ellence. Her idea of virtue as a motive, not a restraint,
not the controlling of low and evil desires, but the precluding of all
temptations to yield to these, by the calling out of stronger, higher
desires, so far from being a low one, is indeed the very noblest; yet
not on that account a chimera to those who hold, like her, to the
conviction that "what now characterizes the exceptionally high may be
expected eventually to characterize all. For that which the highest
human nature is capable of is within the reach of human nature at
large." "We gravitate towards the ideal," she writes, "and this
gravitation is infinite, as is the ideal itself." And her place remains
among those few great intelligences who can be said to have given
humanity an appreciable impulse in the direction of progress.

CHAPTER XII

LATER YEARS.

When, in 1869, Madame Sand was applied to by M. Louis Ulbach--a literary
friend who proposed to write her biography--for some account of her life
from that time onwards where her memoirs break off, she replied, in a
letter now appended to those memoirs, as follows:--

For the last five-and-twenty years there is nothing more that is of
interest. It is old age, very quiet and very happy, _en famille_,
crossed by sorrows entirely personal in their nature--deaths,
defections, and then the general state of affairs in which we have
suffered, you and I, from the same causes. My time is spent in
amusing the children, doing a little botany, long walks in
summer--I am still a first-rate pedestrian--and writing novels,
when I can secure two hours in the daytime and two in the evening.
I write easily and with pleasure. This is my recreation, for my
correspondence is numerous, and there lies work indeed! If one had
none but one's friends to write to! But how many requests, some
touching, some impertinent! Whenever there is anything I can do, I
reply. Those for whom I can do nothing I do not answer. Some
deserve that one should try, even with small hope of succeeding.
Then one must answer that one will try. All this, with private
affairs to which one must really give attention now and then, makes
some ten letters a day.

The old age of George Sand, brighter, fuller and more active than the
youth of most men and women, was in itself a most signal proof of the
stability and worth of her mental organization. Life, which deter