In conversation Mme. Sand was best in _tête-à-tête_. Some of the most memorable of her confidential talks with her friend, Mme. Adam has reproduced in her _Souvenirs_. One evening in Paris, when they were to have gone to the Odéon together, the play having been suddenly changed through an actor’s illness, “Let us stay at home and talk, dear Juliette,” said George. That conversation marked the beginning of George Sand’s ascendancy over her young friend’s mind. “_A partir de cette heure_,” writes Juliette, “_ma grande amie maternelle a été mon guide”_.[154] At the end of a long silence, during which she had been smoking cigarettes, throwing them into a bowl of water after a few whiffs, George said, as if resuming the thoughts that had been occupying her— “I want my life to be useful to another, to the daughter whom I choose to adopt, to you, my child. As we learn to know one another better, as we talk more and more to one another, I will tell you by what paths, always roughest when I most sought to find them smooth, I have climbed the hill of existence.” Through all that she has written of George Sand, we find Juliette ever attempting to excuse, or at least to account for, the irregularities, the ebullience, the wild passions of her friend’s exuberant and turbulent youth. She attributes them to the extravagance and effervescence of that romantic movement, in the hey-day of which Mme. Sand lived the first half of her life. For this view of her friend’s career Juliette had the authority of George herself. “In my young days,” said Mme. Sand on this memorable evening, “I moved in a purely artificial world, in which we were all resolved to feel, to experience, to love, to think, differently from the vulgar herd. Determined to avoid the bank, to swim out into the open, we were constantly losing our foothold and floundering in unfathomable depths. Remote from the crowd, remote from the shore, always more and more remote. How many of us have not perished body and soul! “And those who would not be drowned, who struggled, who were thrown back on to the bank, they recovered their footing, they became like other people, through contact with the earth, and especially with the common sense of humble folk. How often have I not become myself again in the midst of peasants! How often has not Nohant cured me of and saved me from Paris!” For George Sand, as for Joan of Arc four centuries ago, as for Anatole France to-day, the most adorable, the most salutary, the most indispensable of all human sentiments is pity. Looking back from the vantage point of old age on the mad, passionate adventures of her youth, Mme. Sand saw herself ever swayed from the bottom of her heart by _une grand pitié_. It was often that pity which caused her to quarrel with her lovers. She loved them as a mother loves her child. But they demanded from her the love of a mistress.