for higher truth and beauty. With this creed, experimental love was a
logical sequence, and great constancy was already to be unprogressive
stubbornness. 'All love exhausts itself,' said Sand in 'Lelia';
'disgust and sadness follow; the union of the woman with the man should
therefore be transitory.'"

If the putting of preachment into practice is virtue, George Sand was
the most virtuous of all novelists, for the hotel of her large and
roomy heart was for the entertainment of transients only. It was in
1834, when Liszt was twenty-three and Sand thirty, that he was caught
in the vortex swirling around "the fire-eyed child of Berry." Alfred de
Musset introduced Liszt to her, as later Liszt passed her on to
Chopin--or should we say she discarded the poet for the Hungarian, as
later the Hungarian for the Pole? it would be more gallant and quite as
true. Like Chopin, Liszt was at first repelled at the sight of George
Sand. But soon he was entangled in that "caméraderie" which was the
fashionable name for liaison in that time.

From her the Comtesse de Laprunarède had borrowed him for her
snow-begirt castle, and when he returned to Paris there was another
woman there, awaiting her turn to carry him off. This was the Comtesse
Marie Cathérine Sophie d'Agoult, who was born on Christmas night, in
1805, and therefore was six years older than Liszt, whom she met in
1834. It was not till six years later that the comtesse took up
literature as a diversion, and made herself some little name as an art
critic and writer, choosing, as did George Sand, a masculine and
English pen-name, "Daniel Stern."

The comtesse had been married in 1827; her marriage settlement was
signed by King Charles the Tenth, the Dauphin, and others of almost