nd am less in safety." Threatened by the
violence and hatred of the people, she had painfully realized that she
and her party had their most obstinate enemies among those whom they
wished and worked to save and defend.

Her profound discouragement finds expression in many of her letters from
1849 to 1852. The more sanguine hopes of Mazzini and other of her
correspondents she desires, but no longer expects, to see fulfilled. She
compares the moral state of France to the Russian retreat; the soldiers
in the great army of progress seized with vertigo, and seeking death in
fighting with each other.

To her son, who was in Paris at the time of the disturbances in May,
1849, she writes:--

Come back, I implore you. I have only you in the world, and your
death would be mine. I can still be of some small use to the cause
of truth, but if I were to lose you it would be all over with me. I
have not got the stoicism of Barbes and Mazzini. It is true they
are men, and they have no children. Besides, in my opinion it is
not in fight, not by civil war, that we shall win the cause of
humanity in France. We have got universal suffrage. The worse for
us if we do not know how to avail ourselves of it, for that alone
can lastingly emancipate us, and the only thing that would give us
the right to take up arms would be an attempt on their part to take
away our right to vote.

During the two years preceding the _coup d'etat_ of December, 1851, life
at Nohant had resumed its wonted cheerfulness of aspect. Madame Sand was
used to surround herself with young people and artistic people; but now,
amid their light-heartedness, she had for a period to battle with an
extreme inward sadness, confirmed by the fresh evidence brought by these
years of the demoralization in all ranks of opinion. "Your head is not
very lucid when your heart is so deeply wounded," she had remarked
already, after the disasters of 1848, "and how can one help suffering
mortally from the spectacle of civil war and the slaughter among the
people?"

To that was now added a loss of faith in the virtues of her own party,
as well as of the masses. It is no wonder if she fell out of love for
awhile with the ideals of romance, with her own art of fiction, and the
types of heroism that were her favorite creations. But if the shadow of
a morbid pessimism crept over her mind, she could view it now as a
spiritual malady which s