She evidently found it worth while to write for the Figaro, which at that time was quite a small newspaper, managed by Henri de Latouche, who also came from Berry.  He was a very second-rate writer himself, and a poet with very little talent but, at any rate, he appreciated and discovered talent in others.  He published Andre Chenier’s first writings, and he introduced George Sand to the public.  His new apprentice was placed at one of the little tables at which the various parts of the paper were manufactured.  Unfortunately she had not the vocation for this work.  The first principle with regard to newspaper articles is to make them short.  When Aurore had come to the end of her paper, she had not yet commenced her subject.  It was no use attempting to continue, so she gave up “the worst of trades,” lucrative though it might be.

She could not help knowing, though, that she had the gift of writing.  She had inherited it from her ancestors, and this is the blest part of her atavism.  No matter how far back we go, and in every branch of her genealogical tree, there is artistic heredity to be found.  Maurice de Saxe wrote his Reveries.  This was a fine book for a soldier to write, and for that alone he would deserve praise, even if he had not beaten the English so gloriously.  Mademoiselle Verrieres was an actress and Dupin de Francueil a dilettante.  Aurore’s grandmother, Marie-Aurore, was very musical, she sang operatic songs, and collected extracts from the philosophers.  Maurice Dupin was devoted to music and to the theatre.  Even Sophie-Victoire had an innate appreciation of beauty.  She not only wept, like Margot, at melodrama, but she noticed the pink of a cloud, the mauve of a flower, and, what was more important, she called her little daughter’s attention to such things.  This illiterate mother had therefore had some influence on Aurore and on her taste for literature.

It is not enough to say that George Sand was a born writer.  She was a born novelist, and she belonged to a certain category of novelists.  She had been created by a special decree of Providence to write her own romances, and not others.  It is this which makes the history of the far-back origins of her literary vocation so interesting.  It is extremely curious to see, from her earliest childhood, the promises of those faculties which were to become the very essence of her talent.  When she was only three years old, her mother used to put her between four chairs in order to keep her still.  By way of enlivening her captivity, she tells us what she did.

“I used to make up endless stories, which my mother styled my novels. . . .  I told these stories aloud, and my mother declared that they were most tiresome on account of their length and of the development I gave to my digressions. . . .  There were very few bad people in them, and never any serious troubles.  Everything was always arranged satisfactorily, thanks to my lively, optimistic ideas. . . .”