federation, but also
the great European powers, began to be uneasy. France sent agents to
bring home reports, Russia paid agents on the spot, and the persecutions
that touched a professor and exasperated a whole university often arose
from a note sent by the Cabinet of the Tuileries or of St. Petersburg.

It was amid the events that began thus that Sand, after commending
himself to the protection of God, began the year 1817, in the sad mood in
which we have just seen him, and in which he was kept rather by a disgust
for things as they were than by a disgust for life. On the 8th of May,
preyed upon by this melancholy, which he cannot conquer, and which comes
from the disappointment of all his political hopes, he writes in his
diary:

"I shall find it impassible to set seriously to work, and this idle
temper, this humour of hypochondria which casts its black veil over
everything in life,--continues and grows in spite of the moral activity
which I imposed on myself yesterday."

In the holidays, fearing to burden his parents with any additional
expense, he will not go home, and prefers to make a walking tour with his
friends. No doubt this tour, in addition to its recreative side, had a
political aim. Be that as it may, Sand's diary, during the period of his
journey, shows nothing but the names of the towns through which he
passed. That we may have a notion of Sand's dutifulness to his parents,
it should be said that he did not set out until he had obtained his
mother's permission. On their return, Sand, Dittmar, and their friends
the Burschen, found their Ruttli sacked by their enemies of the
Landmannschaft; the house that they had built was demolished and its
fragments dispersed. Sand took this event for an omen, and was greatly
depressed by it.

"It seems to me, O my God!" he says in his journal, "that everything
swims and turns around me. My soul grows darker and darker; my moral
strength grows less instead of greater; I work and cannot achieve; walk
towards my aim and do not reach it; exhaust myself, and do nothing great.
The days of life flee one after another; cares and uneasiness increase; I
see no haven anywhere for our sacred German cause. The end will be that
we shall fall, for I myself waver. O Lord and Father! protect me, save
me, and lead me to that land from which we are for ever driven back by
the indifference of wavering spirits."

About this time a terrible event struck Sand to the heart; hi