But how in the world indeed was the point so indicated _not_ to be the particular cross-road at which the critic should lie in wait for a poor child of the age whom preceding ages and generations had almost infernally conspired to trap for him, to give up, candidly astray, to his hands? If the element of romance for which our heroine’s name stands is best represented by her personal sequences and solutions, it is sufficiently visible that her heredity left her a scant alternative. Space fails me for the story of this heredity, queer and complicated, the very stuff that stories are made of—a chain of generations succeeding each other in confidence and joy and with no aid asked of legal or other artificial sanctions. The facts are, moreover, sufficiently familiar, though here as elsewhere Madame Karénine adds to our knowledge. Presented, foreshortened, stretching back from the quiet Nohant funeral of 1876 to the steps of the throne of King Augustus the Strong of Poland, father of Maurice de Saxe, great-great-grandfather of Aurore Dupin, it all hangs together as a cluster of components more provocative than any the great novelist herself ever handled. Her pre-natal past was so peopled with _dramatis personæ_ that her future was really called on to supply them in such numbers as would preserve the balance. The tide of illegitimacy sets straight through the series. No one to speak of—Aurore’s father is an exception—seems to have had a “regular” paternity. Aurore herself squared with regularity but by a month or two; the marriage of her parents gave her a bare escape. She was brought up by her paternal grandmother between a son of her father and a daughter of her mother born out of wedlock. It all moves before us as a vivid younger world, a world on the whole more amused and more amusing than ours. The period from the Restoration to the events of 1848 is the stretch of time in which, for more reasons than we can now go into, French life gives out to those to whom its appeal never fails most of its charm—most, at all events, of its ancient sociability. Happy is our sense of the picturesque Paris unconscious of a future all “avenues” and exhibitions; happy our sense of these middle years of a great generation, easy and lusty despite the ensanguined spring that had gone before. They live again, piecing themselves ever so pleasantly and strangely together, in Madame Sand’s records and references; almost as much as the conscious close of the old régime so vaunted by Talleyrand they strike us as a season it would have been indispensable to know for the measure of what intercourse could richly be.