ists by their husbands and brothers, were then deemed
startlingly eccentric, and got her into fresh trouble on this head.

Her letters and the fragments of her journal kept during this time, and
in which she tried to commit to paper her impressions, whilst fresh and
vivid, of the Pyrenees, show the same peculiar descriptive power that
distinguished her novels--that art of seizing grand general effects
together with picturesque detail, and depicting them in a simple and
straightforward manner, in which she was an adept. It must be added that
the diffuseness which characterizes her fiction, also pervades her
correspondence. Neither can be adequately represented by extracts. Her
composition is like a gossamer web, that must be shown in its entirety,
as to split it up is to destroy it.

The ensuing winter and spring were passed agreeably in visits with her
husband to his family at Nerac, Gascony, and to friends in the
neighborhood. In the summer of 1826 their wanderings ended. Once more
they settled down at Nohant, where Madame Dudevant, except for a few
brief absences on visits to friends, or to health resorts in the
vicinity, remained stationary for the next four years, during which her
after-destiny was unalterably shaping itself.

It is perfectly idle to speculate on what might have happened had her
lot in marriage turned out a fortunate one, or had she married for love,
or had the moral character of the partner of her life preserved any
solid claim on her respect, since the contrary was unhappily the case.
Their situation, no doubt, was anomalous. In the young girl of barely
eighteen, country-bred and intellectually immature, whom M. Dudevant had
chosen to marry, who could have discerned one of the greatest poetical
geniuses and most powerful minds of the century? Some commiseration
might _a priori_ be felt for the petty squire's son who had taken the
hand of the pretty country-heiress, promising himself, no doubt, a
comfortable jog-trot existence in the ordinary groove, to discover in
after years that he was mated with the most remarkable woman that had
made herself heard of in the literary world since Sappho! But he
remained fatally blind to the nature of the development that was taking
place under his eyes, preserving to the last the serenest contempt for
his wife's intelligence. Her large mind and enthusiastic temperament
sought in vain for moral sympathy from a narrow common spirit, and in
proportion as her facu