nature found in a conventional and limited existence, and for which as yet she knew no remedy.  The fervor of Catholic devotion had, as we have seen, long forsaken her; her studies did not satisfy her; her children—­she had by this time a daughter—­were yet in infancy; her husband was not unkind, but indifferent, and the object of indifference.  She occupied herself with the business of her estate, and with the wants of the neighboring poor; but she was unsuccessful in administering her expenses, and her narrow revenue did not allow her to give large satisfaction to her charitable impulses.  After some years of seclusion and effort, she began to dream of liberty, of wealth,—­in a word, of trying her fortunes in Paris.  She felt a power within her for which she had found no adequate task.  She speaks vaguely, too, of a Being platonically loved, and loving in like manner, absent for most of the year, and seen only for a few days at long intervals, whose correspondence had added a new influence to her life.  This attenuated relation was, however, broken before she made her essay of a new life.  Her half-brother, Hippolyte, brought to Nohant a habit of joviality which soon degenerated into chronic intemperance; and though she does not accuse her husband of participation in this vice, or, indeed, of any wrong towards her, she yet makes us understand that an occasional escape from Nohant became to her almost a matter of necessity.  She, therefore, made arrangements, with her husband’s free consent, to pass alternately three months in Paris and three months at home, for an indefinite period; and leaving Maurice in good hands, and the little Solange, her daughter, for a short time only, she came to Paris in the winter with the intention of writing.

Her hopes and pretensions were at first very modest.  It had been agreed that her husband should pay her an annual pension of fifteen hundred francs.  She would have been well satisfied to earn a like sum by her literary efforts.  She established herself in a small mansarde, a sort of garret, and managed by great economy to furnish it so that Solange could be made comfortable.  She washed and ironed her fine linen with her own hands.  Not finding literary employment at once, and her slender salary running very low, she adopted male attire for a while, as she says, because she was too poor to dress herself suitably in any other.  The fashion of the period was favorable to her design.  Men wore long square-skirted overcoats, down to the heels.  With one of these, and trousers to match, with a gray hat and large woollen cravat, she might easily pass for a young student.