There seems to have been little or no method about her early education. The study of her own language was neglected, and the time spent less profitably, she considered, in acquiring a smattering of Latin. She took to some studies with avidity, while others remained wholly distasteful to her. For mere head-work she cared little. Arithmetic she detested; versification no less. The dry _technique_ in music was a stumbling block of which she was impatient. History and literature she enjoyed in whatever they offered that was romantic, heroic, or poetically suggestive. In her Nohant surroundings there was nothing to check, and much to stimulate, this dominant imaginative faculty.... Such a visionary life might have been most dangerous and mentally enervating had her organization been less robust, and the tendency to reverie not been matched by lively external perception and plentiful physical activity. As it was, if at one moment she was in a cloud-land of her own, or poring over the stories of the Iliad, the classic mythologies, or Tasso’s _Gerusalemme_, the next would see her scouring the fields, ... playing practical jokes on the tutor, and extemporizing wild out-of-door games and dances with her village companions. [Sidenote: A curious development.] Of serious religious education she received none at all.... Her mother was pious in a primitive way, though holding aloof from priestly influences. The grandmother [was] a disciple of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and of Voltaire.... On both sides what was offered her to worship was too indefinite to satisfy her strong religious instincts.... She filled in the blank with her imagination, which was forthwith called upon to picture a being who should represent all perfections, human and divine; something that her heart could love, as well as her intelligence approve. [Sidenote: “Corambé.”] This ideal figure, for whom she devised the name Corambé, was to combine all the spiritual qualities of the Christian ideal with the earthly grace and beauty of the mythological deities of Greece. It is hardly too much to say that the Christianity which had been expressly left out in her teaching she invented for herself. She erected a woodland altar in the recesses of a thicket to this imaginary object of her adoration, and it is a characteristic trait that the sacrifices she chose to offer there were the release of birds and butterflies that had been taken prisoners--as a symbolical oblation most welcome to a divinity whose essential attributes were infinite mercy and love. BERTHA THOMAS: ‘George Sand.’ (Famous Women Series.) Boston: Roberts Brothers, 1883. * * * * * [Sidenote: Unhappy married life.] Her husband seems to have gradually neglected her, to satisfy his tastes as a sportsman. An excellent shot, a daring horseman, an indefatigable huntsman, he often left her at two and three in the morning to indulge in his favorite sport--hunting.