IV

THE ROMANTIC ESCAPADE

THE VENICE ADVENTURE


George Sand did not have to wait long for success. She won fame with her
first book. With her second one she became rich, or what she considered
rich. She tells us that she sold it for a hundred and sixty pounds! That
seemed to her the wealth of the world, and she did not hesitate to leave
her attic on the Quay St. Michel for a more comfortable flat on Quay
Malaquais, which de Latouche gave up to her.

There was, at that time, a personage in Paris who had begun to exercise
a sort of royal tyranny over authors. Francois Buloz had taken advantage
of the intellectual effervescence of 1831 to found the _Revue des Deux
Mondes_. He was venturesome, energetic, original, very shrewd, though
apparently rough, obliging, in spite of his surly manners. He is still
considered the typical and traditional review manager. He certainly
possessed the first quality necessary for this function. He discovered
talented writers, and he also knew how to draw from them and squeeze out
of them all the literature they contained. Tremendously headstrong,
he has been known to keep a contributor under lock and key until his
article was finished. Authors abused him, quarrelled with him, and
then came back to him again. A review which had, for its first numbers,
George Sand, Vigny, Musset, Merimee, among many others, as contributors,
may be said to have started well. George Sand tells us that after a
battle with the _Revue de Paris_ and the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, both