ed colonel, the Baron
Dudevant, whom, in September, 1822, she married. She brought him to live
with her at Nohant, and she bore him two sons, Maurice and Solange,
and a daughter. She quickly perceived, as her own intellectual nature
developed, that her boorish husband was unsuited to her, but their early
years of married life were not absolutely intolerable. In 1831, however,
she could endure him no longer, and an amicable separation was agreed
upon. She left M. Dudevant at Nohant, resigning her fortune, and
proceeded to Paris, where she was hard pressed to find a living. She
endeavoured, without success, to paint the lids of cigar-boxes, and in
final desperation, under the influence of Jules Sandeau--who became her
lover, and who invented the pseudonym of George Sand for her--she turned
her attention to literature. Her earliest work was to help Sandeau in
the composition of his novel, "Rose et Blanche" Her first independent
novel, "Indiana," appeared at the close of 1831, and her second,
"Valentine," two months later. These books produced a great and
immediate sensation, and she felt that she had found her vocation.
In 1833 she produced "Lebia"; in 1834 the "Lettres d'un Voyageur" and
"Jacques"; in 1835 "Andre" and "Leone Leoni." After this her works
become too numerous and were produced with too monotonous a regularity
to be chronicled here. But it should be said that "Mauprat" was written
in 1836 at Nohant, while she was pleading for a legal separation from
her husband, which was given her by the tribunal of Bourges, with full
authority over the education of her children. These early novels all
reflect in measure the personal sorrows of the author, although
George Sand never ceased to protest against too strict a biographical
interpretation of their incidents. "Spiridion" (1839), composed under
the influence of Lamennais, deals with questions of free thought in
religion. But the novels of the first period of her literary activity,
which came to a close in 1840, are mainly occupied with a lyrical
individualism, and are inspired by the wrongs and disillusions of the
author's personal adventures.

The years 1833 and 1834 were marked by her too-celebrated relations with
Alfred de Musset, with whom she lived in Paris and at Venice, and with
whom she quarrelled at last in circumstances deplorably infelicitous.
Neither of these great creatures had the reticence to exclude the world
from a narrative of their misfortunes and