o
say nothing of the various rivals who came and made scenes. It was the
vulgar, ordinary platitude of an Italian intimacy of this kind. In spite
of everything, she continued congratulating herself on her choice.

"I have my love, my stay here with me. He never suffers, for he is never
weak or suspicious. . . . He is calm and good. . . . He loves me and is
at peace; he is happy without my having to suffer, without my having to
make efforts for his happiness. . . . As for me, I must suffer for some
one. It is just this suffering which nurtures my maternal solicitude,
etc. . . ." She finally begins to weary of her dear Pagello's stupidity.
It occurred to her to take him with her to Paris, and that was the
climax. There are some things which cannot be transplanted from one
country to another. When they had once set foot in Paris, the absurdity
of their situation appeared to them.

"From the moment that Pagello landed in France," says George Sand, "he
could not understand anything." The one thing that he was compelled to
understand was that he was no longer wanted. He was simply pushed out.
George Sand had a remarkable gift for bringing out the characteristics
of the persons with whom she had any intercourse. This Pagello, thanks
to his adventure with her, has become in the eyes of the world a
personage as comic as one of Moliere's characters.

Musset and George Sand still cared for each other. He beseeched her
to return to him. "I am good-for-nothing," he says, "for I am simply
steeped in my love for you. I do not know whether I am alive, whether I
eat, drink, or breathe, but I know I am in love." George Sand was afraid
to return to him, and Sainte-Beuve forbade her. Love proved stronger
than all other arguments, however, and she yielded.

As soon as she was with him once more, their torture commenced again,
with all the customary complaints, reproaches and recriminations. "I was
quite sure that all these reproaches would begin again immediately after
the happiness we had dreamed of and promised each other. Oh, God, to
think that we have already arrived at this!" she writes.

What tortured them was that the past, which they had believed to be "a
beautiful poem," now seemed to them a hideous nightmare. All this, we
read, was a game that they were playing. A cruel sort of game, of which
Musset grew more and more weary, but which to George Sand gradually
became a necessity. We see this, as from henceforth it was she who