It was evident that the days of “adoration, ecstasy, and worship” were things of the past.  Unpleasant scenes became more and more frequent.  How, indeed, could a lasting concord be maintained by two such disparate characters?  The woman’s strength and determination contrasted with the man’s weakness and vacillation; her reasoning imperturbation, prudent foresight, and love of order and activity, with his excessive irritability and sensitiveness, wanton carelessness, and unconquerable propensity to idleness and every kind of irregularity.  While George Sand sat at her writing-table engaged on some work which was to bring her money and fame, Musset trifled away his time among the female singers and dancers of the noiseless city.  In April, 1834, before the poet had quite recovered from the effects of a severe attack of typhoid fever, which confined him to his bed for several weeks, he left George Sand after a violent quarrel and took his departure from Venice.  This, however, was not yet the end of their connection.  Once more, in spite of all that had happened, they came together; but it was only for a fortnight (at Paris, in the autumn of 1834), and then they parted for ever.

It is impossible, at any rate I shall not attempt, to sift the true from the false in the various accounts which have been published of this love-drama.  George Sand’s version may be read in her Lettres d’un Voyageur and in Elle et Lui; Alfred de Musset’s version in his brother Paul’s book Lui et Elle.  Neither of these versions, however, is a plain, unvarnished tale.  Paul de Musset seems to keep on the whole nearer the truth, but he too cannot be altogether acquitted of the charge of exaggeration.  Rather than believe that by the bedside of her lover, whom she thought unconscious and all but dead, George Sand dallied with the physician, sat on his knees, retained him to sup with her, and drank out of one glass with him, one gives credence to her statement that what Alfred de Musset imagined to be reality was but the illusion of a feverish dream.  In addition to George Sand’s and Paul de Musset’s versions, Louise Colet has furnished a third in her Lui, a publication which bears the stamp of insincerity on almost every page, and which has been described, I think by Maxime du Camp, as worse than a lying invention—­namely, as a systematic perversion of the truth.  A passage from George Sand’s Elle et Lui, in which Therese and Laurent, both artists, are the representatives of the novelist and poet, will indicate how she wishes the story to be read:—­

Therese had no weakness for Laurent in the mocking and libertine sense that one gives to this word in love.  It was by an act of her will, after nights of sorrowful meditation, that she said to him—­“I wish what thou wishest, because we have come to that point where the fault to be committed is the inevitable reparation of a series of committed faults.  I have been guilty towards thee in not having the egotistical