This was the basis of Madame Sand’s personal evolution, of her immense moral energy, for many a year; it was a practical system, applied and reapplied, and no “inquiry” concerning her has much point save as settling what, for our enlightenment and our esteem, she made of it. The answer meets us, I think, after we have taken in the facts, promptly enough and with great clearness, so long as we consider that it is not, that it cannot be in the conditions, a simple one. She made of it then intellectually a splendid living, but she was able to do this only because she was an altogether exceptional example of our human stuff. It is here that her famous heredity comes in: we see what a race-accumulation of “toughness” had been required to build her up. Monstrous monarchs and bastards of kings, great generals and bastards of bastards, courtesans, dancers supple and hard, accomplished men and women of the old dead great world, seasoned young soldiers of the Imperial epic, grisettes of the _pavé de Paris_, Parisian to the core; the mixture was not quite the blood of people in general, and obviously such a final flower of such a stem might well fix the attention and appeal to the vigilance of those qualified to watch its development. These persons would, doubtless, however, as a result of their observation, have acquired betimes a sense of the high vitality of their young friend. Formed essentially for independence and constructed for resistance and survival she was to be trusted, as I have hinted, to take care of herself: this was always the residuary fact when a passion was spent. She took care of Musset, she took care of Chopin, took care, in short, through her career, of a whole series of nurslings, but never failed, under the worst ingratitude, to be by her own elasticity still better taken care of. This is why we call her anomalous and deprecate any view of her success that loses sight of the anomaly. The success was so great that but _for_ the remainder she would be too encouraging. She was one in a myriad, and the cluster of circumstances is too unlikely to recur.