ecting my scrawls to light the pipes of the Prussians.

But the enemy, though so near, never passed the boundaries of the "Black
Valley." The department of the Indre remained uninvaded, though
compassed on all sides by the foreign army; and George Sand was able to
say afterwards that she at least had never seen a Prussian soldier.

A sad Christmas was passed. On the last night of 1870 a meeting of
friends at Nohant broke up with the parting words, "All is lost!"

"The execrable year is out," writes Madame Sand, "but to all appearances
we are entering upon a worse."

On the 15th of January, 1871, her little drama _Francois le Champi_,
first represented in the troublous months of 1849, was acted in Paris
for the benefit of an ambulance. She notes the singular fate of this
piece to be reproduced in time of bombardment. A pastoral!

The worst strain of suspense ended January 29, with the capitulation of
Paris. Here the _Journal d'un Voyageur_ breaks off. It would be sad
indeed had her life, like that of more than one of her compeers, closed
then over France in mourning. Although it was impossible but that such
an ordeal must have impaired her strength, she outlived the war's
ending, and the horrible social crisis which she had foreseen must
succeed the political one. Happier than Prosper Merimee, than Alexandre
Dumas, and others, she saw the dawn of a new era of prosperity for her
country, whose vital forces, as she had also foretold, were to prevail
in the end over successive ills--the enervation of corruption, of
military disaster, and the "orgie of pretended renovators" at home, that
signalized the first months of peace abroad.

In January, 1872, we again find her writing cheerily to Flaubert:--

Mustn't be ill, mustn't be cross, my old troubadour. Say that
France is mad, humanity stupid, and that we are unfinished animals
every one of us, you must love on all the same, yourself, your
race, above all, your friends. I have my sad hours. I look at my
blossoms, those two little girls smiling as ever, their charming
mother, and my good, hard-working son, whom the end of the world
will find hunting, cataloguing, doing his daily task, and yet as
merry as Punch in his rare leisure moments.

In a later letter she writes in a more serious strain:--

I do not say that humanity is on the road to the heights; I believe
it in spite of all, but I do not argue about it, which is