girl; and as a suitable _vis-à-vis_ for the guest of the evening, Monsieur Lerminier, a well-known professor of philosophy, she has invited Debureau, the famous Pierrot of the Funambules Theatre, whom no one present has seen except on the stage, and whom she introduces as an eminent member of the English House of Commons charged with secret despatches to the Austrian government. To give both him and Lerminier an opportunity to display their accomplishments, the conversation is turned upon politics. But Sir Robert Peel, Lord Stanley, and other such personages are mentioned in vain; the foreign diplomat either maintains an obstinate silence or answers in monosyllables. At last some one employs the expression, "the European balance of power." Then the Englishman speaks. "Would you like to know," he says, "what my idea of the European balance of power at this serious conjuncture in English and continental politics is?--This!" And the diplomat throws up his plate so that it spins round in the air, then cleverly catches it on the point of his knife and balances it as it whirls there. The astonishment of the other guests may be imagined. Does not a little anecdote like this show us the connection between De Musset and George Sand in a curious light of youthfulness and childishness? It is like a reflected gleam from the days of the Renaissance; we know at once that we are in the romantic France of the Thirties. The connection has its commonplace, sordid side, of which enough has been made, and on which I shall not dwell. Every one knows that De Musset and George Sand travelled in Italy together, and that he tormented her with his jealousy, she him with a surveillance of his actions and habits to which he was totally unaccustomed; that their life together was not happy; that he was very ill in Venice (with _delirium tremens_, we are led to understand); and that during his illness she had a love affair with the Italian doctor, Pagello by name, who attended him, the consequence of which was that De Musset left her and went home in a state of extreme depression. But there is yet another and more attractive aspect of the connection--namely, the psychological or aesthetic. The history of literature tells of many such intimacies between remarkable men and women; but in this one there is something unusual and new. A masculine genius of the highest rank, one stage of whose artistic career is already run, but who is still quite young--a feminine genius, great and complete in herself, in appraising whom it may safely be affirmed that no woman before her ever displayed such exuberant creative power--these two influence each other during the exaltation of a passionate attachment.