The last letter of the first volume is dated “La Châtre, 1836,” when what she herself called the crisis of the “sixth lustrum” was over. The celebrated voyage to Venice with Alfred de Musset had already been made, the romance of “Elle et Lui” had been lived through and written—the immortal passion which has been told and sung by both sides for the benefit of the world, and which has now become a part of the poetry of the nineteenth century, was already a thing of the past; and she had come to the point, as she writes to her friend Madame d’Agoult, of finding her greatest happiness in a state of being where she neither thinks nor feels. “You, perhaps, are too happy and too young to envy the lot of those shining white stones which lie so cold, so calm, so dead, under the light of the moon. I always salute them as I pass along the road in my solitary midnight ride.” This volume comprises, therefore, all the most eventful periods of her life, and whatever has since been published is only of secondary interest. George Sand was born in Paris in 1804. She was descended on her father’s side from Maurice de Saxe, natural son of Augustus II., King of Poland. Her father died in 1808, and she was brought up at the château of Nohant close to La Châtre in Berri. She lived there until she was thirteen, passing her days in the open air, sometimes wandering through the woods and fields, with the peasant children of the neighboring village, or more often sitting alone, under some great tree, listening to the murmur of the river close by, and the whisper of the wind amidst the leaves. Here she learnt that kindness and simplicity of manner which always characterised her, and here she contracted that love for communion with Nature which in her wildest and most despairing moments never forsook her. “Ah, that I could live amidst the calm of mountain solitudes,” she exclaims, “morally and materially above the region of storms! There to pass long hours in contemplation of the starry heavens, listening to the mysterious sounds of nature, possessing all that is grandest in creation united with the possession of myself.” At twelve she began to write, composing long stories about a hero to whom, under the name of Corambe, she raised an altar of stones and moss in the corner of the garden. For years she remained faithful to Corambe and cherished the project of constructing a poem or romance to celebrate his illustrious exploits. At thirteen, her mother and grandmother, unable to agree upon the subject of her education, determined to send her to a convent in Paris. “Conceive,” one of her biographers says, “the sadness of this wild bird shut up in the cage of the English Augustines in the ‘Rue des Fossés-Saint-Victor.’ She wept tears of bitter regret for the cool depths of woods, the sunny mornings, and dim quiet evenings of her home.”