sition whatever was raised by its occupier to her prolonged
absence abroad. Secondly, her art-vocation. She wrote incessantly; and
independently of the pecuniary obligations to do so which she put
forward, it is obvious that she had become wedded to this habit of work.
"The habit has become a faculty--the faculty a need. I have thus come to
working for thirteen hours at a time without making myself ill; seven
or eight a day on an average, be the task done better or worse," she
writes to M. Chatiron, from Venice, in March. Sometimes, as with _Leone
Leoni_, she would complete a novel in a week; a few weeks later it was
in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Such haste she afterward deprecated,
and, like all other workers, she aspired to a year's holiday in which to
devote herself to the study of the masterpieces of modern literature;
but the convenient season for such suspension of her own productive
activity never came. And whilst at Venice she found herself literally in
want of money to leave it. Buloz had arranged with her that she should
contribute thirty-two pages every six weeks to his periodical for a
yearly stipend of L160. She had anticipated her salary for the expenses
of her Italian journey, and must acquit herself of the arrears due
before she could take wing.

_Jacques_, the longest of the novels written at Venice, afforded fresh
grounds to those who taxed her works with hostility to social
institutions. Without entering into the vexed question of the right of
the artist in search of variety to exercise his power on any theme that
may invite to its display, and of the precise bearing of ethical rules
on works of imagination, it is permissible to doubt that _Jacques_,
however bitter the sentiments of the author at that time regarding the
marriage tie, ever seriously disturbed the felicity of any domestic
household in the past or present day. It is too lengthy and too
melancholy to attract modern readers, who care little to revel in the
luxuries of woe, so relished by those of a former age. We cannot do
better than quote the judgment pronounced by Madame Sand herself, thirty
years later, on this work of pure sentimentalism--generated by an epoch
thrown into commotion by the passionate views of romanticism--the epoch
of Rene, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types of desperate men; life
weary, but by no means weary of talking. "_Jacques_," she observes,
"belonged to this large family of disillusioned thinkers; they had the