e room from which she had
torn herself with such difficulty that morning. In her letter she gives
utterance to the gratitude she owes to the young man who has reconciled
her once more to life. "My soul," she says, "eager itself for
affection, needed to inspire this in a heart capable of understanding
me thoroughly, with all my faults and qualities. A fervent soul was
necessary for loving me in the way that I could love, and for consoling
me after all the ingratitude which had made my earlier life so desolate.
And although I am now old, I have found a heart as young as my own, a
lifelong affection which nothing can discourage and which grows stronger
every day. Jules has taught me to care once more for this existence,
of which I was so weary, and which I only endured for the sake of my
children. I was disgusted beforehand with the future, but it now seems
more beautiful to me, full as it appears to me of him, of his work, his
success, and of his upright, modest conduct. . . . Oh, if you only knew
how I love him! . . . ."(14)

(14) This quotation and those that follow are borrowed from
the unpublished correspondence with Emile Regnault.

"When I first knew him I was disillusioned about everything, and I no
longer believed in those things which make us happy. He has warmed my
frozen heart and restored the life that was dying within me." She then
recalls their first meeting. It was in the country, at Coudray,
near Nohant. She fell in love with her dear Sandeau, thanks to his
youthfulness, his timidity and his awkwardness. He was just twenty, in
1831. On approaching the bench where she was awaiting him, "he concealed
himself in a neighbouring avenue--and I could see his hat and stick
on the bench," she writes. "Everything, even to the little red ribbon
threaded in the lining of his grey hat, thrilled me with joy. . . ."

It is difficult to say why, but everything connected with this young
Jules seems absurd. Later on we get the following statement: "Until the
day when I told him that I loved him, I had never acknowledged as much
to myself. I felt that I did, but I would not own it even to my own
heart. Jules therefore learnt it at the same time as I did myself."

People at La Chatre took the young man for her lover. The idea of
finding him again in Paris was probably one of her reasons for wishing
to establish herself there. Then came her life, as she describes it
herself, "in the little room looking on to the q