companion was here seized with a terrible illness.  She nursed him day and night through all its length, being so greatly fatigued at the time of his recovery that she saw every object double, through want of sleep.  Yet De Musset went forth from his sick-room with a heart changed towards her.  Hatred had taken the place of love.  Some say that this cruel change was the punishment of as cruel a deception; others call it a mania of the fever, perpetuating itself thenceforth in a brain sound as to all else.  The world does not know about this, and she herself tells us nothing.  In the “Lettres d’un Voyageur,” however, she gives us to understand that constancy is not her forte, and a sigh escapes with this confession, “Prie pour moi, o Marguerite Le Conte!”

George Sand was now launched,—­with brilliant success, in the world of letters, unheeding the conventional restraints of domestic life.  The choicest spirits of the day gathered round her.  She was the luminous centre of a circle of light.  She did not hold a salon, the mimic court of every Frenchwoman of distinction,—­nor were the worldly wits of fashion her vain and supercilious satellites.  But De Lamennais climbed to her mansarde, and unfolded therein his theories of saintly and visionary philosophy.  Liszt and Chopin bound her in the enchantment of their wonderful melodies.  De Balzac feasted her in his fantastic lodgings, and lighted her across the square with a silver-gilt flambeau, himself attired in a flounced satin dressing-gown, of which he was extremely proud.  Pierre Leroux instructed her in the old and the new religions, and taught her the history of secret societies.  Louis Blanc, Cavaignac, and Pauline Garcia were bound to her by ties of intimacy.  She knew Lablache, Quinet, Miekiewiez, whom she calls the equal of Lord Byron.  Her intimates in her own province were men of high character and intelligence, nor were friends wanting among her own sex.  Good-will and sympathy, therefore, not ill-will and antipathy, inspired her best works.  Her views of parties were charitable and conciliatory, and her revolutionism more reconstructive than destructive.  Yet, with all this array of good company, we cannot accord her a miraculous immunity from the fatalities of her situation.  Of the guilt we are not here called upon to judge; of the suffering many pages in this record of her life bear witness.  Little as we know, however, of her own power of self-protection against the tyranny of the selfish and the sensual, we yet feel as if the really base could never have held her in other than the briefest thraldom, and as if her nobler nature must have continually asserted and reasserted itself, with a constant tendency towards that higher liberty which she had sought in the abandonment of outward restraints, but which can never be thus attained.  Some great moral safeguards she had in her tireless industry, her love of art, her honesty and geniality of nature, and, above all, in her passionate love for her children.  Happily, these deep and solid forces of Nature are calculated to outlast the heyday of the blood, and to redeem its errors.