It was in August, 1833, at a dinner given by Buloz to the staff of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, that George Sand first made the personal acquaintance of Alfred de Musset, then in his twenty-third year, and already famous through his just published poem, _Rolla_, and his earlier dramas, _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Les Caprices de Marianne_. He rapidly became enamored of the author of _Lelia_, who for her part felt powerfully the attraction of his many admirable qualities, mutual enchantment leading them so far as to believe they could be the hero and heroine of a happy love tale. In a letter of September 21, addressed to her friend and correspondent Sainte-Beuve, whom she had made the confidant of her previous depression and strange moods of gloom, she writes of herself as lifted out of such dangers by a happiness beyond any she had imagined, restoring youth to her heart--the happiness accorded her by the poet's society and his preference for her own. De Musset, at this time, would have given the world to have been able to make her his wife. The story of their short-lived infatuation and of the swift-following mutual disenchantment,--a story which, says Sainte-Beuve, has become part of the romance of the nineteenth century,--is perhaps of less consequence here than in the life of De Musset,[A] in whom the over-sensitiveness of genius was not allied with the extraordinary healthy vitality which enabled George Sand to come out of the most terrible mental experiences unembittered, with the balance of her mind unshaken, and her powers unimpaired. Yet that he acquired an empire over her no other ever acquired there is much to indicate. It took her from France for a while, from her children, her friends--and the breaking of the spell set her at war, not only with him, but for a while with herself, with life, and her fellow creatures. In the last days of 1833, she and the author of _Rolla_ started on a journey to Italy, where George Sand spent six months, and where she has laid the scene of a number of her novels: the first and best part of _Consuelo_, _La Derniere Aldini_, _Leone_, _Leoni_, _La Daniella_, and others. The spirit of that land she has caught and reproduced perhaps more successfully than any other of the many novelists who have chosen it for a frame--of Italy as the artist's native country, that is--not the Italy of political history, nor of the Medici, but the Italy that is the second home of painters, poets, and musicians. Can anything be more enjoyable, and at the same time more vividly true, than George Sand's delineations of Venice; and, in the first of the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_, the pictures given of her wanderings on the shores of the Brenta, of Bassano, the Brenta valley, Oliero, Possagno, Asolo, a delicious land, till quite recently as little tourist-trodden as in 1834? What a contrast to the purely imaginary descriptions in _Lelia_, written before those beauties had appeared to her except in dreams!