"From the moment that Pagello landed in France," says George Sand, "he
could not understand anything." The one thing that he was compelled to
understand was that he was no longer wanted. He was simply pushed out.
George Sand had a remarkable gift for bringing out the characteristics
of the persons with whom she had any intercourse. This Pagello, thanks
to his adventure with her, has become in the eyes of the world a
personage as comic as one of Moliere's characters.

Musset and George Sand still cared for each other. He beseeched her
to return to him. "I am good-for-nothing," he says, "for I am simply
steeped in my love for you. I do not know whether I am alive, whether I
eat, drink, or breathe, but I know I am in love." George Sand was afraid
to return to him, and Sainte-Beuve forbade her. Love proved stronger
than all other arguments, however, and she yielded.

As soon as she was with him once more, their torture commenced again,
with all the customary complaints, reproaches and recriminations. "I was
quite sure that all these reproaches would begin again immediately after
the happiness we had dreamed of and promised each other. Oh, God, to
think that we have already arrived at this!" she writes.

What tortured them was that the past, which they had believed to be "a
beautiful poem," now seemed to them a hideous nightmare. All this, we
read, was a game that they were playing. A cruel sort of game, of which
Musset grew more and more weary, but which to George Sand gradually
became a necessity. We see this, as from henceforth it was she who
implored Musset. In her diary, dated December 24, 1834, we read: "And
what if I rushed to him when my love is too strong for me. What if I
went and broke the bell-pull with ringing, until he opened his door to