They did not tell me "The King might have had to wait!" but they
wrote "The Emperor waited." However, I continued to write to him,
whenever I saw hopes of saving some victim, to ponder his answers
and watch his actions; and I became convinced that he did not
intentionally impose upon any one. He imposed on himself and on
everybody else.... In private life he had genuine qualities. I
happened to see in him a side that was really generous and sincere.
His dream of grandeur for France was not that of a sound mind, but
neither of an ordinary mind. Really France would have sunk too low
if she had submitted for twenty years to the supremacy of a
_cretin_, working only for himself. One would then have to give her
up in despair for ever and ever. The truth is that she mistook a
meteor for a star, a silent dreamer for a man of depth. Then seeing
him sink under disasters he ought to have foreseen, she took him
for a coward.

George Sand's _Journal d'un Voyageur pendant la guerre_ has a peculiar
and painful interest. It is merely a note-book of passing impressions
from September, 1870, to January, 1871; but its pages give a most
striking picture of those effects of war which have no place in military
annals.

The army disasters of the autumn were preceded by natural calamities of
great severity. The heat of the summer in Berry had been tremendous, and
Madame Sand describes the havoc as unprecedented in her experience--the
flowers and grass killed, the leaves scorched and yellowed, the baked
earth under foot literally cracking in many places; no water, no hay, no
harvest, but destructive cattle-plague, forest-fires driving scared
wolves to seek refuge in the courtyard of Nohant itself--the remnant of
corn spared by the sun, ruined by hail-storms. She and all her family
had suffered from the unhealthiness of the season. Thus the political
catastrophe found her already weakened by anxiety and fatigue, and
feeling greatly the effort to set to work again. Finally, an outbreak of
malignant small-pox in the village forced her to take her little
grandchildren and their mother from Nohant out of reach of the
infection. September and October were passed at or in the neighborhood
of Boussac, a small town some thirty miles off. Sedan was over, and the
worst had begun; the protracted suspense, the long agony of hope.

Those suffered most perhaps who, like herself, had to