wrong. Madame Sand's children were now
grown up; cross-influences could not but arise, hard to conciliate.
Without accrediting Chopin with the self-absorption of Prince Karol, it
is easy to see here, in a situation somewhat anomalous, elements of
probable discord. It was impossible that he should any longer be a first
consideration; impossible that he should not resent it.

For some years his state of health had been getting worse and worse, and
his nervous susceptibilities correspondingly intensified. Madame Sand
betrayed some impatience at last of what she had long borne
uncomplainingly, and their good understanding was broken. As was
natural, the breach was the more severely felt by Chopin, but that it
was of an irreparable nature, one is at liberty to doubt. He bitterly
regretted what he had lost, for which not all the attentions showered on
him by his well-wishers could afford compensation, as his letters
attest.

But outward circumstances prolonged the estrangement till it was too
late. They met but once after the quarrel, and that was in company in
March, 1848. Madame Sand would at once have made some approach, but
Chopin did not then respond to the appeal; and the reconciliation both
perhaps desired was never to take place. Political events had intervened
to widen the gap between their paths. Chopin had neither part nor lot in
the revolutionary movement that just then was throwing all minds and
lives into a ferment, and which was completely to engross Madame Sand's
energies for many months to come. It drove him away to England, and he
only returned to Paris, in 1849, to die.

In May, 1847, the tranquility of life at Nohant had been varied by a
family event, the marriage of Madame Sand's daughter Solange with the
sculptor Clesinger. The remainder of the twelvemonth was spent in the
country, apparently with very little anticipation on Madame Sand's part
that the breaking of the political storm, that was to draw her into its
midst, was so near.

The new year was to be one of serious agitations, different to any that
had yet entered into her experience. Political enterprise for the time
cast all purely personal interests and emotions into the background. "I
have never known how to do anything by halves," she says of herself very
truly; and whatever may be thought of the tendency of her political
influence and the manner of its exertion, no one can tax her with
sparing herself in a contest to which, moreover, she