y earnest art aspirant in almost any great city. However
unjustifiable the proceeding resorted to for a time by George Sand and
Rosa Bonheur may be held to be, it cannot possibly be said they had no
motive for it but a fantastic one.

Writing to her mother from Nohant, whither she had returned in April for
a length of time as agreed, Madam Dudevant speaks out characteristically
in defense of her love of independence:--

I am far from having that love of pleasure, that need of amusement
with which you credit me. Society, sights, finery, are not what I
want,--you only are under this mistake about me,--it is liberty. To
be all alone in the street and able to say to myself, I shall dine
at four or at seven, according to my good pleasure; I shall go to
the Tuileries by way of the Luxembourg instead of going by the
Champs Elysees; this is what amuses me far more than silly
compliments and stiff drawing-room assemblies.

Such audacious self-emancipation, she was well aware, must estrange her
from her friends of her own sex in the upper circles of Parisian
society, and she anticipated this by making no attempt to renew such
connections. For the moment she thought only of taking the shortest,
and, as she judged, the only way for a "torpid country wife," like
herself, to acquire the freedom of action and the enlightenment she
needed. Those most nearly related to her offered no opposition. It was
otherwise with her mother-in-law, the _baronne_ Dudevant, with whom she
had a passage-of-arms at the outset on the subject of her literary
campaign, here disapproved _in toto_.

"Is it true," enquired this lady, "that it is your intention to _print
books_?"

"Yes, madame."

"Well, I call that an odd notion!"

"Yes, madame."

"That is all very good and very fine, but I hope you are not going to
put the name that I bear on the _covers of printed books_?"

"Oh, certaintly not, madame, there is no danger."

The liberty to which other considerations were required to give way was
certainly complete enough. The beginning of July found her back at work
in the capital. On the Quai St. Michel--a portion of the Seine
embankment facing the towers of Notre Dame, the Sainte Chapelle, and
other picturesque monuments of ancient Paris--she had now definitely
installed herself in modest lodgings on the fifth story. Accepted and
treated as a comrade by a little knot of fellow _literati_ and
colleagues on