observes Eugene Delacroix, "belongs to the small number of
those whom one can both esteem and love." Madame Sand joined a
sympathetic appreciation of the refinement of his nature, and an
enthusiastic admiration of his genius--feelings she shared with his
numberless female worshippers--to a strength of character that lent the
support no other could perhaps so fully have given, or that he would
accept from no other, to the fragile, nervous, suffering tone-poet. Her
sentiments towards him seem to resolve themselves into a great
tenderness rather than a passionate fervor--a placid affection for
himself, and an adoration for his music.

All the time their existences, so far from having been united, flowed in
different, nay divergent channels. Chopin, the idol of Paris society,
moved constantly in the aristocratic and fashionable world, from which
Madame Sand lived aloof. She for her part had heavy domestic cares and
anxieties that did not touch him, and with the political party which was
absorbing more and more of her energies he had no sympathy whatever.
Whether the cause were the false start she had made at the outset by her
marriage, forbidding her the realization of a woman's ideal, the
non-separation of the gift of her heart from that of her whole life, or
whether that her masculine strength of intellect created for her serious
public interests and occupations, beside which personal pleasures and
pains are apt to become of secondary moment, certain it appears that
with George Sand, as with many an eminent artist of the opposite sex,
such _affaires de coeur_ were but ripples on the sea of a large and
active existence.

The year after her return from Majorca was marked by her first
appearance before the public as a dramatic author. Although it was a
line in which she afterwards obtained successes, as will be seen in a
future chapter, the result of this initial effort, _Cosima_, a five-act
drama, was not encouraging. It was acted at the Theatre Francais in the
spring of 1840, and proved a failure. It betrays no insufficient sense
of dramatic effect, nor lack of the means for producing it, but decided
clumsiness in the adaptation of these means to that end. The plot and
personages recall those of _Indiana_, with the important differences
that the _beau role_ of the piece falls to the husband, and that the
scene is transported back to Florence in the Middle Ages--an undoubted
error, as giving to a play essentially modern a