l'Etrangere."

Another of Balzac's friendships, rather different in character from
those already mentioned, was that with George Sand, "his brother
George" he used to call her. He first made her acquaintance in 1831,
and would often go puffing up the stairs of the five-storied house on
the Quai Saint-Michel, at the top of which she lived. His ostensible
object was to give advice about her writing, but in reality he would
leave this comparatively uninteresting subject very quickly, and pour
out floods of talk about his own novels. "Ah, I have found something
else! You will see! You will see! A splendid idea! A situation! A
dialogue! No one has ever seen anything like it!" "It was joy,
laughter, and a superabundance of enthusiasm, of which one cannot give
any idea. And this after nights without slumber and days without
repose,"[*] remarks George Sand.

[*] "Autour de la Table," by George Sand.

There were limitations in his view of her, as he never fully realised
the scope of her genius, and looked on her as half a man, so that he
would sometimes shock her by the breadth of his conversation. After
her rupture with Jules Sandeau, whose side in the affair he espoused
vehemently, he disapproved of her for some time, and contrasted rather
contemptuously the versatility of her affairs of the heart with the
ideal of passionate, enduring love portrayed in her novels. However,
later on, when he himself had been disappointed in Sandeau, and when
the latter had further roused his indignation by writing a novel
called "Marianna," which was intended to drag George Sand's name
through the mud, Balzac defended her energetically. About the same
time (1839) he brought out his novel "Beatrix," in which she is
portrayed as Mlle. de Touches, with "the beauty of Isis, more serious
than gracious, and as if struck with the sadness of constant
meditation." Her eyes, according to Balzac, were her great beauty, and
all her expression was in them, otherwise her face was stupid; but
with her splendid black hair and her complexion--olive by day and
white in artificial light--she must have been a striking and
picturesque figure. Later on Balzac appears to have partly reconciled
himself to her moral irregularities, on the convenient ground that
she, like himself, was an exceptional being; and we hear of several
visits he paid to Nohant, where he delighted in long hours of talk on
social questions with a comrade to whom he need not show the
_galan