ever
set foot in it again, if the people I like would make the same
resolution." And again, speaking of her "Black Valley, so good and so
stupid," she adds, "Here I am always more myself than at Paris, where I
am always ill, in body and in spirit."

Paris, however, afforded greater facilities for her children's
education. She had a strong desire to see her son an artist, and he was
already studying painting in Delacroix's studio. Also her income at this
moment did not suffice to enable her to live continuously at Nohant
where, she frankly confessed, she had not yet found out how to live
economically, expected as she was to keep open house, regarded as
grudging and unneighborly if she did not maintain her establishment on a
scale to which her resources as yet were unequal. Her expenses in the
country she calculated as double those in Paris, where, as she writes to
M. Chatiron,--

Everyone's independence is admirable. You invite whom you like, and
when you don't wish to receive anyone you let the porter know you
are not at home. Yet I hate Paris in all other respects. There I
grow stout, and my mind grows thin. You know how quiet and retired
my life there is, and I do not understand why you tell me, as they
say in the provinces, that glory keeps me there. I have no glory, I
have never sought for it, and I don't care a cigarette for it. I
want to breath fresh air and live in peace. I am succeeding, but
you see and you know on what conditions.

Her Paris residence, a few seasons later, she fixed in the Cour
d'Orleans Rue St. Lazare, in a block of buildings one-third of which
was occupied by herself and her family; another belonged to her friend,
Madame Marliani, wife of the Spanish Consul, the third to Frederic
Chopin.

With respect to Chopin's long and deep attachment to Madame Sand, and
its requital, concerning which so much has been written, there can
surely be no greater misstatement than to speak of her as having
blighted his life. This last part of his life was indeed blighted, but
by ill-health and consequent nervous irritability and suffering; but
such mitigation as was possible he found for eight years in the womanly
devotion and genial society of Madame Sand--real benefits to one whose
strange and delicate individuality it was not easy to befriend--and
which the breach that took place between them shortly before his death
should not allow us to forget.

"Chopin,"