The affair thus concluded, Madame Sand entered formally into possession of Nohant; and early in September she started with her two children for Switzerland, where they spent the autumn holidays in a long-contemplated visit to her friend the Comtesse d'Agoult, then at Geneva. This tour is fancifully sketched in a closing number of the _Lettres d'un Voyageur_, a volume which stands as a sort of literary memorial of two years of unsettled, precarious existence, material and spiritual--a time of trial now happily at an end. _Simon_, a tale dedicated to Madame d'Agoult, and published in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, 1836--a graceful story, of no high pretentions--is noticeable as marking the commencement of a decided and agreeable change in the tone of George Sand's fiction. Hitherto the predominant note struck had been most often one of melancholy, if not despair--the more hopelessly painful the subject, the more fervent, apparently, the inspiration to the writer. In _Indiana_ she had portrayed the double victim of tyranny and treachery; in _Valentine_, a helpless girl sacrificed to family ambition and social prejudice; in _Lelia_ and _Jacques_, the incurable _Weltschmerz_, heroism unvalued and wasted; in _Leone Leoni_, the infatuation of a weak-minded woman for a phenomenal scoundrel; in _Andre_, the wretchedness which a timid, selfish character, however amiable, may bring down on itself and on all connected with it. Henceforward she prefers themes of a pleasanter nature. In _Simon_ she paints the triumph of true and patient love over social prejudice and strong opposition. In _Mauprat_,[B] written in 1837, at Nohant, she exerts all the force of her imagination and language to bring before us vividly the gradual redemption of a noble but degraded nature, through the influence of an exclusive, passionate and indestructible affection. The natural optimism of her temperament, not her incidental misfortunes, began and continued to color her compositions. From Switzerland she returned for part of the winter to Paris. She had given up her "poet's garret," and occupied for a while a suite of rooms in the Hotel de France, where resided also Madame d'Agoult. The _salon_ of the latter was a favorite _rendezvous_ of cosmopolitan artistic celebrities, whose general _rendezvous_ just then was Paris. A very Pantheon must have been an intimate circle that included, among others, George Sand, Daniel Stern, Heine, the Polish poet Mickiewicz, Eugene Delacroix, Meyerbeer, Liszt, Hiller, and Frederic Chopin.