The real life story lying behind the first group of George Sand's novels is familiar to every one. She was born in 1804; lost her father at an early age; had a foolish, passionate mother, and a wise, distinguished grandmother; grew up on the family property of Nohant in Berry, a regular country child, romping out of doors, loving nature and freedom, and mixing on equal terms with the children of the peasantry. Her tastes were the tastes of the people, but she was not the less romantic for that. As Chateaubriand in his early youth evolved for himself the image of an ideally charming woman, of whom he constantly dreamed, so George Sand's young imagination created a hero, to whom she built an altar of stone and moss in a corner of her garden, and whom she credited with all the wonderful deeds suggested by her fertile invention. At the age of thirteen she was sent to a convent school in Paris. At first she sadly missed the free country life; then she became for a time ardently religious; but even before she returned to Nohant this enthusiasm had been superseded by a lively interest in the stage and in political literature. In her country surroundings, the grown-up girl reads Rousseau for the first time, and is fascinated, as we all are, when our own nature is revealed to us. Henceforward, to her life's end, she is Rousseau's faithful disciple. His understanding and worship of nature, his faith in God, his belief in and love of equality, his defiant attitude towards so-called civilised society, appealed to all her instincts and, as it were, forestalled feelings that were slumbering in her soul. Shakespeare, Byron, and Chateaubriand also enrapture her; they cause her to feel solitary in her surroundings, and communicate to her that first, vague melancholy which in young, passionate, enthusiastic souls generally precedes the melancholy of real disappointment. In 1822 this girl, who, with her powerful intellect, her rich imagination, and her inability to live her life independently, would never have been satisfied with the companionship of one man, however noble his character and great his gifts, was married to a Monsieur Dudevant, a perfectly ordinary country gentleman, neither better nor worse than most of his kind. He was uncultivated and passionate, and quite incapable of understanding his wife; but it is evident that, even if he had been a much better husband, the ultimate consequences of the marriage would have been the same. Only the first three years were spent in peace and amity. By 1825, George Sand was beginning to look down upon her husband, and, with her natural craving for sympathetic understanding, to form friendships with other men, as a relief from what to her were the insulting and cruelly degrading conditions of her home life. Monsieur Dudevant, who was enough of the husband to be exasperated by intellectual independence in his wife, though he was far too insignificant a personage to be able to profit