Mme. Sand has little hands without any bones, soft and plump.  She is by destiny a woman of excessive curiosity, always disappointed, always deceived in her incessant investigation, but she is not fundamentally ardent.  In vain would she like to be so, but she does not find it possible.  Her physical nature utterly refuses.

The reader will find in all that has now been said the true explanation of George Sand.  Abounding with life, but incapable of long stretches of ardent love, she became a woman who sought conquests everywhere without giving in return more than her temperament made it possible for her to do.  She loved Sandeau as much as she ever loved any man; and yet she left him with a sense that she had never become wholly his.  Perhaps this is the reason why their romance came to an end abruptly, and not altogether fittingly.

She had been spending a short time at Nohant, and came to Paris without announcement.  She intended to surprise her lover, and she surely did so.  She found him in the apartment that had been theirs, with his arms about an attractive laundry-girl.  Thus closed what was probably the only true romance in the life of George Sand.  Afterward she had many lovers, but to no one did she so nearly become a true mate.

As it was, she ended her association with Sandeau, and each pursued a separate path to fame.  Sandeau afterward became a well-known novelist and dramatist.  He was, in fact, the first writer of fiction who was admitted to the French Academy.  The woman to whom he had been unfaithful became greater still, because her fame was not only national, but cosmopolitan.

For a time after her deception by Sandeau, she felt absolutely devoid of all emotions.  She shunned men, and sought the friendship of Marie Dorval, a clever actress who was destined afterward to break the heart of Alfred de Vigny.  The two went down into the country; and there George Sand wrote hour after hour, sitting by her fireside, and showing herself a tender mother to her little daughter Solange.

This life lasted for a while, but it was not the sort of life that would now content her.  She had many visitors from Paris, among them Sainte-Beuve, the critic, who brought with him Prosper Merimee, then unknown, but later famous as master of revels to the third Napoleon and as the author of Carmen.  Merimee had a certain fascination of manner, and the predatory instincts of George Sand were again aroused.  One day, when she felt bored and desperate, Merimee paid his court to her, and she listened to him.  This is one of the most remarkable of her intimacies, since it began, continued, and ended all in the space of a single week.  When Merimee left Nohant, he was destined never again to see George Sand, except long afterward at a dinner-party, where the two stared at each other sharply, but did not speak.  This affair, however, made it plain that she could not long remain at Nohant, and that she pined for Paris.