rom the world, indifferent to fame, and effectually
disenchanted--so she believes--with passion. Despite an experience
strange and stormy, even for a member of her Bohemian profession,
Lucrezia has miraculously preserved intact her native nobility of soul,
and appears as a meet object of worship to a fastidious young prince on
his travels, who becomes passionately enamored of her. He over-persuades
Lucrezia into trusting that they will find their felicity in each other.
Their happiness is of the briefest duration, owing to the unreasonable
character of the prince, who leads the actress a miserable life; his
love taking the form of petty tyranny and retrospective jealousy. After
long years of this material and moral captivity, the heroic Lucrezia
fades and dies.

Not content with identifying the intolerable, though it must be owned
severely-tested, Prince Karol with Chopin, imaginative writers have gone
so far as to assert that the book was conceived and written from an
express design on the novelist's part to bring about the breach of a
link she was beginning to find irksome!

Madame Sand has described how it was written--as are all such works of
imagination--in response to a sort of "call"--some striking yet
indefinable quality in one idea among the host always floating through
the brain of the artist, that makes him instantly seize it and single it
out as inviting to art-treatment. It would be preposterous to doubt her
statement. But whether the inspiration ought not to have been sacrificed
is another question. Her gift was her good angel and her evil angel as
well, but in any case something of her despot. Here, assuredly, it
ruled her ill. It is indisputable that, as she had pointed out, the sad
history of the attachment of Lucrezia the actress and Karol the prince
deviates too widely from that which was supposed to have originated it
for just comparisons to be drawn between the two, that Karol is not a
genius, and therefore has none of the rights of genius--including, we
presume, the right to be a torment to those around him--that to talk of
a portrait of Chopin without his genius is a contradiction in terms,
that he never suspected the likeness assumed until it was insinuated to
him, and so forth. But there remains this, that in the work of
imagination she here presented to the public there was enough of reality
interwoven to make the world hasten to identify or confound Prince Karol
with Chopin. This might have b