hapless
romance. An approach to complete reconciliation--for the existing
partial estrangement had been discovered to be more unbearable than all
besides--led to stormy scenes and violent discord, and resulted before
very long in mutual avoidance, which was to be final. It is said that
forgiveness is the property of the injured, and it should be remembered
that whenever De Musset's name is mentioned by George Sand it is with
the admiring respect of one to whom his genius made that name sacred,
and who refused to the end of his life to use the easy weapon offered
her by his notorious frailties for vindicating herself at his expense.
And, however pernicious the much talked of effect on De Musset's mind,
it is but fair to the poet to recollect that it is no less true of him
than of George Sand that his best work, that with which his fame has
come chiefly to associate itself, was accomplished after this painful
experience.

Into her own mental state--possibly at this time the least enviable of
the two--we get some glimpses in the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_ of the
autumn 1834, and winter 1834-35. Here, again, we should be content with
gathering a general impression, and not ingenuously read literal facts
in all the self-accusations and recorded experiences of the
"_voyageur_"--a semi-fictitious personage whose improvisations were,
after all, only a fresh exercise which George Sand had invented for her
imagination taking herself and reality for a starting-point merely, a
suggestive theme.

But the despair and disgust of life, to which both these and her private
letters give such uncompromising and eloquent expression, indubitably
reflect her feelings at this moral crisis--the feelings of one who
having openly braved the laws of society, to become henceforward a law
unto herself, recognizes that she has only found her way to fresh
sources of misery. Never yet had she had such grave and deep causes of
individual mental torment to blacken her views of existence, and incline
her to abhor it as a curse. "Your instinct will save you, bring you back
to your children," wrote a friend who knew her well. But her maternal
love and solicitude themselves were becoming a source of added distress
and apprehension.

The extraordinary arrangement she and M. Dudevant had entered into four
years before with regard to each other, was clearly one impossible to
last. It will be recollected that she at that time had relinquished her
patrimony to