with the man's weakness and vacillation; her reasoning imperturbation,
prudent foresight, and love of order and activity, with his excessive
irritability and sensitiveness, wanton carelessness, and unconquerable
propensity to idleness and every kind of irregularity. While George Sand
sat at her writing-table engaged on some work which was to bring her
money and fame, Musset trifled away his time among the female singers
and dancers of the noiseless city. In April, 1834, before the poet had
quite recovered from the effects of a severe attack of typhoid fever,
which confined him to his bed for several weeks, he left George Sand
after a violent quarrel and took his departure from Venice. This,
however, was not yet the end of their connection. Once more, in spite
of all that had happened, they came together; but it was only for a
fortnight (at Paris, in the autumn of 1834), and then they parted for
ever.

It is impossible, at any rate I shall not attempt, to sift the true
from the false in the various accounts which have been published of
this love-drama. George Sand's version may be read in her Lettres d'un
Voyageur and in Elle et Lui; Alfred de Musset's version in his brother
Paul's book Lui et Elle. Neither of these versions, however, is a plain,
unvarnished tale. Paul de Musset seems to keep on the whole nearer
the truth, but he too cannot be altogether acquitted of the charge of
exaggeration. Rather than believe that by the bedside of her lover, whom
she thought unconscious and all but dead, George Sand dallied with the
physician, sat on his knees, retained him to sup with her, and drank
out of one glass with him, one gives credence to her statement that
what Alfred de Musset imagined to be reality was but the illusion of
a feverish dream. In addition to George Sand's and Paul de Musset's
versions, Louise Colet has furnished a third in her Lui, a publication
which bears the stamp of insincerity on almost every page, and which
has been described, I think by Maxime du Camp, as worse than a lying
invention--namely, as a systematic perversion of the truth. A passage
from George Sand's Elle et Lui, in which Therese and Laurent, both
artists, are the representatives of the novelist and poet, will indicate
how she wishes the story to be read:--

Therese had no weakness for Laurent in the mocking and
libertine sense that one gives to this word in love. It was
by an act of her will, after nights of sorrowful meditatio