“You know my home life, and how intolerable it is! You yourself have often been astonished to see me raise my head the day after I had been crushed to the earth. But there is a term to everything. Events latterly have hastened the resolution which otherwise I should not have been strong enough to take. No one suspects anything; there has been no open quarrel. When seeking for something in my husband’s desk I found a packet addressed to myself. On it were written these words: ‘To be opened after my death.’ I opened it however at once. What did I find? imprecations, anathemas, insulting accusations, and the word ‘perversity.’” This discovery, she tells him, decided her to come to an arrangement with her husband at once, by which she was to live the greater part of the year in Paris with her children, spending a month or two of the summer at Nohant. There were, no doubt, faults on both sides. She herself confesses in her autobiography “that she was no saint, and was often unjust, impetuous in her resolves, too hasty in her judgments.” Wherever there are strong feelings and desires there must be discord at times. “Happy he who plants cabbages,” says she. “He has one foot on the earth, and the other is only raised off it the height of the spade. Unfortunately for me, I fear if I did plant cabbages I should ask for a logical justification for my activity, and some reason for the necessity of planting cabbages.” Hers is not a nature that must be judged coldly. What right have we to say that she was to clip the wings of her genius, pass her years in the service of conventionality, and never seek the full development of her artistic nature? When she left the home of her childhood with pilgrim’s staff and scrip to start along the thorny path that led to the shrine of art, she was not actuated by any weak and wayward desire of change, but by the vehement and passionate desire to give forth to the world what was locked within her breast. The beginning of her life in Paris was one of considerable poverty and privation. She lived _au cinquième_ in a lodging, which cost her a yearly rent of £12; she had no servant, and got in her food from an eating-house close by for the sum of two francs a day. Her washing and needlework she did herself. Notwithstanding this rigid economy, it was impossible to keep within the limits of her husband’s allowance of £10 a year, especially as far as her dress was concerned. After some hesitation therefore she took the resolution, which caused so much scandal then and afterwards, of adopting male attire.