d tormented her mind and imagination,
and has its literary memorial in _Lelia_, she was to find a timely,
though but a temporary rescue, in the charm of a new acquaintance--the
delighting society of a poetic mind of an order not inferior to her own.

It was in August, 1833, at a dinner given by Buloz to the staff of the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, that George Sand first made the personal
acquaintance of Alfred de Musset, then in his twenty-third year, and
already famous through his just published poem, _Rolla_, and his earlier
dramas, _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Les Caprices de Marianne_. He rapidly
became enamored of the author of _Lelia_, who for her part felt
powerfully the attraction of his many admirable qualities, mutual
enchantment leading them so far as to believe they could be the hero and
heroine of a happy love tale. In a letter of September 21, addressed to
her friend and correspondent Sainte-Beuve, whom she had made the
confidant of her previous depression and strange moods of gloom, she
writes of herself as lifted out of such dangers by a happiness beyond
any she had imagined, restoring youth to her heart--the happiness
accorded her by the poet's society and his preference for her own. De
Musset, at this time, would have given the world to have been able to
make her his wife.

The story of their short-lived infatuation and of the swift-following
mutual disenchantment,--a story which, says Sainte-Beuve, has become
part of the romance of the nineteenth century,--is perhaps of less
consequence here than in the life of De Musset,[A] in whom the
over-sensitiveness of genius was not allied with the extraordinary
healthy vitality which enabled George Sand to come out of the most
terrible mental experiences unembittered, with the balance of her mind
unshaken, and her powers unimpaired. Yet that he acquired an empire over
her no other ever acquired there is much to indicate. It took her from
France for a while, from her children, her friends--and the breaking of
the spell set her at war, not only with him, but for a while with
herself, with life, and her fellow creatures.

In the last days of 1833, she and the author of _Rolla_ started on a
journey to Italy, where George Sand spent six months, and where she has
laid the scene of a number of her novels: the first and best part of
_Consuelo_, _La Derniere Aldini_, _Leone_, _Leoni_, _La Daniella_, and
others. The spirit of that land she has caught and reproduced perhaps
m