that he left his
wife much alone. And when he was at home his society may not always have
been very entertaining, for what liveliness he had seems to have been
rather in his legs than in his brain. Writing to her mother on April
i, 1828, Madame Dudevant says: "Vous savez comme il est paresseux de
l'esprit et enrage des jambes." On the other hand, her temper, which
was anything but uniformly serene, must have been trying to her husband.
Occasionally she had fits of weeping without any immediate cause, and
one day at luncheon she surprised her husband by a sudden burst of
tears which she was unable to account for. As M. Dudevant attributed
his wife's condition to the dulness of Nohant, the recent death of her
grandmother, and the air of the country, he proposed a change of scene,
which he did the more readily as he himself did not in the least like
Berry. The pleasant and numerous company they found in the house of the
friends with whom they went to stay at once revived her spirits, and
she became us frolicsome as she had before been melancholy. George
Sand describes her character as continually alternating between
"contemplative solitude and complete giddiness in conditions of
primitive innocence." It is hardly to be wondered at that one who
exhibited such glaring and unaccountable contrasts of character was
considered by some people whimsical (bizarre) and by her husband an
idiot. She herself admits the possibility that he may not have been
wrong. At any rate, little by little he succeeded in making her feel
the superiority of reason and intelligence so thoroughly that for a long
time she was quite crushed and stupefied in company. Afraid of finding
themselves alone at Nohant, the ill-matched pair continued their
migration on leaving their friends. Madame Dudevant made great efforts
to see through her husband's eyes and to think and act as he wished, but
no sooner did she accord with him than she ceased to accord with her
own instincts. Whatever they undertook, wherever they went, that sadness
"without aim and name" would from time to time come over her. Thinking
that the decline of her religiousness was the cause of her lowness of
spirits, she took counsel with her old confessor, the Jesuit Abbe de
Premord, and even passed, with her husband's consent, some days in the
retirement of the English convent. After staying during the spring of
1825 at Nohant, M. and Madame Dudevant set out for the south of France
on July 5, t