philanthropist as well as a critical thinker, one whose life and
fighting power were devoted to promoting the good of the working classes
to whom he belonged, having been brought up as a printer. He was
regarded as the apostle of communism, as then understood, or rather not
understood--for the form under which it suggested itself to the social
reformers of the period in question was entirely indefinite.

Meantime the novelist's pen was far from idle. One or two pleasant
glimpses she has given us into her manner of working belong to this
year. In the summer the heat in her "poet's garret" becoming
intolerable, she took refuge in a congenial solitude offered by the
ground-floor apartments of the house, then in course of reconstruction,
dismantled and untenanted. The works had been temporarily suspended,
and Madame Sand took possession of the field abandoned by the builders
and carpenters. The windows and doors opening into the garden had been
taken away, and the place thus turned into an airy, cool retreat. Out of
the apparatus of the workmen, left behind, she constructed her
writing-establishment, and here, secure from interruption, denying
herself to all visitors, never going out except to visit her children at
their respective schools, she completed her novel with no companions but
the spiders crawling over the planks, the mice running in and out of the
corners, and the blackbirds hopping in from the garden; the deep sense
of solitude enhanced by the roar of the city in the very heart of which
she had thus voluntarily isolated herself.

As an artistic experience she found it refreshing, and repeated it more
than once. Soon after, a friend offered her the loan of an empty house
at Bourges, a town that had been suggested to her as a desirable place
of residence, should the circumstances at Nohant ever force her to
abandon it entirely. As a home she saw and disapproved of Bourges, but
she thoroughly enjoyed a brief retreat spent there in an absolutely
deserted, vine-covered dwelling, standing in a garden enclosed by stone
walls. Her meals were handed in through a wicket. A few friends came to
see her in the evenings. The days, and often the nights, she passed in
study and meditation, shut up in the library reading Lavater,
expatiating on her impressions of his theories in a letter addressed to
Franz Liszt (inserted among the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_), or strolling
in the flower garden--"forgotten," she tells us, "by the