over-frankness of the author in revealing herself to the public. Others
complain that she keeps on a mask throughout, and never allows us to see
into the recesses of her mind. Her passion for the analysis of sentiment
has doubtless led her here, as in her romances, to give very free
expression to truths usually better left unspoken. But her silence on
many points about which her readers, whether from mere curiosity or some
more honorable motive, would gladly have been informed, was then
inevitable. It could not have been broken without wounding the
susceptibilities of living persons, which she did right in respecting,
at the cost of disappointment to an inquisitive public.

In January, 1855, a terrible domestic sorrow befell her in the loss of
her six-years-old grandchild, Jeanne Clesinger, to whom she was devoted.
It affected her profoundly. "Is there a more mortal grief," she
exclaims, "than to outlive, yourself, those who should have bloomed upon
your grave?" The blow told upon her mentally and physically; she could
not rally from its effects, till persuaded to seek a restorative in
change of air and scene, which happily did their work.

"I was ill," she says, when writing of these events to a lady
correspondent, later in the same year; "my son took me away to Italy....
I have seen Rome, revisited Florence, Genoa, Frascati, Spezia,
Marseilles. I have walked a great deal, been out in the sun, the rain,
the wind, for whole days out of doors. This, for me, is a certain
remedy, and I have come back cured."

Those who care to follow the mind of George Sand on this Italian journey
may safely infer from _La Daniella_, a novel written after this tour,
and the scene of which is laid in Rome and the Campagna, that the
author's strongest impression of the Eternal City was one of
disillusion. Her hero, a Berrichon artist on his travels, confesses to a
feeling of uneasiness and regret rather than of surprise and admiration.
The ancient ruins, stupendous in themselves, seemed to her spoilt for
effect by their situation in the center of a modern town. "Of the Rome
of the past not enough exists to overwhelm me with its majesty; of the
Rome of the present not enough to make me forget the first, and much too
much to allow me to see her."

But the Baths of Caracalla, where the picture is not set in a frame of
hideous houses, awakened her native enthusiasm. "A grandiose ruin," she
exclaims, "of colossal proportions; it is shut away,