This biographer, I must of course note, discriminates with delicacy among her heroine’s felicities and mistakes, recognising that some of the former, as a latent awkwardness in them developed, inevitably parted with the signs that distinguished them from the latter; but I think we feel, as the instances multiply, that no regret could have equalled for us that of our not having the display vivid and complete. Once all the elements of the scarce in advance imaginable were there it would have been a pity that they should not offer us the show of their full fruition. What more striking show, for example, than that, as recorded by Madame Karénine in a footnote, the afflicted parent of Solange should have lived to reproduce, or rather, as she would herself have said, to “arrange” the girlish character and conduct of that young person, so humiliating at the time to any near relation, let alone a mother, in the novel of “Mademoiselle Merquem,” where the truth to the original facts and the emulation of the graceless prime “effects” are such as our author can vouch for? The fiction we name followed indeed after long years, but during the lifetime of the displeasing daughter and with an ease of reference to the past that may fairly strike us as the last word of superiority to blighting association. It is quite as if the close and amused matching of the character and its play in the novel with the wretched old realities, those that had broken in their day upon the scared maternal vision, had been a work of ingenuity attended with no pang. The example is interesting as a measure of the possible victory of time in a case where we might have supposed the one escape to have been by forgetting. Madame Sand remembers to the point of gratefully—gratefully as an artist—reconstituting; we in fact feel her, as the irrepressible, the “healthy” artist, positively to enjoy so doing. Thus it clearly defined itself for her in the fulness of time that, humiliating, to use our expression, as the dreadful Solange might have been and have incessantly remained, she herself had never in the least consented to the stupidity or sterility of humiliation. So it could be that the free mind and the free hand were ever at her service. A beautiful indifferent agility, a power to cast out that was at least proportioned to the power to take in, hangs about all this and meets us in twenty connections. Who of her readers has forgotten the harmonious dedication—her inveterate dedications have always, like her clear light prefaces, the last grace—of “Jeanne,” so anciently, so romantically readable, to her faithful Berrichon servant who sits spinning by the fire? “Vous ne savez pas lire, ma paisible amie,” but that was not to prevent the association of her name with the book, since both her own daughter and the author’s are in happy possession of the art and will be able to pass the entertainment on to her. This in itself is no more than