In the first days of January 1831,
the Rubicon was passed. The step, though momentous
in any case to Madame Dudevant, was one whose ultimate
consequences were by none less anticipated than by
herself, when to town she came, still undecided whether
her future destiny were to decorate screens and tea-caddies,
or to write books, but resolved to give the literary
career a trial.
For actual subsistence she had her
small fixed allowance from home; for credentials she
was furnished with an introduction or two to literary
men from her friends in the country who had some appreciation,
more or less vague, of her intellectual powers.
Though courageous and determined, she was far from
self-confident; she asked herself if she might not
be mistaking a mere fancy for a faculty, and her first
step was to seek the opinion of some experienced authority
as to her talent and chances.
M. de Keratry, a popular novelist,
to whom she was recommended, spoke his mind to her
without restraint. It was to the crushing effect
that a woman ought not to write at all. Her sex,
Madame Dudevant was informed, can have no proper place
in literature whatsoever. M. Delatouche, proprietor
of the Figaro, poet and novelist besides, and
cousin of her old and intimate friends the Duvernets,
of La Châtre, was a shade more encouraging,
even so far committing himself as to own that, if she
would not let herself be disgusted by the struggles
of a beginner, there might be a distant possibility
for her of making some sixty pounds a year by her
pen. Such specimens of her fiction as she submitted
to him he condemned without appeal, but he encouraged
her to persevere in trying to improve upon them, and
advised her well in advising her to avoid imitation
of any school or master, and fearlessly to follow her
own bent.
Meantime he took her on to the staff
of his paper, then in its infancy and comparative
obscurity. Journalism however was the department
of literature least suited to her capabilities, and
her fellow-contributors, though so much less highly
gifted than Madame Dudevant, excelled her easily in
the manufacture of leaders and paragraphs to order.
To produce an article of a given length, on a given
subject, within a given time, was for her the severest
of ordeals; here her exuberant facility itself was
against her. She would exhaust the space allotted
to her, and find herself obliged to break off just
at the point when she felt herself “beginning
to begin.” But she justly valued this apprenticeship
as a professional experience, bringing her into direct
relations with the literary world she was entering
as a perfect stranger. Once able to devote herself
entirely to composition and to live for her work,
she found her calling begin to assert itself despotically.
In a letter to a friend, M. Duteil, at La Châtre, dated about
six weeks after her arrival in Paris, she writes:
If I had foreseen half the difficulties
that I find, I should not have undertaken this
enterprise. Well, the more I encounter the more
I am resolved to proceed. Still, I shall soon
be returning home again, perhaps without having
succeeded in launching my boat, but with hopes
of doing better another time, and with plans of working
harder than ever.
Three weeks later we find her writing to her sons tutor, M. Boucoiran, in
the same strain:
I am more than ever determined to follow
the literary career. In spite of the disagreeables
I often meet with, in spite of days of sloth
and fatigue that come and interrupt my work, in spite
of the more than humble life I lead here, I feel
that henceforth my existence is filled.
I have an object, a task, better say it at once,
a passion. The profession of a writer is a violent
one, and so to speak, indestructible. Once
let it take possession of your wretched head,
you cannot stop. I have not been successful; my
work was thought too unreal by those whom I asked
for advice.
But still she persisted, providing,
as best she could, “copy” for the Figaro,
at seven francs a column, and trying the experiment
of literary collaboration, working at fictions and
magazine articles, the joint productions of herself
and her friend and fellow-student, Jules Sandeau,
who wrote for the Revue de Paris. It was
under his name that these compositions appeared, Madam
Dudevant, in these first trial-attempts, being undesirous
to bring hers before the public.
“I have no time to write home,”
she pleads, petitioning M. Boucoiran for news from
the country, “but I like getting letters from
Nohant, it rests my heart and my head.”
And alluding to her approaching temporary return thither, in accordance with
the terms of her agreement with M. Dudevant, she writes to M. Charles Duvernet:
I long to get back to Berry, for I
love my children more than all besides, and,
but for the hopes of becoming one day more useful to
them with the scribe’s pen than with the
housekeeper’s needle, I should not leave
them for so long. But in spite of innumerable
obstacles I mean to take the first steps in this
thorny career.
In her case it was really the first
step only that cost dear; whilst against the annoyances
with which, as a new comer, she had to contend, there
was ample compensation to set in the novel interests
of the intellectual, political, and artistic world
stirring around her. Country life and peasant
life she had had the opportunity of studying from her
youth up; of middle-class society she had sufficient
experience; she counted relatives and friends among
the noblesse, and had moved in those charmed
circles; but the republic of art and letters, to which
by nature and inclination she emphatically belonged,
was a land of promise first opened up to her now.
She was eager and impatient to deprovincialize herself.
In the art galleries of the Louvre,
at the theatre and the opera, in the daily interchange
of ideas on all kinds of topics with her little circle
of intelligent acquaintance, her mind grew richer by
a thousand new impressions and enjoyments, and rapidly
took fresh strength together with fresh knowledge.
The heavy practical obstacles that interfere with
such self-education on the part of one of her sex were
seriously aggravated in her case by her narrow income.
How she surmounted them is well known; assuming on
occasion a disguise which, imposing on all but the
initiated, enabled her everywhere to pass for a collegian
of sixteen, and thus to go out on foot in all weathers,
at all hours, alone if necessary, unmolested and unobserved,
in theatre or restaurant, boulevard or reading-room.
In defense of her adoption of this strange measure,
she pleads energetically the perishable nature of feminine
attire in her day, a day before double-soles
or ulsters formed part of a lady’s wardrobe, its
incompatibility with the incessant going to and fro
which her busy life required, the exclusion of her
sex from the best part of a Paris theatre, and so
forth; the ineffable superiority of a costume which,
economy and comfort apart, secured her equal independence
with her men competitors in the race, and identical
advantages as to the rapid extension of her field
of observation. The practice, though never carried
on by her to such an extent as very commonly asserted,
was one to which she did not hesitate to resort now
and then in later years, as a mere measure of convenience a
measure the world will only tolerate in the Rosalinds
and Violas of the stage. The career of George
Sand was, like her nature, entirely exceptional, and
any attempt to judge it in any other light lands us
in hopeless moral contradictions. She had extraordinary
incentives to prompt her to extraordinary actions,
which may be condemned or excused, but which there
could be no greater mistake than to impute to ordinary
vulgar motives. It must also be remembered that
fifty years ago, the female art student had no recognized
existence. She was shut out from that modicum
of freedom and of practical advantages it were arbitrary
to deny, and which may now be enjoyed by any earnest
art aspirant in almost any great city. However
unjustifiable the proceeding resorted to for a time
by George Sand and Rosa Bonheur may be held to be,
it cannot possibly be said they had no motive for
it but a fantastic one.
Writing to her mother from Nohant, whither she had returned in April for a
length of time as agreed, Madam Dudevant speaks out characteristically in
defense of her love of independence:
I am far from having that love of pleasure,
that need of amusement with which you credit
me. Society, sights, finery, are not what I want, you
only are under this mistake about me, it
is liberty. To be all alone in the street
and able to say to myself, I shall dine at four
or at seven, according to my good pleasure; I shall
go to the Tuileries by way of the Luxembourg
instead of going by the Champs Elysees; this
is what amuses me far more than silly compliments
and stiff drawing-room assemblies.
Such audacious self-emancipation,
she was well aware, must estrange her from her friends
of her own sex in the upper circles of Parisian society,
and she anticipated this by making no attempt to renew
such connections. For the moment she thought
only of taking the shortest, and, as she judged, the
only way for a “torpid country wife,” like
herself, to acquire the freedom of action and the enlightenment
she needed. Those most nearly related to her
offered no opposition. It was otherwise with
her mother-in-law, the baronne Dudevant, with
whom she had a passage-of-arms at the outset on the
subject of her literary campaign, here disapproved
in toto.
“Is it true,” enquired
this lady, “that it is your intention to print
books?”
“Yes, madame.”
“Well, I call that an odd notion!”
“Yes, madame.”
“That is all very good and very
fine, but I hope you are not going to put the name
that I bear on the covers of printed books?”
“Oh, certaintly not, madame, there is no
danger.”
The liberty to which other considerations
were required to give way was certainly complete enough.
The beginning of July found her back at work in the
capital. On the Quai St. Michel a portion
of the Seine embankment facing the towers of Notre
Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, and other picturesque monuments
of ancient Paris she had now definitely
installed herself in modest lodgings on the fifth story.
Accepted and treated as a comrade by a little knot
of fellow literati and colleagues on the Figaro,
two of whom Jules Sandeau and Felix Pyat were
from Berry, like herself; and with Delatouche, also
a Berrichon, for their head-master, she served thus
singularly her brief apprenticeship to literature
and experience; sharing with the rest both
their studies and their relaxations, dining with them
at cheap restaurants, frequenting clubs, studios,
and theatres of every degree; the youthful effervescence
of her student-friends venting itself in such collegians’
pranks as parading deserted quarters of the town by
moonlight, in the small hours, chanting lugubrious
strains to astonish the shopkeepers. The only
great celebrity whose acquaintance she had made was
Balzac, himself the prince of eccentrics. Although
he did not encourage Madame Dudevant’s literary
ambition, he showed himself kindly disposed towards
her and her young friends, and she gives some amusing
instances that came under her notice of his oddities.
Thus, once after a little Bohemian dinner at his lodgings
in the Rue Cassini, he insisted on putting on a new
and magnificent dressing-gown, of which he was exceedingly
vain, to display to his guests, of whom Madame Dudevant
was one; and not satisfied therewith, must needs go
forth, thus accoutred, to light them on their walk
home. All the way he continued to hold forth
to them about four Arab horses, which he had not got
yet, but meant to get soon, and of which, though he
never got them at all, he firmly believed himself
to have been possessed for some time. “He
would have escorted us thus,” says Madame Dudevant,
“from one extremity of Paris to another, if
we had let him.”
Twice again before the end of the
year, faithful to her original intentions, we find
her returning to her place as mistress of the house
at Nohant, occupying herself with her children, and
working at the novel Indiana, which was to
create her reputation the following year.
Meanwhile, a novelette, La Prima
Donna, the outcome of the literary collaboration
with Jules Sandeau, had found its way into a magazine,
the Revue de Paris; and was followed by a longer
work of fiction, of the same double authorship, entitled
Rose et Blanche, published under Sandeau’s
nom de plume of Jules Sand.
This literary partnership was not
to last long, and to-day the novel will be found omitted
in the list of the respective works of its authors.
Its perusal will hardly repay the curious. The
powerful genius of Madame Dudevant, the elegant talent
of the author of Mlle. de la Seigliere, are
mostly conspicuous by their absence in Rose et
Blanche, or La Comedienne et la Religieuse,
an imitative attempt, and not a happy one, in the
style of fiction then in vogue.
Madame Dudevant had stepped into the
literary world at the moment of the most ardent activity
of the Romantic movement. The new school was on
the point of achieving its earliest signal triumphs.
Victor Hugo’s first poems had just been followed
by the dramas Hernani and Marion Delorme.
Dumas’ Antony was drawing crowded and
enthusiastic houses. A few months before the
publication of Rose et Blanche appeared Notre
Dame de Paris. The passion for innovation
which had seized on all the younger school of writers
was leading many astray. The strange freaks of
Hugo’s genius had, to quote Madame Dudevant’s
own expression, excited a “ferocious appetite”
for whatever was most outrageous, and set taste, precedent,
and probability most flatly at defiance. From
those aberrations into which the great master’s
imitators had been betrayed Madame Dudevant’s
fine art-instincts were calculated to preserve her;
but she had not yet learned to trust to them implicitly.
Rose et Blanche, though containing
many clever passages waifs and strays of
shrewd observation, description and character analysis, is
in the main ill-conceived, ill-constructed, and unreal.
The two authors have sacrificed their individualities
in a mistaken effort to follow the fashion’s
lead, resulting in a most ineffective compound of tameness
and sensationalism. Amazing adventures are undergone
by each heroine before she is one-and-twenty.
Angels of innocence, they are doomed to have their
existences crushed out by the heartless conduct of
man, Blanche expiring of dismay almost as soon as
she is led from the altar, Rose burying herself and
her despair in a convent. The then favorite heroes
of romance were of the French Byronic type young
men of fortune who have exhausted life before they
are five-and-twenty, whose minds are darkened by haunting
memories of some terrific crime, but who are none
the less capable of all the virtues and great elevation
of sentiment on occasion. None of these requisitions
are left unfulfilled by the unamiable hero of Rose
et Blanche, a work which did little to advance
the fortunes of its authors, and whose intrinsic merits
offer little warrant for dragging it out of the oblivion
into which it has been suffered to drop.
To escape the influences of the literary
revolution everywhere then triumphant was of course
impossible. To make them serve her individual
genius instead of enslaving her individuality was all
Madame Dudevant needed to learn. Her friend Balzac
had done this for himself, suiting his genius to the
period without any sacrifice of originality. Although
not yet at the height of his fame he had produced many
most successful works, and Madame Dudevant, according
to her own account, derived great profit from the
study of his method, although with no inclination to
follow in his direction. Yet he afterwards observed
to her, “Our two roads lead to the same goal.”
Rose et Blanche, though little
noticed by the public, brought a publisher to the
door, one Ernest Dupuy, with an order for another novel
by the same authors. Indiana was ready-written,
and came in response to the demand. But as Sandeau
had had no hand whatever in this composition, the
signature had of course to be varied. The publisher
wishing to connect the new novel with its predecessor
it was decided to alter the prefix only. She
fixed on George, as representative of Berry, the land
of husbandmen; and George Sand thus became pseudonym
of the author of Indiana, a pseudonym whose
origin imaginative critics have sought far afield
and some have discovered in her alleged sympathy with
Kotzebue’s murderer, Karl Sand, and political
assassination in general! Its assumption was
to inaugurate a new era in her life.
In the last days of April, 1832, appeared
Indiana, by George Sand. “I took,”
says Madame Dudevant, in her account of the transaction,
“the 1,200 francs paid me by the publisher,
which to me were a little fortune, hoping he would
see his money back again.” She had recently
returned from one of her periodical visits to Nohant,
accompanied this time by her little girl, whom the
progress already achieved enabled her now to take
into her charge, and was living very quietly and studiously
in her humble establishment on the Quai St. Michel,
when she awoke to find herself famous.
Her success, for which indeed there
had been nothing to prepare her neither
flattery of friends, nor vain-glorious ambition within
herself was immediate and conclusive.
Whatever differences of opinion might exist about
the book, critics agreed in recognizing there the
revelation of a new writer of extraordinary power.
“One of those masters who have been gifted with
the enchanter’s wand and mirror,”
wrote Sainte-Beuve, a few months later, when he did
not hesitate to compare the young author to Madame
de Stael. The novel of sentimental analysis,
a style in which George Sand is unsurpassed, was then
a fresh and promising field. Indiana, without
the aid of marvellous incidents, startling crimes,
or iniquitous mysteries, riveted the attention of its
readers as firmly as the most thrilling tales of adventure
and horror. It is a “soul’s tragedy,”
and that is all the love-tragedy vulgarized
since by repeated treatment by inferior novelists,
of a romantic, sensitive, passionate, high-natured
girl, hopelessly ill-mated with a somewhat tyrannical
and stupid, yet not entirely ill-disposed old colonel,
and exposed to the seductions of a Lovelace the
truth about whose unloveable character, in its profound
and heartless egoism, first bursts upon her at the
moment when, maddened by brutal insult, she is driven
to claim the generous devotion he has proffered a thousand
times. Side by side with the ideal of selfishness,
Raymon stands in contrast with the ideally chivalrous
Ralph, Indiana’s despised cousin, who, loving
her disinterestedly and in silence, has watched over
her as a guardian-friend to the last, and does save
her ultimately. The florid descriptions, the
high-flown strains of emotion, which now strike as
blemishes in the book, were counted beauties fifty
years since; and even to-day, when reaction has brought
about an extreme distaste for emotional writing, they
cannot conceal the superior ability of the novelist.
The sentiment, however extravagantly worded, is genuine
and spontaneous, and has the true ring of passionate
conviction. The characters are vividly, if somewhat
closely drawn and contrasted, the scenes graphic;
every page is colored by fervid imagination, and despite
some violations of probability in the latter portion,
out of keeping artistically with the natural character
of the rest of the book, the whole has the strength
of that unity and completeness of conception which
is the distinguishing stamp of a genius of the first
order. The entrain of the style is irresistible.
It was written, she tells us, tout d’un jet,
under the force of a stimulus from within. Ceasing
to counterfeit the manner of anyone, or to consult
the exigencies of the book-market, she for the first
time ventures to be herself responsible for the inspiration
and the mode of expression adopted.
The papers spoke of the new novel
in high tones of praise, the public read it with avidity.
The authorship, for a time, continued to perplex people.
In spite of the masculine pseudonym, certain feminine
qualities, niceties of perception and tenderness,
were plainly recognized in the work, but the possibility
that so vigorous and well-executed a composition could
come from a feminine hand was one then reckoned scarcely
admissible. Even among those already in the secret
were sceptics who questioned the author’s power
to sustain her success, since nearly everybody, it
is said, can produce one good novel.
“The success of Indiana
has thrown me into dismay,” writes Madame Dudevant,
in July, 1832, to M. Charles Duvernet, at La Châtre.
“Till now, I thought my writing was without
consequence, and would not merit the slightest attention.
Fate has decreed otherwise. The unmerited admiration
of which I have become the object must be justified.”
And Valentine was already in progress; and
its publication, not many months after Indiana,
to be a conclusive answer to the challenge.
The season of 1832, in which George
Sand made her debut in literature, was marked,
in Paris, by public events of the most tragic character.
In the spring, the cholera made its appearance, and
struck panic into the city. Six people died in
the house where Madame Dudevant resided, but neither
she nor any of her friends were attacked. She
was next to be a witness of political disturbances
equally terrible. The disappointment felt by
the Liberals at the results of the Revolution of 1830,
and of the establishment of Louis Philippe’s
Government, upon which such high hopes had been founded,
was already beginning to assert itself in secret agitation,
and in the sanguinary street insurrections, such as
that of June, 1832, sanguinarily repressed. Madame
Dudevant at this time had no formulated political
creed, and political subjects were those least attractive
to her. But though born in the opposite camp she
felt all her natural sympathies incline to the Republican
side. They were further intensified by the scenes
of which she was an eye-witness, and which roused
a similar feeling even among anti-revolutionists.
Thus Heine, in giving an account of the struggle mentioned
above, and speaking of the enthusiasts who sacrificed
their lives in this desperate demonstration, exclaims:
“I am, by God! no Republican. I know that
if the Republicans conquer they will cut my throat,
and all because I don’t admire all they admire;
but yet the tears came into my eyes as I trod those
places still stained with their blood. I had
rather I, and all my fellow-moderates, had died than
those Republicans.”
Amid such disturbing influences it
is not surprising that we find her complaining in
the letter last quoted that her work makes no progress;
but the lost time was made up for by redoubled industry
during her summer visit to Nohant.
In the autumn appeared Valentine.
This second novel not only confirmed the triumph won
by the first, but was a surer proof of the writer’s
calibre, as showing what she could do with simpler
materials. Here, encouraged by success, she had
ventured to take her stand entirely on her own ground dispensing
even with an incidental trip to the tropics, which,
in Indiana, strikes as a misplaced concession
to the prevalent craze for Oriental coloring and
to lay the scene in her own obscure province of Berry,
her first descriptions of which show her rare comprehension
of the poetry of landscape. Like Indiana,
Valentine is a story of the affections; like
Indiana, it is a domestic tragedy, of which
the girl-heroine is the victim of a pernicious system
that makes of marriage, in the first instance, a mere
commercial speculation. Indeed, the extreme painfulness
of the story would render the whole too repulsive
but for the charm of the setting, which relieves it
not a little, and a good deal of humor in the treatment
of the minor characters, notably the eighteenth century
marquise, and the Lhery family of peasant-parvenus.
The personages are drawn with more finish than those
in Indiana; the tone is more natural in its
pitch. It is the work of one who finds in every-day
observation, as well as in such personal emotions
as come but once in a lifetime, the inspiration that
smaller talents can derive from the latter alone.
In both her consummate art, or rather
natural gift of the art of narrative, is the mainstay
of the fabric her imagination has reared. That
incomparable style of hers is like some magic fairy-ring,
that bears the wearer, safe and victorious, through
manifold perils perils these of prolixity,
exaggeration, and disdain of careful construction.
Both Indiana and Valentine, moreover,
contain scenes and passages offensive to English taste,
but it is impossible fairly to criticise the fiction
of a land where freer expression in speech and in print
than with us is habitually recognized and practiced,
from our own standpoint of literary decorum.
It was not for this feature that French criticism
had already begun to charge her books with dangerous
tendencies (thus contributing largely to noise her
fame abroad), as breathing rebellion against the laws
of present society; charges which, so far as Indiana
and Valentine are concerned, had, as is now
generally admitted, but little foundation. Each
is the story of an unhappy marriage, but there is
no attempt whatever to throw contempt on existing institutions,
or to propound any theory, unless it be the idea no
heresy or novelty in England at least that
marriage, concluded without love on either side, is
fraught with special dangers to the wife, whose happiness
is bound up with her affections. It was the bold
and uncompromising manner in which this plain fact
was brought forward, the energy of the protest against
a real social abuse, which moved some critics to sound
a war-cry for which, as yet, no just warrant had been
given.
Besides these two novels, containing
full proof of her genius, if not of its highest employment,
there appeared, late in 1832, that remarkable novelette,
La Marquise, revealing fresh qualities of subtle
penetration and clear analysis. The flexibility
of her imagination, the variety in her modes of its
application, form an essential characteristic of her
work. Not by any single novel, nor, indeed by
half-a-dozen taken at random, can she be adequately
represented.
When in the winter of 1832 Madame
Sand returned with her little girl to Paris after
spending the autumn, as usual, at Nohant, it was to
rather more comfortable quarters, on the Quai Malplaquet.
The rapid sale of her books was placing her in comparatively
easy circumstances, and giving fresh spur to her activity.
But her situation was transforming itself fast; the
freedom of obscurity was lost to her for ever from
the day when the unknown personage, George Sand, became
the object of general curiosity of curiosity
redoubled in Paris by the rumors current there of
her exceptional position, eccentric habits, and interesting
personality.
The celebrated portrait of her by
Eugene Delacroix was painted in the year 1833.
It is a three-quarter view, and represents her wearing
her quasi masculine redingote, with
broad revers and loosely knotted silk neck-tie.
Of somewhat later date is a highly interesting drawing
by Calamatta, well-known by engravings; but of George
Sand in her first youth no likeness unfortunately
has been left to the world. She has been most
diversely described by her different contemporaries.
But that at this time she possessed real beauty is
perfectly evident; for all that she denies it herself,
and that, unlike most women, and nearly all French
women, she scorned to enhance it by an elaborated toilette.
Heine, though he never professed himself one of her
personal adorers, compares the beauty of her head
to that of the Venus of Milo, saying, “It bears
the stamp of ideality, and recalls the noblest remaining
examples of Greek art.” Her figure was somewhat
too short, but her hands and feet were very small
and beautifully shaped. His acquaintance with
her dates from the early years of her literary triumphs,
and his description is in harmony with Calamatta’s
presentation. She had dark curling hair, a beauty
in itself, falling in profusion to her shoulders,
well-formed features, pale olive-tinted complexion,
the countenance expressive, the eyes dark and very
fine, not sparkling, but mild and full of feeling.
The face reminds us of the character of “Still
Waters,” attributed to the Aurore Dupin of fifteen
by the Lady Superior of the English convent.
Her voice was soft and muffled, and the simplicity
of her manner has been remarked on by those who sought
her acquaintance, as a particular charm. Yet,
like all reserved natures, she often failed to attract
strangers at a first meeting. In general conversation
she disappointed people, by not shining. Men
and women, immeasurably her inferiors, surpassed her
in ready wit and brilliant repartee. Her taciturnity
in society has been somewhat ungenerously laid to a
parti pris. She was one, it is said, who
took all and gave nothing. That she was intentionally
chary of her passing thoughts and impressions to those
around her, is, however, sufficiently disproved by
her letters. Here she shows herself lavish of
her mind to her correspondents. Conversation and
composition necessitate a very different brain action,
and her marvellous facility in writing seems really
to have been accompanied with no corresponding readiness
of speech and reply. Probably it was only, as
she herself states, when she had a pen in her hand
that her lethargic ideas would arise and flow in order
as they should. And the need of self-expression
felt by all those who have not the gift of communicating
themselves fully and easily in speech or manner, a
strong need in her case, from her having so much to
express, was the spur that drove her to seek and find
the mode of so doing in art.
Her silence in company certainly did
not detract from her fascination upon a closer acquaintance.
Of those who fell under the spell, the more fortunate
came at once to terms of friendship with her, which
remained undisturbed through life. Thus, of one
among this numerous brotherhood, Francois Rollinat,
with whom she would congratulate herself on having
realized the perfection of such an alliance of minds,
she could write when recording their friendship, then
already a quarter of a century old, that it was still
young as compared with some that she counted, and
that dated from her childhood.
Others fell in love with her, and
found her unresponsive. With some of these, jealousies
and misunderstandings arose, and led to estrangements,
for the most part but temporary. Yet the winner
of her heart was scarcely to be envied. She was
apt she has herself thus expressed it to
see people through a prism of enthusiasm, and afterwards
to recover her lucidity of judgment. Great, no
doubt, was her power of self-illusion; it betrayed
her into errors that have been unsparingly judged.
For her power of calm and complete disillusion she
was perhaps unique among women, and it is no wonder
if mankind have found it hard to forgive.