he had yet the will and the strength to live
down; as years before she had surmounted a similar phase of feeling
induced by personal sorrow.

Already, in 1847, she had begun to write her _Memoirs_, and reverting to
them now, she found there work that suited her mood, as dealing with the
past, more agreeable to contemplate just then than the present or the
future.

However, in September, 1850, we find her writing to Mazzini,--after
dwelling on the present shortcomings of the people, and the mixture of
pity and indignation with which they inspired her: "I turn back to
fiction and produce, in art, popular types such as I see no longer; but
as they ought to be and might be." She alludes to a play on which she
was engaged, and continues: "The dramatic form, being new to me, has
revived me a little of late; it is the only kind of work into which I
have been able to throw myself for a year."

The events of December, 1851, surprised her during a brief visit to
Paris. Her hopes for her country had sunk so low, that she owns herself
at the moment not to have regarded the _coup d'etat_ as likely to prove
more disastrous to the cause of progress than any other of the violent
ends which threatened the existing political situation. She left the
capital in the midst of the cannonade, and with her family around her at
Nohant awaited the issue of the new dictatorship.

The wholesale arrests that followed immediately, and filled the country
with stupefaction, made havoc on all sides of her. Among the victims
were comrades of her childhood, numbers of her friends and acquaintance
and their relatives--as well in Berry as in the capital--many arrested
solely on suspicion of hostility to the President's views, yet none the
less exposed to chances of death, or captivity, or exile.

The crisis drove Madame Sand once more to quit the privacy of her
country life, but this time in the capacity of intercessor with the
conqueror for his victims. She came up to Paris, and on January 20,
1852, addressed a letter to the President, imploring his clemency for
the accused generally in an admirably eloquent appeal to his sentiments
as well of justice as of generosity. The plea she so forcibly urged,
that according to his own professions mere opinion was not to be
prosecuted as a crime, whereas the so-called "preventive measures" had
involved in one common ruin with his active opponents those who had been
mere passive spectators of late events, was, o