Himself a guest once more of the Carrauds at Frapesle in February 1838, he took advantage of his proximity to Nohant to go and see George Sand; and spent two or three days with her. On his arrival, he surprised her clad in her dressing-gown, and smoking a cigar after dinner, beside the fire, in a huge, solitary room. Beneath the gown, she had on some red trousers, which allowed her smart stockings and yellow slippers to be seen. Since he used to meet her in the house of the Rue Cassini, she had grown stout, and now had a double chin; but her hair was still unbleached, and her bistre complexion preserved its tinge as of old. Working hard, she went to bed at six in the morning, and got up at noon. During the time he was at Nohant, Balzac adopted her habits. They talked from five in the evening all through the night and till five o'clock in the morning; and he learnt to know her more truly in these hours of familiar converse than in the four years of her liaison with Jules Sandeau. He summed her up as a tomboy, an artist, a mind great, generous, devoted and chaste (this last term would need explanation); her characteristic traits were those of a man, not a woman. She had, so he opined, neither force of conception, nor gift of constructing plots, nor faculty of reaching the true, nor the art of the pathetic. The French language she used she did not thoroughly know, but she had style. Of her glory she made little account, and despised the public. Her fate was to be duped--and duped she had been by Bocage, by de Lamennais, by Liszt, by Madame d'Agoult. Together they discussed the future revolution in manners and morals, and the influence their books might have in bringing it about. She suggested to him some subjects that he might develop, and taught him --up to then opposed to the weed--how to smoke latakia tobacco in a hookah pipe. Imagining the hookah to be something Russian, he asked Madame Hanska, to whom he related all this, to purchase him one, telling her that he would have his wonderful stick-knob, with its jewels, adapted to it, since he no longer bore the stick about with him as a fetish.