_our_ superstition of payment, in proportion to such enormities of ostensibly buying or borrowing—which fact, we have to recognise, left an existence as far removed either from moral, or intellectual, or even social bankruptcy as if it had proceeded from the first but on the most saving lines. That is what remains on the whole most inimitable in the picture—the impression it conveys of an art of life by which the rough sense of the homely adage that we may not both eat our cake and have it was to be signally falsified; this wondrous mistress of the matter strikes us so as having consumed _her_ refreshment, her vital supply, to the last crumb, so far as the provision meant at least freedom and ease, and yet having ever found on the shelf the luxury in question undiminished. Superlatively interesting the idea of how this result was, how it _could_ be, achieved—given the world as we on our side of the water mainly know it; and it is as meeting the mystery that the monument before us has doubtless most significance. We shall presently see, in the light of our renewed occasion, how the question is solved; yet we may as well at once say that this will have had for its conclusion to present our heroine—mainly figuring as a novelist of the romantic or sentimental order once pre-eminent but now of shrunken credit—simply as a supreme case of the successful practice of life itself. We have to distinguish for this induction after a fashion in which neither Madame Sand nor her historian has seemed at all positively concerned to distinguish; the indifference on the historian’s part sufficiently indicated, we feel, by the complacency with which, to be thorough, she explores even the most thankless tracts of her author’s fictional activity, telling the tales over as she comes to them on much the same scale on which she unfolds the situations otherwise documented. The writer of “Consuelo” and “Claudie” and a hundred other things is to this view a literary genius whose output, as our current term so gracefully has it, the exercise of an inordinate personal energy happens to mark; whereas the exercise of personal energy is for ourselves what most reflects the genius—recorded though this again chances here to be through the inestimable fact of the possession of style. Of the action of that perfect, that only real preservative in face of other perils George Sand is a wondrous example; but her letters alone suffice to show it, and the style of her letters is no more than the breath of her nature, her so remarkable one, in which expression and aspiration were much the same function. That is what it is really to _have_ style—when you set about performing the act of life. The forms taken by this latter impulse then cover everything; they serve for your adventures not less than they may serve at their most refined pitch for your Lélias and your Mauprats.