Nor is there anything more remarkable in her correspondence than the extremely interesting series of letters, extending from February, 1863, to within three months of her death in 1876, and addressed to Gustave Flaubert, at this period her familiar friend. The intercourse of two minds of so different an intellectual and moral order as those of the authors of _Consuelo_ and of _Madame Bovary_ offers to all a curious study. To the admirers of George Sand these letters are invaluable, both from a literary point of view and as a record of her inner life from that time onwards, when, as expressed by herself, she resolutely buried youth, and owned herself the gainer by an increasing calm within. The secret of her future happiness she found in living for her children and her friends. That she retained her zest for intellectual pleasures she ascribed to the very fact that she never allowed herself to be absorbed for long in these and in herself. "Artists are spoilt children," she writes to Flaubert, "and the best of them are great egoists. You tell me I love them too well; I love them as I love woods and fields, all things, all beings that I know a little and make my constant study. In the midst of it all I pursue my calling; and how I love that calling of mine, and all that nourishes and renovates it!" We must now take up the thread of outward events again, which we have slightly anticipated. In the autumn of 1860 Madame Sand had a severe attack of typhoid fever. She was then on the point of beginning her little tale, _La Famille de Germandre_; "_le roman de ma fievre_," she playfully terms it afterwards, when retracing the circumstances in a letter to her old friend Francois Rollinat:-- The day before that upon which I was suddenly taken very seriously ill, I had felt quite well. I had scribbled the beginning of a novel; I had placed all my personages; I knew them thoroughly; I knew their situations in the world, their characters, tendencies, ideas, relations to each other. I saw their faces. All that remained to be known was what they were going to do, and I did not trouble my head about that, having time to think it over to-morrow. Struck down on the morrow, she was for many days in a precarious condition; and in the confused fancies of fever found herself wandering with _La Famille de Germandre_ about the country, alighting in ruined castles, and encountering the most whimsical adventures in flood and field.