souls, to reconcile being a man with being an author. He has made
his choice; he has renounced the cheerful sanities of the world:

"I pass entire weeks without exchanging a word with a human being;
and at the end of the week it is not possible for me to recall a
single day nor any event whatsoever. I see my mother and my niece on
Sundays, and that is all. My only company consists of a band of rats
in the garret, which make an infernal racket above my head, when the
water does not roar or the wind blow. The nights are black as ink,
and a silence surrounds me comparable to that of the desert.
Sensitiveness is increased immeasurably in such a setting. I have
palpitations of the heart for nothing.

"All that results from our charming profession. That is what it
means to torment the soul and the body. But perhaps this torment is
our proper lot here below."

To George Sand, who wrote as naturally as she breathed and almost as
easily, seclusion and torment were by no means the necessary
conditions of literary activity. Enormously productive, with a
hundred books to his half-a-dozen, she has never dedicated and
consecrated herself to her profession but has lived heartily and a
bit recklessly from day to day, spending herself in many directions
freely, gaily, extravagantly. Now that she has definitely said
farewell to her youth, she finds that she is twenty years younger;
and now that she is, in a sense, dissipating her personality and
living in the lives of others, she finds that she is happier than
ever before. "It can't be imperative to work so painfully"--such is
the burden of her earlier counsels to Flaubert; "spare yourself a
little, take some exercise, relax the tendons of your mind, indulge