reached Florence. The aspect of this city and
his researches in the _Chroniques florentines_ supplied the poet with
the subject for _Lorenzaccio_. It appears that George Sand and Musset
each treated this subject, and that a _Lorenzaccio_ by George Sand
exists. I have not read it, but I prefer Musset's version. They reached
Venice on January 19, 1834, and put up at the Hotel Danieli. By this
time they were at loggerheads.

The cause of their quarrel and disagreement is not really known, and the
activity of retrospective journalists has not succeeded in finding this
out. George Sand's letters only give details about their final quarrel.
On arriving, George Sand was ill, and this exasperated Musset. He was
annoyed, and declared that a woman out of sorts was very trying. There
are good reasons for believing that he had found her very trying for
some time. He was very elegant and she a learned "white blackbird."
He was capricious and she a placid, steady _bourgeois_ woman, very
hard-working and very regular in the midst of her irregularity. He used
to call her "personified boredom, the dreamer, the silly woman, the
nun," when he did not use terms which we cannot transcribe. The climax
was when he said to her: "I was mistaken, George, and I beg your pardon,
for I do not love you."

Wounded and offended, she replied: "We do not love each other any
longer, and we never really loved each other."

They therefore took back their independence. This is a point to note,
as George Sand considered this fact of the greatest importance, and she
constantly refers to it. She was from henceforth free, as regarded her
companion.

Illness kept them now at Venice. George Sand's illness first and then
Musset's alarming malady. He had high fever, accompanied by chest
affection and attacks of delirium which lasted six consecutive hours,
during which it took four men to hold him.

George Sand was an admirable nurse. This must certainly be acknowledged.
She sat up with him at night and she nursed him by day, and, astonishing
woman that she was, she was also able to work and to earn enough to pay
their common expenses. This is well known, but I am able to give another
proof of it, in the letters which George Sand wrote from Venice to
Buloz. These letters have been communicated to me by Madame Pailleron,
_nee_ Buloz, and by Madame Landouzy, _veuve_ Buloz, whom I thank for
the public and for myself. The following are a few of the essential
pa