ervous system could not escape the exhaustion and
disturbance that attend on incessant brain-work. "Those who have nothing
to do," she remarks, "when they see artists produce with facility, are
ready to wonder at how few hours, how few instants, these can reserve
for themselves. For such do not know how these gymnastics of the
imagination, if they do not affect your health, yet leave an excitation
of your nerves, an obsession of mental pictures, a languor of spirit,
that forbid you to carry on any other kind of work."

Although her constitution was even stronger than in her youth, she had
for some years been subject to severe attacks of neuralgia. "Madame Sand
suffers terribly from violent headaches and pain in her eyes," remarks
Delacroix, in one of the letters above quoted, "which she takes upon
herself to surmount as far as possible, with a great effort, so as not
to distress us by what she goes through." Her habit of writing
principally at night and contenting herself with the least possible
allowance of repose, few could have persisted in for so long without
breaking down. For many years she never took more than four hours sleep.
The strain began to tell on her eye-sight at last, and already in a
letter of 1842 she speaks of being temporarily compelled to suspend this
practice of night-work, to her great regret, as in the daylight hours
she was never secure from interruption. Only her abnormal power of
activity and of bearing fatigue could have enabled her to fulfill so
strenuously the responsibilities she had undertaken to her children, her
private friends, and the public. The pressure of literary work was
incessant, and whatever her dislike to accounts and arithmetic she is
said to have fulfilled her engagements to editors and publishers with
the regularity and punctuality of a notary. Her large acquaintance,
relations with various classes, various projects, literary, political,
and philanthropical, involved an immense amount of serious
correspondence in addition to that arising from the postal persecution
from which no celebrity escapes. Ladies wrote to consult her on
sentimental subjects--to inquire of her, as of an oracle, whether they
should bestow their heart, their hand, or both, upon their suitors;
poets, to solicit her patronage and criticism. In the course of a single
half-year, 153 manuscripts were sent her for perusal! She replied when
it seemed fit, conscientiously and ungrudgingly; but experience had