sewing-basket to reappear smoking black cigars in the Latin Quarter.
We find her, at about 1831, entering into competition with the
brilliant literary generation of Balzac, Hugo, Alfred de Musset,
Merimee, Stendhal, and Sainte-Beuve. To signalize her equality with
her brothers in talent, she adopts male attire: "I had a sentry-box
coat made, of rough grey cloth, with trousers and waist-coat to
match. With a grey hat and a huge cravat of woolen material, I
looked exactly like a first-year student." In the freedom of this
rather unalluring garb she entered into relations Platonic,
fraternal, or tempestuously passionate with perhaps the most
distinguished series of friends and lovers that ever fluttered about
one flame. There was Aurelien de Seze; Jules Sandeau, her first
collaborator, who "reconciled her to life" and gave her a nom de
guerre; the inscrutable Merimee, who made no one happy; Musset--an
encounter from which both tiger-moths escaped with singed wings; the
odd transitional figure of Pagello; Michel Euraed; Liszt; Chopin,
whom she loved and nursed for eight years; her master Lamennais; her
master Pierre Leroux; her father-confessor Sainte-Beuve; and Gustave
Flaubert, the querulous friend of her last decade.

As we have compressed the long and complex story of her personal
relationships, so we must compress the intimately related history of
her works and her ideas. When under the inspiration of Rousseau, the
emancipated George Sand began to write, her purposes were but
vaguely defined. She conceived of life as primarily an opportunity
for unlimited self-expansion, and of literature as an opportunity
for unrestricted self-expression. "Nevertheless," she declares, "my
instincts have formed, without my privity, the theory I am about to
set down,--a theory which I have generally followed unconsciously.
... According to this theory, the novel is as much a work of poetry