made
her less expansive than formerly to those whose overtures she felt to be
prompted by curiosity or some such idle motive, in the absence of any
sympathy for her ways of thinking. "I am not to be caught in my words
with indifferent persons," she writes to M. Charles Duvernet,
describing how, when in her friend Madame Marliani's _salon_ in Paris
she heard herself and her political allies or their opinions attacked,
she was not to be provoked into argument or indignant denial, but went
on quietly with her work of hemming pocket-handkerchiefs. "To such
people one speaks through the medium of the Press. If they will not
attend, no matter."

Her sex, her anomalous position, her freedom of expression and action,
exposed her to an extent quite exceptional, even for a public character,
to the shafts of malice and slander. Accustomed to have to brave the
worst from such attacks, she might and did arrive at treating them with
an indifference that was not, however, in her nature, which shrank from
the observation and personal criticism of the vulgar.

To a young poet of promise in whose welfare she took interest, she
writes, August, 1842:--

Never show my letters except to your mother, your wife, or your
greatest friend. It is a shy habit, a mania I have to the last
degree. The idea that I am not writing for those alone to whom I
write, or for those who love them thoroughly, would freeze my heart
and my hand directly. Everyone has a fault. Mine is a misanthropy
in my outward habits--for all that I have no passion left in me but
the love of my fellow-creatures; but with the small services that
my heart and my faith can render in this world, my personality has
nothing to do. Some people have grieved me very much,
unconsciously, by talking and writing about me personally and my
doings, even though favorably, and meaning well. Respect this
malady of spirit.

Madame Sand, being naturally undemonstrative, was commonly more or less
tongue-tied and chilled in the presence of a stranger, and she had a
frank dread of introductions and first interviews, even when the
acquaintance was one she desired to make. Sometimes she asks her friends
to prepare such new comers for receiving an unfavorable first
impression, and to beg them not to be unduly prejudiced thereby. Such a
one would find the persecution of lion-hunters intolerable, and now and
then this drove her to extremities