All the author’s “authority” is in these few words, and in none more than in the glance at the work and the tide. The work and the tide rose ever as high as she would to float her, and wherever we look there is always the authority. “I find Chopin _magnificent_,” she had already written from the thick of the fray, “to keep seeing, frequenting and approving Clésinger, who struck me because I snatched from his hands the hammer he had raised upon Maurice—Chopin whom every one talks of as my most faithful and devoted friend.” Well indeed may our biographer have put it that from a certain date in May 1847 “the two _Leitmotive_ which might have been called in the terms of Wagner the _Leitmotif_ of soreness and the _Leitmotif_ of despair—Chopin, Solange—sound together now in fusion, now in a mutual grip, now simply side by side, in all Madame Sand’s unpublished letters and in the few (of the moment) that have been published. A little later a third joins in—Augustine Brault, a motive narrowly and tragically linked to the _basso obligato_ of Solange.” To meet such a passage as the following under our heroine’s hand again is to feel the whole temper of intercourse implied slip straight out of our analytic grasp. The allusion is to Chopin and to the “defection” of which he had been guilty, to her view, at the time when it had been most important that she might count on him. What we have first, as outsiders, to swallow down, as it were, is the state of things, the hysteric pitch of family life, in which any ideal of reticence, any principle, as we know it, of minding one’s business, for mere dignity’s sake if for none other, had undergone such collapse.