After the June massacres, she retired, sad and disappointed, to Nohant, where, surrounded by her children and grandchildren, she reigned as _père et mère de famille_, respected and loved by all. The eccentricities of her youth were forgiven for the sake of her genius and generosity of heart. She was hospitable and simple, allowing her son and his wife to manage the household and property, making her guests, however, feel that she was the controlling spirit of the house. Here—all the struggles of life over—she devoted herself to literature, and produced the best works of her life: “La Petite Fadette,” “La Mare au Diable,” and “François le Chiampi.” George Sand had none of the brilliancy and repartee in general conversation one would have expected, and as the years went on she became more silent and reserved. Her greatest happiness was to sit in her arm-chair smoking cigarettes. Often, when her friends thought she was absorbed in her own meditations, she would put in a word that proved she had been listening to everything. The word spoken, she would relapse again into silence. It was only when she sat down to her desk that she became eloquent, and the expressions that halted on her lips rushed abundantly from her pen. Her characters grew beneath her hand, and she went on writing, with that perfect style which is like the rhythmic cadence of a great river—“Large, calm, and regular.” George Sand worked all night long after all her guests were in bed, sometimes remaining up until five o’clock in the morning. She generally sat down to the old bureau in the hall at Nohant, with pen, ink, and foolscap paper sewn together, and began, without notes or a settled scheme of any kind. “You wish to write,” she says to her lovely young friend, the Comtesse d’Agoult. “Then do so by all means. You are young, in the full force of your intelligence and powers. Write quickly and don’t think too much. If you reflect, you will cease to have any particular bent, and will write from habit. Work while you have genius, while the gods dictate to you. I think you will have a great success, and may you be spared the thorns which surround the blessed flowers of the crown of glory. Why should the thorns pierce your flesh? You have not wandered through the desert.” When death came, she met it simply and bravely, like the great soul that she was. “Laissez la verdure” were the last words she spoke. No one at first understood what she meant, and thought she was delirious, but afterwards they remembered that she had always expressed a dislike to slabs and crosses on the graves of those she loved, so they left a mound of grass to mark her resting-place.