mistaking a mere fancy for a faculty, and her first step
was to seek the opinion of some experienced authority as to her talent
and chances.

M. de Keratry, a popular novelist, to whom she was recommended, spoke
his mind to her without restraint. It was to the crushing effect that a
woman ought not to write at all. Her sex, Madame Dudevant was informed,
can have no proper place in literature whatsoever. M. Delatouche,
proprietor of the _Figaro_, poet and novelist besides, and cousin of her
old and intimate friends the Duvernets, of La Chatre, was a shade more
encouraging, even so far committing himself as to own that, if she would
not let herself be disgusted by the struggles of a beginner, there might
be a distant possibility for her of making some sixty pounds a year by
her pen. Such specimens of her fiction as she submitted to him he
condemned without appeal, but he encouraged her to persevere in trying
to improve upon them, and advised her well in advising her to avoid
imitation of any school or master, and fearlessly to follow her own
bent.

Meantime he took her on to the staff of his paper, then in its infancy
and comparative obscurity. Journalism however was the department of
literature least suited to her capabilities, and her
fellow-contributors, though so much less highly gifted than Madame
Dudevant, excelled her easily in the manufacture of leaders and
paragraphs to order. To produce an article of a given length, on a given
subject, within a given time, was for her the severest of ordeals; here
her exuberant facility itself was against her. She would exhaust the
space allotted to her, and find herself obliged to break off just at the
point when she felt herself "beginning to begin." But she justly valued
this apprenticeship as a professional experience, bringing her into
direct relations with the literary world she was entering as a perfect
stranger. Once able to devote herself entirely to composition and to
live for her work, she found her calling begin to assert itself
despotically. In a letter to a friend, M. Duteil, at La Chatre, dated
about six weeks after her arrival in Paris, she writes:--

If I had foreseen half the difficulties that I find, I should not
have undertaken this enterprise. Well, the more I encounter the
more I am resolved to proceed. Still, I shall soon be returning
home again, perhaps without having succeeded in launching my boat,
but with hopes of doing bet