those who had thought it no dishonor to continue to enjoy
it; and the terms of that agreement had since been nominally
undisturbed. But besides that, the control of the children remained a
constant subject of dissension. M. Dudevant was beginning to get into
pecuniary difficulties in the management of his wife's estate. Sometimes
he contemplated resigning it to her, and retiring to Gascony, to live
with his widowed stepmother on the property which at her death would
revert to him. But unfortunately he could not make up his mind to this
course. No sooner had he drawn up an agreement consenting to a division
of property, than he seemed to regret the sacrifice; upon which she
ceased to press it.

Meantime Madame Dudevant, whose position at Nohant was that of a visitor
merely, and becoming untenable, felt her hold on her cherished home and
her children becoming more precarious day by day.

Some of her friends had strongly advised her to travel for a length of
time, both as offering a mortal remedy, and as a temporary escape from
the practical perplexities of the moment. Her rescue, however, was to be
otherwise effected, and a number of new intellectual interests that
sprang up for her at this time all tended to retain her in her own
country.

It was in the course of this spring that she made the acquaintance of M.
de Lamennais, introduced to her by their common friend, the composer,
Franz Liszt. The famous author of the _Paroles d'un Croyant_ had
virtually severed himself from the Church of Rome by his recent
publication of this little volume, pronounced by the Pope, "small in
size, immense in perversity!" The eloquence of the poet-priest, and the
doctrines of the anti-Catholic and humanitarian Christianity of which he
came forward as the expounder, could not fail powerfully to impress her
intelligence. Here seemed the harbor of refuge her half-wrecked faiths
were seeking, and what the abbe's antagonists denounced as the
"diabolical gospel of social science," came to her as the teachings of
an angel of light. Christianity as preached by him was a sort of
realization of the ideal religion of Aurore Dupin--faith divorced from
superstition and the doctrine of Romish infallibility. Complete identity
of sentiments between herself and the abbe was out of the question. But
his was the right mind coming to her mind at the right moment, and
exercised a healing influence over her troubled spirits. For _Le Monde_,
a journal founded