ing to your
lover.' George Sand had recourse to her usual threat of
leaving the house. Alfred de Musset read her up: 'You are
thinking of a horrible plan. You want to hurry off to your
doctor, pretend that I am mad and that your life is in
danger. You will not leave this room. I will keep you from
anything so base. If you do go, I will put such an epitaph
on your grave that the people who read it will turn pale,'
said Alfred with terrible energy.

"George Sand was trembling and crying.

"'I no longer love you,' Alfred said scoffingly to George
Sand.

"'It is the right moment to take your poison or to go and
drown yourself.'

"Confession to Alfred of her secret about the doctor.
Reconciliation. Alfred's departure. George Sand's
affectionate and enthusiastic letters."

Such are the famous episodes of the _tea-cup_ and _the
letter_ as Buloz heard them told at the time.

Musset returned in March, 1834, leaving George Sand with Pagello in
Venice. The sentimental exaggeration continued, as we see from the
letters exchanged between Musset and George Sand. When crossing
the Simplon the immutable grandeur of the Alps struck Alusset with
admiration, and he thought of his two "great friends." His head was
evidently turned by the heights from which he looked at things. George
Sand wrote to him: "I am not giving you any message from Pagello,
except that he is almost as sad as I am at your absence." "He is a fine
fellow," answered Musset. "Tell him how much I like him, and that my
eyes fill with tears when I think of him." Later on he writes: "When I
saw Pagello, I recognized in him the better side of my own nature,
but pure and free from the irreparable stains which have ruined mine."
"Always treat me like that," writes Musset again. "It makes me feel
proud. My dear friend, the woman who talks of her new lover in this way
to the one she has given up, but who still loves her, gives him a proof
of the greatest esteem that a man can receive from a woman. . . ." That
romanticism which made a drama of the situation in _L'Ecole des Femmes_,
and another one out of that in the _Precieuses ridicules_, excels in
taking tragically situations that belong to comedy and in turning them
into the sublime.

Meanwhile George Sand had settled down in Venice with Pagello--and with
all the family, all the Pagello tribe, with the brother, the sister, t