y ways of loving, and it is surely noble and
disinterested in a woman to love a man as his mother. "I shall love
him," she says, kissing the young Prince's pale face ardently, "but
it will be as his mother loved him, just as fervently and just as
faithfully. This maternal affection, etc. . . ." Lucrezia Floriani had
a way of introducing the maternal instinct everywhere. She undertook to
encircle her children and Prince Karol with the same affection, and her
notions of therapeutics were certainly somewhat strange and venturesome,
for she fetched her children to the Prince's bedside. "Karol breathed
more freely," we are told, "when the children were there. Their pure
breath mingling with their mother's made the air milder and more gentle
for his feverish lungs." This we shall not attempt to dispute. It is
the study of the situation, though, that forms the subject of _Lucrezia
Floriani_. George Sand gives evidence of wonderful clear-sightedness and
penetration in the art of knowing herself.

She gives us warning that it is "a sad story and sorrowful truth"
that she is telling us. She has herself the better _role_ of the two
naturally. It could not have been on that, account that Chopin' was
annoyed. He was a Pole, and therefore doubly chivalrous, so that such an
objection would have been unworthy of a lover. What concerns us is that
George Sand gives, with great nicety, the exact causes of the rupture.
In the first place, Karol was jealous of Lucrezia's stormy past; then
his refined nature shrank from certain of her comrades of a rougher
kind. The invalid was irritated by her robust health, and by the
presence and, we might almost say, the rivalry of the children. Prince
Karol finds them nearly always in his way, and he finally takes a
dislike to them. There comes a moment when Lucrezia sees herself obliged
to choose between the two kinds of maternity, the natural kind and the
maternity according to the convention of lovers.

The special kind of sentiment, then, between George Sand and Chopin,
Just as between Lucrezia and Prince Karol, was just this: love with
maternal affection. This is extremely difficult to define, as indeed
is everything which is extremely complex. George Sand declares that her
reason for not refusing intimacy with Chopin was that she considered
this in the light of a duty and as a safeguard. "One duty more," she
writes, "in a life already so full, a life in which I was overwhelmed
with fatigue, seeme