ngth she
retired, it was to write on until the morning hours according to her old
habit, only relinquished when her health made this imperative.

She had allowed her son and her daughter-in-law to take the cares of
household management off her hands. This left her free, as she
expressed it, to be a child again, to hold aloof from things immediate
and transitory, reserving her thoughts and contemplations for what is
general and eternal. She found a poet's pleasure in abstracting herself
from human life, saying: "There are hours when I escape from myself,
when I live in a plant, when I feel myself grass, a bird, a tree-top, a
cloud, a running stream." Shaking off, as it were, the sense of
personality, she felt more freely and fully the sense of kinship with
the life and soul of the universe.

It was her habit every evening to sum up in a few lines the impressions
of the day, and this journal, for the conspicuous absence of incident in
its pages, she compares to the log-book of a ship lying at anchor. But
one terrible and little anticipated break in its tranquil monotony was
yet to come.

George Sand lived to see her country pass through every imaginable
political experience. Born before the First Republic had expired, she
had witnessed the First Empire, the restored Monarchy, the Revolution of
1830, the reign of Louis Philippe, the convulsions of 1848, the
presidency of Louis Bonaparte, and the Second Empire. She was still to
see and outlive its fall, the Franco-German War, the Commune, and to
die, as she was born, under a republic.

To some of her friends who had reproached her with showing too much
indulgence for the state of things under Imperial rule, she replied that
the only change in her was that she had acquired more patience in
proportion as more was required. The _regime_ she condemned--and amid
apparent prosperity had foretold the corrupting influence on the nation
of the established ideal of frivolity, and that a crash of some kind
must ensue. Her judgment on the Emperor, after his fall, is worth
noting, if only because it is dispassionate. Since his elevation to the
Imperial dignity she had lost all old illusions as to his public
intentions. With regard to these, on the occasion of her interviews with
him at the Elysee, he had completely deceived her, and designedly, she
had at first thought. Nor had she concealed her disgust.

I left Paris, and did not come to an appointment he had offered me.