Returning thither, she is said to have set her cap at Victor Hugo, who was, however, too much in love with himself to care for any one, especially a woman who was his literary rival.  She is said for a time to have been allied with Gustave Planche, a dramatic critic; but she always denied this, and her denial may be taken as quite truthful.  Soon, however, she was to begin an episode which has been more famous than any other in her curious history, for she met Alfred de Musset, then a youth of twenty-three, but already well known for his poems and his plays.

Musset was of noble birth.  He would probably have been better for a plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the degenerate.  His mother’s father had published a humanitarian poem on cats.  His great-uncle had written a peculiar novel.  Young Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is certain that he was given to dissipation, which so far had affected his health only by making him hysterical.  He was an exceedingly handsome youth, with exquisite manners, “dreamy rather than dazzling eyes, dilated nostrils, and vermilion lips half opened.”  Such was he when George Sand, then seven years his senior, met him.

There is something which, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, seems far more absurd than pathetic about the events which presently took place.  A woman like George Sand at thirty was practically twice the age of this nervous boy of twenty-three, who had as yet seen little of the world.  At first she seemed to realize the fact herself; but her vanity led her to begin an intrigue, which must have been almost wholly without excitement on her part, but which to him, for a time, was everything in the world.

Experimenting, as usual, after the fashion described by Dumas, she went with De Musset for a “honeymoon” to Fontainebleau.  But they could not stay there forever, and presently they decided upon a journey to Italy.  Before they went, however, they thought it necessary to get formal permission from Alfred’s mother!

Naturally enough, Mme. de Musset refused consent.  She had read George Sand’s romances, and had asked scornfully: 

“Has the woman never in her life met a gentleman?”

She accepted the relations between them, but that she should be asked to sanction this sort of affair was rather too much, even for a French mother who has become accustomed to many strange things.  Then there was a curious happening.  At nine o’clock at night, George Sand took a cab and drove to the house of Mme. de Musset, to whom she sent up a message that a lady wished to see her.  Mme. de Musset came down, and, finding a woman alone in a carriage, she entered it.  Then George Sand burst forth in a torrent of sentimental eloquence.  She overpowered her lover’s mother, promised to take great care of the delicate youth, and finally drove away to meet Alfred at the coach-yard.