y towns, too, and the
chances are as one to ten thousand that the maelstrom will sweep them
into hades.

But Madame Dudevant was different--in two years she had won her way to
literary fame, and was commanding the jealous admiration of the best
writers of Paris. Her first work was a collaboration with Jules
Sandeau in a novel. Every woman who ever wrote well began by
collaborating with a man. Sandeau had formerly come from Nohant, and how
much he had to do with Madame Dudevant's breaking loose from her
homes-ties no one knows. Anyway, the second novel was written by the
Madame alone, and as a tribute to her friend the name "George Sand" was
placed upon the title-page as author. Jules Sandeau, all-'round
hack-writer and critic, was greatly pleased by the compliment of having
his name anglicized and printed on the title-page of "Indiana," but
later he was not so proud of it. George Sand soon proved herself to be a
bigger man than Sandeau.

She was not handsome, either in face or in form. She was inclined to be
stout--was rather short--and her complexion olive. But she lured with
her eyes--great sphinx-like eyes of hazel-brown--that looked men through
and through. Liszt has told us that "she had eyes like a cow," which is
not so bad as Thomas Carlyle's remark that George Eliot had a face like
a horse. George Sand was silent when other women talked, and her look
told in a half-proud, half-sad way that she knew all they knew, and all
she herself knew beside.

Without going into the issue as to what George Sand was not, let us
frankly admit that pain, deprivation, misunderstanding and maternity had
taught her many things not found in books, and that she looked at Fate
out of her wide-open eyes with a gaze that did not blink. She was wise
beyond the lot of women. I was just going to say she was a genius, but I
remember the remark of the De Goncourts to the effect that, "There are
no women of genius--women of genius are men." Possibly the point could
be covered by saying George Sand had a man's head and a woman's heart.

Women did not like her, yet what other woman was ever so honored by
woman as was George Sand in those two matchless sonnets addressed to her
by Elizabeth Barrett Browning?

The amazing energy of George Sand, her finely flowing sentences--all
charged with daring satire and insight into the heart of things--made
her work sought by readers and publishers. Her pen brought her all the
money she needed; and she