One day, Madame Dudevant, while looking for something in her husband's desk, chanced upon a package addressed to herself, and bearing the direction: _To be opened only on my death_. Deeming that her health did not promise her survival of her husband, and seeing that the package was addressed to her, Madame Dudevant, anxious to know the estimation in which her husband held her, opened the package. Her letter to Monsieur Boucoiran, dated December 3, 1830, best tells the revelation. She writes: "Good God! what a will! For me nothing but maledictions. He had heaped up therein all his violence of temper and ill-will against me, all his reflections concerning my perversity, all his contempt for my character. And that was what he had bequeathed me as his token of affection! I believed that I was dreaming, I, who hitherto had been obstinately shutting my eyes and refusing to see that I was scorned. The reading of that will at last aroused me from my slumber.... My decision was taken, and, I dare declare, irrevocably." Madame Dudevant at once informed her husband of her decision to leave him, and of the motives thereof. The explanations that followed led to an arrangement whereby Madame Dudevant was to receive from her husband an income of about three thousand francs, and to spend one-half of the year at Nohant and the other half in Paris. The care she took to keep the secret of her troubles from the world, for the sake of her children, may be understood from her letters. She desired that it should be supposed that she was leading a "separate life," hoping that, by her alternate residence in Paris and at Nohant, her husband would "learn circumspection." She writes to Monsieur Boucoiran, on December 8, 1830: "I must confess I am distressed at the thought that the secret of my domestic affairs may become known to others besides you.... The good understanding which, notwithstanding my separation from my husband, I desire to maintain in all that concerns my son, will compel me to act with as much caution when absent as when with him." The momentous step which was to result in Madame Dudevant's entire liberty of action, and, above all, in her giving to the world the masterpieces which soon rendered her famous, was taken in the early days of January, 1831, when, leaving her children, and her home at Nohant, with its cherished associations, she set out for Paris, armed with letters of introduction to one or two literary men, given her by friends at La Châtre.