instant in the enforcement, both by example
and exhortation, of her conviction that it was the duty of all true
patriots and philanthropists to consecrate their energies to the cause
of the new republic.

"My heart is full and my head on fire," she writes to a fellow-worker in
the same cause. "All my physical ailments, all my personal sorrows are
forgotten. I live, I am strong, active, I am not more than twenty years
old." The exceptional situation of the country was one in which,
according to her opinion, it behooved men to be ready not only with
loyalty and devotion, but with fanaticism if needed. She worked hard
with her son and her local allies at the ungrateful task of
revolutionizing Le Berry, which, she sighs, "is very drowsy." In March
she came up to Paris and placed her services as journalist and partizan
generally at the disposal of Ledru-Rollin, Minister of the Interior
under the new Government. "Here am I already doing the work of a
statesman," she writes from Paris to her son at Nohant, March 24. Her
indefatigable energy, enabling her as it did to disdain repose, was
perhaps the object of envy to the statesmen themselves. At their disgust
when kept up all night by the official duties of their posts, she laughs
without mercy. Night and day her pen was occupied, now drawing up
circulars for the administration, now lecturing the people in political
pamphlets addressed to them. To the _Bulletin de la Republique_, a
government journal started with the laudable purpose of preserving a
clear understanding between the mass of the people in the provinces and
the central government, she became a leading contributor. For the festal
invitation performances given to the people at the "Theatre de la
Republique," where Rachel sang the Marseillaise and acted in _Les
Horaces_, Madame Sand wrote a little "occasional" prologue, _Le Roi
Attend_, a new and democratic version of Moliere's _Impromptu de
Versailles_. The outline is as follows:--Moliere is discovered impatient
and uneasy; the King waits, and the comedians are not ready. He sinks
asleep, and has a vision, in which the muse emerges out of a cloud,
escorted by AEschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Shakespeare, and
Beaumarchais, to each of whom are assigned a few lines--where possible,
lines of their own--in praise of equality and fraternity. They vanish,
and Moliere awakes; his servant announces to him that the King
waits--but the King this time is, of course, the people,