inevitable a future separation on less amicable terms,
though neither appear to have realized it at the time. Madame Dudevant
can have had no motive to blind her in the matter beyond her desire, in
detaching herself from her present position, not to disconnect her life
from that of her children. The freedom she demanded it was probably too
late to deny. Those about her, her husband and M. Chatiron, who, with
his family, was temporarily domesticated at Nohant, and who so far
supported her as to offer her the loan of rooms held by him in Paris,
for the first part of her stay, thought her resolution but a caprice.
And viewed by the light of her subsequent success it is hard now to
realize the boldness of an undertaking whose consequences, had it
failed, must have been humiliating and disastrous. She had no practical
knowledge of the world, had received no artistic training, and enjoyed
none of the advantages of intellectual society. But she had
extraordinary courage, spirit, and energy, springing no doubt from a
latent sense of extraordinary powers, almost matured, though as yet but
half-manifest. So much she knew of herself, and states modestly: "I had
discovered that I could write quickly, easily, and for long at a time
without fatigue; that my ideas, torpid in my brain, woke up and linked
themselves together deductively in the flow of the pen; that in my life
of seclusion, I had observed a good deal, and understood pretty well the
characters I had chanced to come across, and that, consequently, I knew
human nature well enough to describe it." A most moderate estimate, in
which, however, she had yet to convince people that she was not
self-deceived.

CHAPTER III.

DEBUT IN LITERATURE.

In the first days of January 1831, the Rubicon was passed. The step,
though momentous in any case to Madame Dudevant, was one whose ultimate
consequences were by none less anticipated than by herself, when to town
she came, still undecided whether her future destiny were to decorate
screens and tea-caddies, or to write books, but resolved to give the
literary career a trial.

For actual subsistence she had her small fixed allowance from home; for
credentials she was furnished with an introduction or two to literary
men from her friends in the country who had some appreciation, more or
less vague, of her intellectual powers. Though courageous and
determined, she was far from self-confident; she asked herself if she
might not be