elegant and ornate in
society: names, manners, talents, titles. Madcap as I
assuredly was, I looked upon all this as vanity, and went in
quest of intimacy and simplicity combined with poesy. Thanks
to God, I found them in Zoe, who was really a person of
merit, and, moreover, a woman with a heart as eager for
affection as my own.

M. and Madame Dudevant spent the greater part of autumn and the whole
winter at Guillery, the chateau of Colonel Dudevant. Had the latter not
died at this time, he might perhaps have saved the young people from
those troubles towards which they were drifting, at least so his
daughter-in-law afterwards thought. In the summer of 1826 the
ill-matched couple returned to Nohant, where they continued to live, a
few short absences excepted, till 1831. Hitherto their mutual relation
had left much to be desired, henceforth it became worse and worse
every day. It would, however, be a mistake to account for this state of
matters solely by the dissimilarity of their temperaments--the poetic
tendency on the one side, the prosaic on the other--for although
it precluded an ideal matrimonial union, it by no means rendered an
endurable and even pleasant companionship impossible. The real cause
of the gathering clouds and imminent storm is to be sought elsewhere.
Madame Dudevant was endowed with great vitality; she was, as it were,
charged with an enormous amount of energy, which, unless it found an
outlet, oppressed her and made her miserable. Now, in her then position,
all channels were closed up. The management of household affairs, which,
if her statement may be trusted, she neither considered beneath her
dignity nor disliked, might have served as a safety-valve; but her
administration came to an untimely end. When, after the first year of
their married life, her husband examined the accounts, he discovered
that she had spent 14,000 francs instead of 10,000, and found
himself constrained to declare that their purse was too light for her
liberality. Not having anything else to do, and her uselessness vexing
her, she took to doctoring the poor and concocting medicines. Hers,
however, was not the spirit that allows itself to be fettered by the
triple vow of obedience, silence, and poverty. No wonder, therefore,
that her life, which she compared to that of a nun, was not to her
taste. She did not complain so much of her husband, who did not
interfere with her reading and brewing of juleps, and