are not afraid that this would make you bankrupt.  If, through his illness, he should not be able to work for a long time, my work could be used for that, so be at ease. . . .  Do this, I beseech you, and write him a short letter to ease his mind at once.  I will then read it to him, and this will pacify one of the torments of his poor head.  Oh, my friend, if you only knew what this delirium is like!  What sublime and awful things he has said, and then what convulsions and shouts!  I do not know how he has had strength enough to pull through and how it is that I have not gone mad myself.  Adieu, adieu, my friend.”

There really was a gambling debt, then, but we do not know exactly where it was contracted.  It amounted to three hundred and sixty francs, which is very different from the ten thousand francs and the threat of suicide.

And now we come to the pure folly!  Musset had been attended by a young doctor, Pietro Pagello.  He was a straightforward sort of young man, of rather slow intelligence, without much conversation, not speaking French, but very handsome.  George Sand fell in love with him.  One night, after having scribbled a letter of three pages, she put it into an envelope without any address and gave it to Pagello.  He asked her to whom he was to give the letter.  George Sand took the envelope back and wrote on it:  “To stupid Pagello.”  We have this declaration, and among other things in the letter are the following lines:  “You will not deceive me, anyhow.  You will not make any idle promises and false vows. . . .  I shall not, perhaps, find in you what I have sought for in others, but, at any rate, I can always believe that you possess it. . . .  I shall be able to interpret your meditations and make your silence speak eloquently. . . .”  This shows us clearly the kind of charm George Sand found in Pagello.  She loved him because he was stupid.

The next questions are, when did they become lovers, and how did Musset discover their intimacy?  It is quite certain that he suspected it, and that he made Pagello confess his love for George Sand.(20) A most extraordinary scene then took place between the three of them, according to George Sand’s own account.  “Adieu, then,” she wrote to Musset, later on, “adieu to the fine poem of our sacred friendship and of that ideal bond formed between the three of us, when you dragged from him the confession of his love for me and when he vowed to you that he would make me happy.  Oh, that night of enthusiasm, when, in spite of us, you joined our hands, saying:  ’You love each other and yet you love me, for you have saved me, body and soul.”  Thus, then, Musset had solemnly abjured his love for George Sand, he had engaged his mistress of the night before to a new lover, and was from henceforth to be their best friend.  Such was the ideal bond, such the sacred friendship!  This may be considered the romantic escapade.

     (20) On one of George Sand’s unpublished letters to Buloz
     the following lines are written in the handwriting of Buloz: