The first letter is dated April, 1831.  George Sand had left Paris for Nohant, and is anxiously wondering how her poor Jules has passed this wretched day, and how he will go back to the room from which she had torn herself with such difficulty that morning.  In her letter she gives utterance to the gratitude she owes to the young man who has reconciled her once more to life.  “My soul,” she says, “eager itself for affection, needed to inspire this in a heart capable of understanding me thoroughly, with all my faults and qualities.  A fervent soul was necessary for loving me in the way that I could love, and for consoling me after all the ingratitude which had made my earlier life so desolate.  And although I am now old, I have found a heart as young as my own, a lifelong affection which nothing can discourage and which grows stronger every day.  Jules has taught me to care once more for this existence, of which I was so weary, and which I only endured for the sake of my children.  I was disgusted beforehand with the future, but it now seems more beautiful to me, full as it appears to me of him, of his work, his success, and of his upright, modest conduct. . . .  Oh, if you only knew how I love him! . . . ."(14)

     (14) This quotation and those that follow are borrowed from
     the unpublished correspondence with Emile Regnault.

“When I first knew him I was disillusioned about everything, and I no longer believed in those things which make us happy.  He has warmed my frozen heart and restored the life that was dying within me.”  She then recalls their first meeting.  It was in the country, at Coudray, near Nohant.  She fell in love with her dear Sandeau, thanks to his youthfulness, his timidity and his awkwardness.  He was just twenty, in 1831.  On approaching the bench where she was awaiting him, “he concealed himself in a neighbouring avenue—­and I could see his hat and stick on the bench,” she writes.  “Everything, even to the little red ribbon threaded in the lining of his grey hat, thrilled me with joy. . . .”

It is difficult to say why, but everything connected with this young Jules seems absurd.  Later on we get the following statement:  “Until the day when I told him that I loved him, I had never acknowledged as much to myself.  I felt that I did, but I would not own it even to my own heart.  Jules therefore learnt it at the same time as I did myself.”

People at La Chatre took the young man for her lover.  The idea of finding him again in Paris was probably one of her reasons for wishing to establish herself there.  Then came her life, as she describes it herself, “in the little room looking on to the quay.  I can see Jules now in a shabby, dirty-looking artist’s frock-coat, with his cravat underneath him and his shirt open at the throat, stretched out over three chairs, stamping with his feet or breaking the tongs in the heat of the discussion.  The Gaulois used to sit in a corner weaving great plots, and you would be seated on a table.”