iorates
a frail character, told with a perfecting and elevating power upon hers.

Of her earlier personal beauty few traces remained after middle age
except a depth of expression in her eyes, the features having become
thickened by age. Some among those who, like Dickens, first saw her in
her later years and still looked for the semblance of a heroine of
romance, failed to find the muse Lelia of their imaginations under the
guise of a middle-aged _bourgeoise_. But such impressions were
superficial. Her portrait in black and white by Couture, engraved by
Manceau, seems to reconcile these apparent discrepancies. Beauty is not
here, but the face is so powerful and comprehensive that we perceive
there at once the mirror of a mind capable of embracing both the prose
and the poetry of life; and by many this portrait is preferred to the
earlier likenesses.

Nor is there anything more remarkable in her correspondence than the
extremely interesting series of letters, extending from February, 1863,
to within three months of her death in 1876, and addressed to Gustave
Flaubert, at this period her familiar friend. The intercourse of two
minds of so different an intellectual and moral order as those of the
authors of _Consuelo_ and of _Madame Bovary_ offers to all a curious
study. To the admirers of George Sand these letters are invaluable, both
from a literary point of view and as a record of her inner life from
that time onwards, when, as expressed by herself, she resolutely buried
youth, and owned herself the gainer by an increasing calm within. The
secret of her future happiness she found in living for her children and
her friends. That she retained her zest for intellectual pleasures she
ascribed to the very fact that she never allowed herself to be absorbed
for long in these and in herself.

"Artists are spoilt children," she writes to Flaubert, "and the best of
them are great egoists. You tell me I love them too well; I love them as
I love woods and fields, all things, all beings that I know a little and
make my constant study. In the midst of it all I pursue my calling; and
how I love that calling of mine, and all that nourishes and renovates
it!"

We must now take up the thread of outward events again, which we have
slightly anticipated.

In the autumn of 1860 Madame Sand had a severe attack of typhoid fever.
She was then on the point of beginning her little tale, _La Famille de
Germandre_; "_le roman de ma fievre_,"