wait in enforced
inaction, amid the awful dead calm that reigned in the provinces, yet
forbidden to forget their affliction for a moment. The peasant was gone
from the land--only the old and infirm were left to look after the
flocks, to till and sow the field. Madame Sand notes, and with a kind of
envy, the stolid patience and industry, the inextinguishable confidence,
of poor old Jacques Bonhomme when things are at the worst. "He knows
that in one way or another it is he who will have to pay the expenses of
the war; he knows next winter will be a season of misery and want, but
he believes in the spring"--in the bounty of nature to repair war's
ravages.

During this time of unimaginable trouble some of the strongest minds
were unhinged. It is no small honor to George Sand that hers should
have preserved its balance. The pages of this journal are distinguished
throughout by a wonderful calm of judgment and an equitable tone--not
the calm of indifference, but of a broad and penetrating intelligence,
no longer to be blinded by the wild excitement and passions of the
moment, or exalted by childish hopes one hour to be thrust into the
madness of despair the next.

Although tempted now and then to regret that she had recovered from her
illness ten years ago, surviving but to witness the abasement of France,
she was not, like others, panic-struck at the prospect of invasion, as
though this meant the end of their country. "It will pass like a squall
over a lake," she said.

But it was a time when they could be sure of nothing except of their
distress. The telegraph wires were cut; rumors of good news they feared
to believe would be succeeded by tales of horror they feared to
discredit. Tidings would come that three hundred thousand of the enemy
had been disposed of in a single engagement and King William taken
prisoner; then of fatal catastrophes befallen to private
friends--stories which often proved equally unfounded.

She had friends shut up in Paris of whom she knew not whether they were
alive or dead. The strain of anxiety and painful excitement made sleep
impossible to her except in the last extremity of fatigue. Yet she had
her little grandchildren to care for; and when they came around her,
clamoring for the fairy tales she was used to supply, she contented them
as well as she could and gave them their lessons as usual, anxious to
keep them from realizing the sadness the causes of which they were too
young to unde