nts. "I
suffer for those who do harm and allow harm to be done without
understanding it.... I see nothing but ignorance and moral weakness
preponderating on the face of the globe."

Through the medium of the press, notably of the journal _La Vraie
Republique_, she continued to give plain expression to her sentiments,
regardless of the political enmities she might excite, and of the
personal mortification to which she was exposed, even at Nohant, which
with its inmates had recently become the mark for petty hostile
"demonstrations." Alluding to these, she writes:--

Here in this Berry, so romantic, so gentle, so calm and good, in
this land I love so tenderly, and where I have given sufficient
proof to the poor and uneducated that I know my duties towards
them, I myself in particular am looked upon as the enemy of the
human race; and if the Republic has not kept its promises, it is I,
clearly, who am the cause.

The term "communist," caught up and passed from mouth to mouth, was
flung at Madame Sand and her son by the peasants, whose ideas as to its
significance were not a little wild. "A pack of idiots," she writes to
Madame Marliani, "who threaten to come and set fire to Nohant. Brave
they are not, neither morally nor physically; and when they come this
way and I walk through the midst of them they take off their hats; but
when they have gone by they summon courage to shout, 'Down with the
communists.'"

The ingratitude of many who again and again had received succor from her
and hers, she might excuse on account of their ignorance, but the extent
of their ignorance was an obstacle to immediate progress whose weight
she had miscalculated.

"I shall keep my faith," she writes to Joseph Mazzini at this
crisis--"the idea, pure and bright, the eternal truth will ever remain
for me in my heaven, unless I go blind. But hope is a belief in the near
triumph of one's faith. I should not be sincere if I said that this
state of mind had not been modified in me during these last months."

The terrible insurrection of June followed, and overwhelmed her for the
time. It was not only that her nature, womanly and poetical, had the
greatest horror of bloodshed. The spectacle of the republicans
slaughtering each other, of the evil passions stirred, the frightful
anarchy, ended but at a frightful cost, the complete extinction of all
hopes,--nothing left rampant but fear, rancor and distrust,--was
hear