If the putting of preachment into practice is virtue, George Sand was the most virtuous of all novelists, for the hotel of her large and roomy heart was for the entertainment of transients only.  It was in 1834, when Liszt was twenty-three and Sand thirty, that he was caught in the vortex swirling around “the fire-eyed child of Berry.”  Alfred de Musset introduced Liszt to her, as later Liszt passed her on to Chopin—­or should we say she discarded the poet for the Hungarian, as later the Hungarian for the Pole? it would be more gallant and quite as true.  Like Chopin, Liszt was at first repelled at the sight of George Sand.  But soon he was entangled in that “cameraderie” which was the fashionable name for liaison in that time.

From her the Comtesse de Laprunarede had borrowed him for her snow-begirt castle, and when he returned to Paris there was another woman there, awaiting her turn to carry him off.  This was the Comtesse Marie Catherine Sophie d’Agoult, who was born on Christmas night, in 1805, and therefore was six years older than Liszt, whom she met in 1834.  It was not till six years later that the comtesse took up literature as a diversion, and made herself some little name as an art critic and writer, choosing, as did George Sand, a masculine and English pen-name, “Daniel Stern.”

The comtesse had been married in 1827; her marriage settlement was signed by King Charles the Tenth, the Dauphin, and others of almost equal rank.  The comte was forty-five, she only half his age.  He seems to have been a by no means ideal character, and she found her diversion in the brilliant society she gathered into her salon.  For some time she seems to have been fascinated by Liszt before she could reach him with her own fascinations.

Indeed she was always the pursuer, and he the pursued.  This is the more strange, since, at least at first, she was extremely handsome.  Ramann has thus pictured her: 

“The Countess d’Agoult was beautiful, very beautiful, a Lorelei:  slender, of lofty bearing, enchantingly graceful and yet dignified in her movements, her head proudly raised, with an abundance of fair tresses, which waved over her shoulders like molten gold, a regular, classic profile, which stood in strange and interesting contrast with the modern breath of dreaminess and melancholy that was spread over her countenance; these were the general features which rendered it impossible to overlook the countess in the salon, the concert-room, or the opera-house, and these were enhanced by the choicest toilets, the elegance of which was surpassed by few, even in the salons of the Faubourg St. Germain.  That fantastic dreams were hidden behind the purity of her profile, and passion, burning passion, under the soft melancholy of her expression, was known to but a few, at the time that her connection with the young artist began.”