f course, unanswerable.
The future Emperor granted her two audiences within a week at the
Elysee, in answer to her request, and he succeeded on the first occasion
in convincing her that the acts of iniquity and intimidation perpetrated
as by his authority were as completely in defiance of his public
intentions as of his private principles. As a personal favor to herself,
he readily offered her the release of any of the political prisoners
that she choose to name, and promised that a general amnesty should
speedily follow. She left him, reassured to some extent as to the fate
in store for her country. The second interview she had solicited in
order to plead the cause of one of her personal friends, condemned to
transportation. The mission was a delicate one, for her client would
engage himself to nothing for the future, and Madame Sand, in
petitioning for his release, saw no better course open to her than as
expressed by herself, frankly to denounce him to the President as his
"incorrigible personal enemy." Upon this the President granted her the
prisoner's full pardon at once. Madame Sand was naturally touched by
this ready response of the generous impulse to which she had trusted. To
those who cast doubts on the sincerity of any good sentiment in such a
quarter, she very properly replied that it was not for her to be the
first to discredit the generosity she had so successfully appealed to.

But between her republican friends, loth to owe their deliverance to the
tender mercies of Louis Napoleon, and her own desire to save their lives
and liberties, and themselves and their families from ruin and despair,
she found her office of mediator a most unthankful one. She persisted
however in unwearying applications for justice and mercy, addressed both
to the dictator directly, and through his cousin, Prince Napoleon
(Jerome), between whom and herself there existed a cordial esteem. She
clung as long as she could to her belief in the public virtue of the
President, or Emperor as he already began to be called here and there.
But the promised clemency limited itself to a number of particular cases
for whom she had specially interceded.

The subsequent conditions of France precluded all free emission of
socialist or republican opinions, but Madame Sand desired nothing better
than to send in her political resignation; and it is impossible to share
the regret of some of her fellow-republicans at finding her again
devoting her bes