whom she saw spring up in
her home, she became passionately devoted. Most of her compositions
henceforward are dated from Nohant, where, indeed, more than fifty years
of her life were spent.

As regards decorum of expression and temperance of sentiments, the later
novels of George Sand have earned more praise than censure; but some
readers may feel that in fundamental questions of taste the comparison
between them and their forerunners is not always entirely to their
advantage. The fervor of youth has a certain purifying power to redeem
from offense matter, even though over-frankly treated, which becomes
disagreeable in cold analysis, however sober the wording, and clear and
admirable the moral pointed.

_Mademoiselle La Quintinie_, which appeared in 1863, was suggested by M.
Octave Feuillet's _Sibille_. The point of M. Feuillet's novel is, that
Sibille, an ardent Catholic, stifles her love, and renounces her lover
on account of his heterodox opinions. Madame Sand gives us the
reverse--a heroine who is reflectively rather than mystically inclined,
and whose lover by degrees succeeds in effecting her conversion to his
more liberal views. Here, as elsewhere, the author's mind shows a
sympathetic comprehension of the standpoint of enlightened Protestantism
curiously rare among those who, like herself, have renounced Romanism
for the pursuit of free thought and speculation. But even those who
prefer the _denoument_ of George Sand's novel to that of M. Feuillet's
will not rank _Mademoiselle La Quintinie_ very high among the author's
productions. It is colorless, and artistically weak, however
controversially strong.

Madame Sand, according to her own reckoning in 1869, had made at least
L40,000 by her writings. Out of this she had saved no fortune. She had
always preferred to live from day to day on the proceeds of her work,
regulating her expenses accordingly, trusting her brain to answer to any
emergency and bring her out of the periodical financial crises in which
the uncertainty of literary gains and the liberality of her expenditure
involved her. She continued fond of travelling, especially of exploring
the nooks and corners of France, felt by her to be less well known than
they deserve, and fully as picturesque as the spots tourists go far to
visit. Here she sought fresh frames for her novels. "If I have only
three words to say about a place," she tells us, "I like to be able to
refer to it in my memory so as to mak