mitation_;
Rousseau and Byron followed Chateaubriand, and romance in her heart
put on the form of melancholy. At eighteen the passive Aurore was
married to M. Dudevant, whose worst fault was the absence of those
qualities of heart and brain which make wedded union a happiness.
Two children were born; and having obtained her freedom and a scanty
allowance, Madame Dudevant in 1831, in possession of her son and
daughter, resolved upon trying to obtain a livelihood in the capital.

Perhaps she could paint birds and flowers on cigar-cases and
snuff-boxes; happily her hopes received small encouragement. Perhaps
she could succeed in journalism under her friend Delatouche; she
proved wholly wanting in cleverness; her imagination had wings; it
could not hop on the perch; before she had begun the beginning of
an article the column must end. With her compatriot Jules Sandeau,
she attempted a novel--_Rose et Blanche_. "Sand" and Sandeau were
fraternal names; a countryman of Berri was traditionally George.
Henceforth the young Bohemian, who traversed the _quais_ and streets
in masculine garb, should be GEORGE SAND.

To write novels was to her only a process of nature; she seated herself
before her table at ten o'clock, with scarcely a plot, and only the
slightest acquaintance with her characters; until five in the evening,
while her hand guided a pen, the novel wrote itself. Next day and
the next it was the same. By-and-by the novel had written itself in
full, and another was unfolding. Not that she composed mechanically;
her stories were not manufactured; they grew--grew with facility and
in free abundance. At first, a disciple of Rousseau and Chateaubriand,
her theme was the romance of love. In _Indiana_, _Valentine_, _Lelia_,
_Jacques_, she vindicated the supposed rights of passion. These
novels are lyrical cries of a heart that had been wounded; protests
against the crime of loveless marriage, against the tyranny of man,
the servitude of woman; pleas for the individualism of the
soul--superficial in thought, ill-balanced in feeling, unequal in
style, yet rising to passages of rare poetic beauty, and often
admirable in descriptive power. The imagination of George Sand had
translated her private experiences into romance; yet she, the
spectator of her own inventions, possessed of a fund of sanity which
underlay the agitations of her genius, while she lent herself to her
creations, plied her pen with a steady hand from day to day.