The beginning of her life in Paris was one of considerable poverty and privation. She lived _au cinquième_ in a lodging which cost her a yearly rent of £12; she had no servant, and got in her food from an eating-house close by for the sum of two francs a day. Her washing and needlework she did herself. Notwithstanding this rigid economy, it was impossible to keep within the limits of her husband’s allowance of £120 a year, especially as far as her dress was concerned. After some hesitation, therefore, she took the resolution, which caused so much scandal then and afterwards, of adopting male attire. [Sidenote: Adoption of male attire.] “My thin boots wore out in a few days,” she tells us in the autobiography. “I forgot to hold up my dress, and covered my petticoats with mud. My bonnets were spoilt one after another by the rain. I generally returned from the expeditions I took, dirty, weary, and cold. Whereas my young men acquaintances--some of whom had been the companions of my childhood in Berri--had none of these inconveniences to submit to. I therefore had a long gray cloth coat made, with a waistcoat and trousers to match. When the costume was completed by a gray felt hat and a loose woollen cravat, no one could have guessed that I was not a young student in my first year. My boots were my particular delight. I should like to have gone to bed with them. On their little iron heels I wandered from one end of Paris to the other; no one took any notice of me, or suspected my disguise.” ---- ----: ‘George Sand.’ _Temple Bar_, April, 1885. * * * * * [Sidenote: Literature at first a resource.] My husband has set down my private expenses at 3,000 francs. You know that that is little for me, who like to give and cannot bear to receive. I therefore only purpose increasing my income from some other source. I have no ambition to be known, and shall not be. I shall not attract either the envy or the hatred of any one. Most writers, I know, lead lives of anguish and struggle; but those whose sole ambition is to earn a livelihood live in peaceable obscurity. It would ... be very odd if a paltry talent like mine could not withhold itself from the public gaze. AURORE DUDEVANT: _Letter to M. Jules Boucoiran_, February, 1831, in ‘Letters of George Sand.’ * * * * * [Sidenote: But soon a passion.] I am more than ever intent upon following a literary career. In spite of the repugnance which I sometimes experience, despite the days of idleness and fatigue which cause me to break off my work, in spite of the life, more than quiet, which I lead here, I feel that henceforth my existence has an aim. I have a purpose in view, a task before me, and, if I may use the word, a _passion_. For the profession of writing is nothing else but a violent, indestructible passion. When it has once entered people’s heads it never leaves them.