y throat, and all because I don't admire all they
admire; but yet the tears came into my eyes as I trod those places still
stained with their blood. I had rather I, and all my fellow-moderates,
had died than those Republicans."

Amid such disturbing influences it is not surprising that we find her
complaining in the letter last quoted that her work makes no progress;
but the lost time was made up for by redoubled industry during her
summer visit to Nohant.

In the autumn appeared _Valentine_. This second novel not only confirmed
the triumph won by the first, but was a surer proof of the writer's
calibre, as showing what she could do with simpler materials. Here,
encouraged by success, she had ventured to take her stand entirely on
her own ground--dispensing even with an incidental trip to the tropics,
which, in _Indiana_, strikes as a misplaced concession to the prevalent
craze for Oriental coloring--and to lay the scene in her own obscure
province of Berry, her first descriptions of which show her rare
comprehension of the poetry of landscape. Like _Indiana_, _Valentine_ is
a story of the affections; like _Indiana_, it is a domestic tragedy, of
which the girl-heroine is the victim of a pernicious system that makes
of marriage, in the first instance, a mere commercial speculation.
Indeed, the extreme painfulness of the story would render the whole too
repulsive but for the charm of the setting, which relieves it not a
little, and a good deal of humor in the treatment of the minor
characters, notably the eighteenth century _marquise_, and the Lhery
family of peasant-_parvenus_. The personages are drawn with more finish
than those in _Indiana_; the tone is more natural in its pitch. It is
the work of one who finds in every-day observation, as well as in such
personal emotions as come but once in a lifetime, the inspiration that
smaller talents can derive from the latter alone.

In both her consummate art, or rather natural gift of the art of
narrative, is the mainstay of the fabric her imagination has reared.
That incomparable style of hers is like some magic fairy-ring, that
bears the wearer, safe and victorious, through manifold perils--perils
these of prolixity, exaggeration, and disdain of careful construction.
Both _Indiana_ and _Valentine_, moreover, contain scenes and passages
offensive to English taste, but it is impossible fairly to criticise the
fiction of a land where freer expression in speech and in print t