Well, after reflection, this danger disappeared and even assumed an opposite character—­that of a preservative against emotions which I no longer wished to know.  One duty more in my life, already so full of and so overburdened with work, appeared to me one chance more to attain the austerity towards which I felt myself attracted with a kind of religious enthusiasm.

If this is a sincere confession, we can only wonder at the height of self-deception attainable by the human mind; if, however, it is meant as a justification, we cannot but be surprised at the want of skill displayed by the generally so clever advocate.  In fact, George Sand has in no instance been less happy in defending her conduct and in setting forth her immaculate virtuousness.  The great words “chastity” and “maternity” are of course not absent.  George Sand could as little leave off using them as some people can leave off using oaths.  In either case the words imply much more than is intended by those from whose mouths or pens they come.  A chaste woman speculating on “real love” and “passing diversions,” as George Sand does here, seems to me a strange phenomenon.  And how charmingly naive is the remark she makes regarding her relations with Chopin as a “Preservative against emotions which she no longer wished to know”!  I am afraid the concluding sentence, which in its unction is worthy of Pecksniff, and where she exhibits herself as an ascetic and martyr in all the radiance of saintliness, will not have the desired effect, but will make the reader laugh as loud as Musset is said to have done when she upbraided him with his ungratefulness to her, who had been devoted to him to the utmost bounds of self-abnegation, to the sacrifice of her noblest impulses, to the degradation of her chaste nature.

George Sand, looking back in later years on this period of her life, thought that if she had put into execution her project of becoming the teacher of her children, and of shutting herself up all the year round at Nohant, she would have saved Chopin from the danger which, unknown to her, threatened him—­namely, the danger of attaching himself too absolutely to her.  At that time, she says, his love was not so great but that absence would have diverted him from it.  Nor did she consider his affection exclusive.  In fact, she had no doubt that the six months which his profession obliged him to pass every year in Paris would, “after a few days of malaise and tears,” have given him back to “his habits of elegance, exquisite success, and intellectual coquetry.”  The correctness of the facts and the probability of the supposition may be doubted.  At any rate, the reasons which led her to assume the non-exclusiveness of Chopin’s affection are simply childish.  That he spoke to her of a romantic love-affair he had had in Poland, and of sweet attractions he had afterwards experienced in Paris, proves nothing.