the official was unfurnished with
guests, except for the said music-master and the Dudevants themselves.
She wrote a poetical skit to commemorate the incident, which created
great amusement among her friends.

In the autumn, 1828, her daughter Solange was born. The care of her two
children, to whom she was devoted, occupied her seriously. Maurice's
education was beginning, a fresh inducement to her to study that she
might be better able to superintend his instruction. His least
indisposition put her into a fever of anxiety. Her own health during all
these years had repeatedly given cause for alarm. Symptoms of
chest-disease showed themselves, but afterwards disappeared, her
constitutional vigor triumphing in the end over complaints which seem to
a great extent to have been of a nervous order. Meantime her domestic
horizon was becoming overcast at many points.

Her brother, Hippolyte Chatiron, now married, came with his family to
settle in the neighborhood, and spent some time at Nohant. He had fallen
into the fatal habit of drinking, in which he was joined by M. Dudevant
to the degradation of his habits and, it would be charitable to suppose,
to the confusion of his intelligence. This grave ill came to make an
open break in the household calm, hitherto undisturbed on the surface.
Low company and its brutalizing influences were tending to bring about a
state of things to which the most patient of wives might find it hard to
submit. A role of complete self-effacement was not one it was in her
power long to sustain, and the utter moral solitude into which she was
thrown consolidated those forces inclining her to the extreme of
self-assertion. For together with trials without came the growing sense
of superiority, the _ennui_ and unrest springing from mental faculties
with insufficient outlet, and moreover, denied the very shadow of
appreciation at home, where she saw the claim to her deference and
allegiance co-exist with a repudiation she resented of all idea of the
reciprocity of such engagements.

She had voluntarily handed over the management of her property--the
revenue of which was hardly proportionate to the necessary expenses and
required careful economy--to her husband, an arrangement which left her,
even for pocket money, dependent on him. She now set herself to devise
some means of adding to her resources by private industry. The more
ambitious project of securing by her own exertions a separate
maintenance