, one must see everything, know everything, laugh at everything. Ah, ma foi, vive la vie d’artiste! notre devise est libertÉ.”

She thus describes her mornings spent in the editorial offices of the Figaro:

“I was not very industrious, I must confess, but then I understood nothing of the work. Delatouche would give me a subject, and a piece of foolscap paper, telling me not to exceed certain limits. I often scribbled over ten pages which I threw in the fire, and on which I had not written one word of sense. My colleagues were full of intelligence, energy, and facility. I listened, was much amused, but did no good work, and at the end of the month received an average of twelve francs fifty centimes, and am not sure I was not overpaid at that.”

She writes to M. Boucoiran:

“People blame me because I write for the Figaro. I do not care much what they say. I must live, and am proud enough of earning my bread myself. The Figaro is a means as well as another. I must pass through the apprenticeship of journalism. I know it is often disagreeable; but one need never dirty one’s hands with anything unworthy. Seven francs a column is not much to earn, but it is most important to get a good footing in a newspaper office.”

She painted the most vivid portraits of the various eminent men whose aid she sought, and who invariably tried to dissuade her from embarking on a literary career. Balzac, when she first knew him, lived in an “entresol” in the Rue de Cassini.

“I was introduced to him as a person greatly struck by his talent, which indeed was true, for although at that time he had not yet produced his ‘chefs-d’oeuvre,’ I had admired his original manner of looking at things, and felt that he had a great future before him. Every one knows how satisfied he was with himself, a satisfaction which was so well justified that one forgave him for it. He loved to talk of his works, to describe them beforehand, and to read little bits of them aloud. NaÏve and good-hearted, he asked advice of children, and then only made use of it as an argument to prove how right he was himself.

“One evening when we had dined with him in some eccentric manner on boiled beef, melon and iced champagne, he went and put on a beautiful new dressing-gown, which he showed off with the delight of a young girl. We could not dissuade him from going out in this costume to accompany us as far as the entrance to the Luxembourg. There was not a breath of wind, and he carried a lighted candle in his hand, talking continuously of four Arab horses, which he never owned, but which he firmly believed for some time were in his possession. He would have gone with us to the other end of Paris, had we permitted it.

“My employer Delatouche was not nearly so pleasant. He also talked continuously about himself, and read aloud his novels with more discretion than Balzac, but with still more complacency. Woe betide you if you moved the furniture, stirred the fire, or even sneezed while he was thus occupied. He would stop immediately to ask you, with polite solicitude, if you had a cold, or an attack of nerves, and pretending to forget the book he had been reading, he obliged you to beg and pray before he would open it again. He never could accept the idea of growing old with resignation, and always said: ‘I am not fifty, but twice twenty-five years of age.’ He had plenty of critical discernment, and his observations often kept me from affectations and peculiarities of style—the great stumbling-block of all young authors. Although he gave me good advice, he put what seemed to me insurmountable difficulties in my way. ‘Beware of imitation,’ he said, ‘make use of your own powers, read in your own heart, and in the life you see around you, and then record your impressions.... You are too absolute in your sentiments. Your character is too strong. You neither know the world, nor individuals, your brain is empty! Your works may be charming, but they are quite wanting in common sense. You must write them all over again.’ I perfectly agreed with him and went away, making up my mind to keep to the painting of tea-caddies and cigarette cases.”

At last “Indiana” was begun, aimlessly, and with no hope of success.

“I resolutely,” she says in the “Histoire de ma Vie,” “put all precept and example out of my mind, and neither sought in others, nor in my own individuality, a type or character. Of course it has been said that Indiana was me, and her history mine. She was nothing of the kind. I have drawn many different female personations, but I think when the world reads this confession of my impressions and reflections, it will see that none of them are intended for my own portrait. I am too elevated in my views to see a heroine of romance in my mirror. I never found myself handsome enough nor amiable enough to be either poetic or interesting; it would have seemed to me as impossible to dramatise my life, as to embellish my person.”

“Indiana” was signed for the first time by her nom de plume George Sand.

Her former romance, “Rose et Blanche,” had been written in collaboration with M. Jules Sandeau. It appeared under the name of Jules Sand. When “Indiana” was finished Delatouche, who undertook to publish it, advised its authoress to change the name of Jules to George. She did so, and henceforth in literature and society was known by no other name but George Sand.

“Indiana” was a genuine success, and made a considerable stir in Paris. The imperfections of its construction were forgiven for the eloquence of its passion and the beauty of its style; and the only words on every one’s lips for some days after its appearance, were, “Have you read ‘Indiana’? You must read ‘Indiana.’”

Even her severe friend Delatouche was stirred out of his critical frame of mind. She describes his clambering up to her garret, and finding a copy of “Indiana” lying on the table.

“He took it up, and opened it contemptuously. I wished to keep him from the subject and spoke about other things, but he would read on, and kept calling out at each page: ‘Come, it is a copy! Nothing but a copy of Balzac.’ I had neither sought nor avoided an imitation of the great novelist’s style, and felt that although the book had been written under his influence, it was unjust to say it was a copy. I let him carry away the volume, hoping he would rescind his judgment. Next morning on awaking I received the following letter:

“‘George,—I beg your pardon; I am at your feet. Forgive the insulting observations I made last night. Forgive all that I have said to you for the last six months. I have spent the night reading your book. Ah, my child! How proud I am of you!’”

The following extract from one of her letters written after the publication of “Indiana” shows how modest she remained in the midst of her success:

“The popularity of my book frightens me. Up to this moment I have worked inconsequently, convinced that anything I produced would pass unnoticed. Fate has ordained otherwise. I must try to justify the undeserved admiration of which I am the object.

“Curiously enough, it seems as if half the pleasure of my profession were gone. I had always thought the word inspiration very ambitious, and only to be employed when referring to genius of the highest order. I would never dare to use it when speaking of myself without protesting against the exaggeration of a term which is only sanctioned by an incontestable success. We must find a word, however, which will not make modest people blush, and will express that ‘grace’ which descends more or less intensely on all heads in earnest about their work. There is no artist, however humble, who has not his moments of inspiration, and perhaps the heavenly liquor is as precious in an earthenware vessel as in a golden one. Only one keeps it pure and clear, while the other transmutes it or breaks itself. Let us accept the word as it is therefore, and take it for granted that from my pen it means nothing presumptuous.

“When beginning to write ‘Indiana,’ I felt an unaccustomed and strong emotion, unlike anything I had ever experienced in my former efforts at composition; it was more painful than agreeable. I wrote spontaneously, never thinking of the social problem on which I was touching. I was not Saint-Simonian, I never have been, although I have had great sympathy with some of the ideas and for some of the members of the fraternity; but I did not know them at that time, and was uninfluenced by their tenets. The only feeling I had was a horror of ignorant tyranny.”

In spite of her literary success the year 1833 was one of the most unhappy of George Sand’s life. We know the lines addressed to her by Mrs. Browning:

“True genius, but true woman! dost deny The woman’s nature with a manly scorn, And break away the gauds and armlets worn By weaker women in captivity? Ah, vain denial! That revolted cry Is sobbed in by a woman’s voice forlorn,— Thy woman’s hair, my sister! all unshorn, Floats back dishevelled, strength in agony, Disproving thy man’s name: And while before The world thou burnest in a poet-fire, We see thy woman’s heart beat evermore Through the large flame.”

“I ought to be able to enjoy this independence bought at so dear a price,” she writes to her friend M. FranÇois Rollinat, “but I am no longer able to do so. My heart has become twenty years older, and nothing in life seems bright or gay. I can never feel anything acutely again, either sorrow or joy. I have gone through everything and rounded the cape; not like those easy-going nabobs who repose in silken hammocks under the cedarwood ceilings of their palaces, but like those poor pilots who, crushed by fatigue, and burnt by the sun, come to anchor, not daring to expose their fragile bark to the stormy seas. Formerly they led a happy life, full of adventure and love. They long to begin it again, but their vessel is dismasted, and the cargo lost.”

Alas! the “fragile bark” was tempted once more to put to sea, this time freighted with the rich cargo of all the love and all the hope of her passionate woman’s heart.

In the “Histoire de ma Vie” she touches very slightly on the episode of her journey to Venice with Alfred de Musset, and in the “Correspondence” we only read the following significant words, written to M. Jules Boucoiran from Venice on April 6, 1834:

“Alfred has left for Paris. I shall remain here some time. We have separated, for months, perhaps for ever. God knows what will become of me now. I feel still, however, full of strength to live, work, and endure.”

He suffered more than she. After lying six weeks in a brain fever hovering between life and death, he returned to his family broken down in health and spirits—“I bring you,” he writes to his brother, “a sick body, a grieving soul, and a bleeding heart, but one that still loves you.”

He declared later, when the anguish had passed, that,

“In spite of its sadness, it was the happiest period of my life. I have never told you all the story. It would be worth something if I wrote it down; but what is the use? My mistress was dark, she had large eyes! I loved her, and she forsook me. I wept and sorrowed for four months; is not that enough?”

The year that followed their separation was a momentous one in both their literary careers. He produced the “Nuit de Mai,” the “Nuit de DÉcembre” and the “Confessions d’un Enfant du SiÈcle;” while she wrote “Jacques” and “Consuelo.”

Her letters are the fittest commentary on her life and mode of thought at this time. She thus addresses M. Jules Boucoiran:

“You make serious accusations against me. You reproach me for my many frivolous friendships and affections. I never undertake to justify statements made about my character. I can explain facts and actions, but blunders of the intelligence, errors of the heart, never! I have too just an opinion of merit in general to think much of my individual worth; indeed I have neither reverence nor affection for myself, the field is therefore open to those who malign me; and I am ready to laugh with them, if they appeal to my philosophy; but when it is a question of affection, when it is the sufferings of friendship which you wish to express, you are wrong. If we have discovered great faults in those we love we must take counsel with ourselves, and see whether we can still continue to care for them. The wisest course is to give them up, the most generous to remain their friends, but for that generosity to be complete there must be no reproaches, no dragging up of events long past.”

The following is written to M. Adolphe Gueroult:

“Your letter is as good and true as your heart; but I send you back this page of it, which is absurd and quite out of place. No one must write in such terms to me. If you criticise my costume, let it be on other grounds. It is really better you should not interfere at all. Read the parts I have underlined, they are astoundingly impertinent. I don’t think you were quite responsible when you wrote them. I am not angry and am not less attached to you, but I must beg you not to be so foolish again. It does not suit you....

“My friends will respect me just as much, I hope, in a coat as in a dress. I do not go out in male habiliments without a stick, so do not be afraid ... and be assured I do not aspire to the dignity of a man. It seems to me too ridiculous a position to be preferable to the servitude of a woman. I only wish to possess to-day, and for ever, that delightful and complete independence which you seem to imagine is your prerogative alone. You can tell your friends and acquaintances that it is absolutely useless to attempt to presume on my attire or my black eyes, for I do not allow any impertinence, however I may be dressed.”

She became Republican, almost Communistic in her views, founded a paper, the Cause du Peuple, and contributed to another, the Commune de Paris.

“It seems to me,” she writes to her son, “that the earth belongs to God, who made it and has given it to man as a haven of refuge. It cannot therefore be His intention that some should suffer from repletion, while others die of hunger. All that any one can say on the subject will not prevent me from feeling miserable and angry when I see a beggar man moaning at a rich man’s door.

“If I say all this to you, however, you must not repeat it or show my letter. You know your father’s opinions are different. You must listen to him with respect, but your conscience is free, and you can choose between his ideas and mine. I will teach you many things if you and I ever live together. If we are not fated to enjoy this happiness (the greatest I can imagine, and the only thing that would make me wish to stop on earth), you will pray God for me, and from the bosom of death, if anything remains of me in the Universe, my spirit will watch over you.”

After the June massacres, she retired, sad and disappointed, to Nohant, where, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she reigned as pÈre et mÈre de famille, respected and loved by all. The eccentricities of her youth were forgiven for the sake of her genius and generosity of heart. She was hospitable and simple, allowing her son and his wife to manage the household and property, making her guests, however, feel that she was the controlling spirit of the house. Here—all the struggles of life over—she devoted herself to literature, and produced the best works of her life: “La Petite Fadette,” “La Mare au Diable,” and “FranÇois le Chiampi.” George Sand had none of the brilliancy and repartee in general conversation one would have expected, and as the years went on she became more silent and reserved.

Her greatest happiness was to sit in her arm-chair smoking cigarettes. Often, when her friends thought she was absorbed in her own meditations, she would put in a word that proved she had been listening to everything. The word spoken, she would relapse again into silence. It was only when she sat down to her desk that she became eloquent, and the expressions that halted on her lips rushed abundantly from her pen. Her characters grew beneath her hand, and she went on writing, with that perfect style which is like the rhythmic cadence of a great river—“Large, calm, and regular.” George Sand worked all night long after all her guests were in bed, sometimes remaining up until five o’clock in the morning. She generally sat down to the old bureau in the hall at Nohant, with pen, ink, and foolscap paper sewn together, and began, without notes or a settled scheme of any kind.

“You wish to write,” she says to her lovely young friend, the Comtesse d’Agoult. “Then do so by all means. You are young, in the full force of your intelligence and powers. Write quickly and don’t think too much. If you reflect, you will cease to have any particular bent, and will write from habit. Work while you have genius, while the gods dictate to you. I think you will have a great success, and may you be spared the thorns which surround the blessed flowers of the crown of glory. Why should the thorns pierce your flesh? You have not wandered through the desert.”

When death came, she met it simply and bravely, like the great soul that she was. “Laissez la verdure” were the last words she spoke. No one at first understood what she meant, and thought she was delirious, but afterwards they remembered that she had always expressed a dislike to slabs and crosses on the graves of those she loved, so they left a mound of grass to mark her resting-place.

As we read the works of the two great female novelists of the century, George Eliot and George Sand, a comparison inevitably suggests itself to our minds. They both had the same passionate sympathy with the trials and sufferings of humanity, the same love and reverence for all that was weak and lowly. No intellectual aristocracy existed for them; they loved the crowd, and tried to influence the crowd. It is curious they should both have made the same observation, the one on hearing Liszt, the other on hearing Mendelssohn play: “Had I any genius, that is the form I should have wished to take, for then I could have spoken to all my fellow-men.” George Sand was ever seeking ideal perfection, and in that search often lost the right road and “wandered in the desert.” George Eliot accepted life with that calm resignation that was part of her nature; she was more restrained and less passionate than her French sister. The one, while at school, reproaches herself for her coldness and inability to feel any enthusiasm about the prayer-meetings in vogue among her companions. The other cast herself on her knees one day in a fit of devotion, and for weeks declared that she would become a nun.

There is as much divergence in the artistic work they produced as in their characters. George Sand, without having the perfection of construction and finish that distinguish George Eliot, far surpasses her in the delineation of her female characters. George Eliot never described a woman of genius, while George Sand has written Consuelo and the Comtesse Rudolstadt, both of them types of the femme artiste, with all her weakness and all her greatness.

In the painting of human love, also, the French novelist is infinitely stronger than the English one. We linger with absorbing interest over the suffering and passion of Indiana and Valentine, while we yawn over the conversations between Dorothea and Will Ladislaw, or Deronda and Myra. George Eliot herself has said, “That for eloquence and depth of feeling no man approaches George Sand.”

We have seen a photograph done of George Sand shortly before she died. The face is massive, but lit up by the wonderful eyes through which the soul still shines. An expression of tenderness and gentle philosophy hovers round the lips, and we feel almost as though they would break into a smile as we gaze. She became latterly like one of those grand old trees of her own “VallÉe Noire,” lopped and maimed by the storms and struggles of life, but ever to the last putting forth tender shoots and expanding into fresh foliage, through which the soft winds of heaven whisper, making music in the ears of those weary wayfarers who pause to rest beneath their shade.—Temple Bar.