useless,
for every one judges according to his own eyesight, and the general
outlook at the present moment is ugly and poor. Besides, I do not
need to be assured of the salvation of our planet and its
inhabitants in order to believe in the necessity of the good and
the beautiful; if our planet departs from this law it will perish;
if its inhabitants discard it they will be destroyed. As for me, I
wish to hold firm till my last breath, not with the certainty or
the demand to find a "good place" elsewhere, but because my sole
pleasure is to maintain myself and mine in the upward way.

The last five years of her life saw her pen in full activity. In the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, _Malgretout_, the novel of 1870, was succeeded
by _Flamarande_ and _Les Deux Freres_--compositions executed with
unflagging energy and animation of style; _La Tour de Percemont_, and a
series of graceful fairy-stories entitled _Contes d'une grand'mere_.
_Nanon_ (1872), a rustic romance of the First Revolution, is a highly
remarkable little work, possibly suggested by her recent experiences of
the effect of public disturbances on remote country places.

She was also a constant contributor to the newspaper _Le Temps_. A
critical notice by her hand of M. Renan's _Dialogues et Fragments
Philosophiques_, reprinted from those columns, bears date May, 1876,
immediately before she succumbed to the illness which in a few days was
to cut short her life.

At the beginning of this year she had written on this subject to
Flaubert, in the brave spirit she would fain impart to her weaker
brethren:--

Life is perhaps eternal, and work in consequence eternal. If so,
let us finish our march bravely. If otherwise, if the individual
perish utterly, let us have the honor of having done our task. That
is duty, for our only obvious duties are to ourselves and our
fellow-creatures. What we destroy in ourselves we destroy in them.
Our abasement abases them; our falls drag them down; we owe to them
to stand fast, to save them from falling. The desire to die early
is a weakness, as is the desire to live long.

George Sand, like most persons of an exceptional constitution, had
little faith in the efficacy for herself of medical science. She was
persuaded that the prescribed remedies did her more harm than good, and
on more than one occasion, when her health had caused her children
uneas