In connection with her domestic life, she gives some explanations which must not be overlooked.  She did not at first quit her husband’s roof with an intention of permanent absence, but with the intention of a periodical return thither.  In time, however, her presence there became unwelcome, and she found those arrangements of which, as she says, she had no right to complain, but which she could not recognize.  Friends intervened, advising an effectual reintegration of the broken marriage; but against this, she says, her conscience, no less than her heart, rebelled.  There existed, indeed, no virtual bond between herself and her late husband.  Whatever may have been the beginning of their estrangement, it seems certain that he acquiesced in her independence with easy satisfaction.  He wrote to her,—­“I shall not put up at your lodgings when I come to Paris, because I wish as little to be in your way as I wish to have you in mine.”  At the same time, by visiting her there, and appearing with her in public, he had given a certain recognition to her position.  There was, therefore, no room for penitence on the one side, for forgiveness on the other, and, through these, for a renewable moral relation between the two.  The law took cognizance of these facts, when, some years later, M. Dudevant brought an action for civil divorce, wishing to recover possession of his children.  His complicity in what had taken place, and the amicable nature of the separation, were so fully established, that the court, recognizing in the parties neither husband nor wife, followed the pleadings of Nature, and bestowed the children where, in the present instance, they were likely to find the warmest cherishing.  Under this decision, she gave up the estate of Nohant to M. Dudevant, who, becoming weary of its management, returned it to her, by a later compromise, in exchange for other property, and the home of her childhood now shelters her declining years.

For the history draws near its close; more travels, more novels, more successes, more sorrows, much fond talk of her friends, many of whom death has endeared to her, a shadowy sketch of her seven years’ intimacy with Chopin, a sob over the untimely grave of her married daughter, and the wonderful book is ended.  Surely, it tells its own moral; and we, who have woven into short measure the tissue of its relations, need not appear either as the apologist of a very exceptional woman, or as the vindicator of laws inevitable and universal, the mischief of whose violation no human knowledge can justly fathom.  The world knows that the life before us is no example for women to follow; but it also knows, we think, that she who led it was on the whole an earnest and sincere person, of ardent imagination and large heart, loving the good as well as the beautiful, even if often mistaken in both,—­and above all, honest in her errors and their acknowledgment.  Gross injustice has, no doubt, been done her.  The creations