of the women connected with it.  On his campaign, he took with him a theatrical company which gave a representation the evening before a battle.  In this company was a young artiste named Mlle. de Verrieres whose father was a certain M. Rinteau.  Maurice de Saxe admired the young actress and a daughter was born of this liaison, who was later on recognized by her father and named Marie-Aurore de Saxe.  This was George Sand’s grandmother.  At the age of fifteen the young girl married Comte de Horn, a bastard son of Louis XV.  This husband was obliging enough to his wife, who was only his wife in name, to die as soon as possible.  She then returned to her mother “the Opera lady.”  An elderly nobleman, Dupin de Francueil, who had been the lover of the other Mlle. Verrieres, now fell in love with her and married her.  Their son, Maurice Dupin, was the father of our novelist.  The astonishing part of this series of adventures is that Marie-Aurore should have been the eminently respectable woman that she was.  On her mother’s side, though, Aurore Dupin belonged to the people.  She was the daughter of Sophie-Victoire Delaborde milliner, the grandchild of a certain bird-seller on the Quai des Oiseaux, who used to keep a public-house, and she was the great-granddaughter of Mere Cloquart.

This double heredity was personified in the two women who shared George Sand’s childish affection.  We must therefore study the portraits of these two women.

The grandmother was, if not a typical grande dame, at least a typical elegant woman of the latter half of the eighteenth century.  She was very well educated and refined, thanks to living with the two sisters, Mlles.  Verrieres, who were accustomed to the best society.  She was a good musician and sang delightfully.  When she married Dupin de Francueil, her husband was sixty-two, just double her age.  But, as she used to say to her granddaughter, “no one was ever old in those days.  It was the Revolution that brought old age into the world.”

Dupin was a very agreeable man.  When younger he had been too agreeable, but now he was just sufficiently so to make his wife very happy.  He was very lavish in his expenditure and lived like a prince, so that he left Marie-Aurore ruined and poor with about three thousand a year.  She was imbued with the ideas of the philosophers and an enemy of the Queen’s coterie.  She was by no means alarmed at the Revolution and was very soon taken prisoner.  She was arrested on the 26th of November, 1793, and incarcerated in the Couvent des Anglaises, Rue des Fosse’s-Saint-Victor, which had been converted into a detention house.  On leaving prison she settled down at Nohant, an estate she had recently bought.  It was there that her granddaughter remembered her in her early days.  She describes her as tall, slender, fair and always very calm.  At Nohant she had only her maids and her books for company.  When in Paris, she delighted in the society of people of her own station and of her time, people who had the ideas and airs of former days.  She continued, in this new century, the shades of thought and the manners and Customs of the old regime.