Without waiting a day longer, still feeble and ill, I declared my will and mentioned my motives with an aplomb and coolness which petrified him.  He hardly expected to see a being like me rise to its full height in order to face him.  He growled, disputed, beseeched.  I remained immovable.  I want an allowance, I shall go to Paris, my children will remain at Nohant.

She feigned intractability on all these points, but after some time relented and consented to return to Nohant if her conditions were accepted.  From the “Histoire de ma Vie” we learn what these conditions were.  She demanded her daughter, permission to pass twice three months every year in Paris, and an allowance of 250 francs per month during the time of her absence from Nohant.  Her letters, however, show that her daughter was not with her during her first three months at Paris.

Madame Dudevant proceeded to Paris at the beginning of 1831.  Her establishment there was of the simplest.  It consisted of three little rooms on the fifth story (a mansarde) in a house on the Quai Saint-Michel.  She did the washing and ironing herself, the portiere assisting her in the rest of the household work.  The meals came from a restaurant, and cost two francs a day.  And thus she managed to keep within her allowance.  I make these and the following statements on her own authority.  As she found her woman’s attire too expensive, little suited for facing mud and rain, and in other respects inconvenient, she provided herself with a coat (redingote-guerite), trousers, and waistcoat of coarse grey cloth, a hat of the same colour, a large necktie, and boots with little iron heels.  This latter part of her outfit especially gave her much pleasure.  Having often worn man’s clothes when riding and hunting at Nohant, and remembering that her mother used to go in the same guise with her father to the theatre during their residence in Paris, she felt quite at home in these habiliments and saw nothing shocking in donning them.  Now began what she called her literary school-boy life (vie d’ecolier litteraire), her vie de gamin.  She trotted through the streets of Paris at all times and in all weathers, went to garrets, studios, clubs, theatres, coffee-houses, in fact, everywhere except to salons.  The arts, politics, the romance of society and living humanity, were the studies which she passionately pursued.  But she gives those the lie who said of her that she had the “curiosite du vice.”

The literary men with whom she had constant intercourse, and with whom she was most closely connected, came, like herself, from Berry.  Henri de Latouche (or Delatouche, as George Sand writes), a native of La Chatre, who was editor of the Figaro, enrolled her among the contributors to this journal.  But she had no talent for this kind of work, and at the end of the month her payment amounted to perhaps from twelve to fifteen francs.  Madame Dudevant and the two other Berrichons, Jules Sandeau and Felix