Cleopatra had long since made up her mind to die sooner than walk in chains through the streets where once she had swept as Cæsar's peerless sweetheart. But she was part Greek and part Egyptian--both soft nations, lacking in the stern qualities of Rome. She had no taste for naked steel. She was content to die, but she wanted to die without pain. On certain of her slaves she practiced the effects of various Oriental poisons. Some of these slaves died in agony, some in mere discomfort. One of them died with a smile on his lips--a slave on whom had been inflicted the bite of the tiny gray Nile-mud asp. Cleopatra's question was answered. She put an asp to her breast. The serpent fixed its fangs in her white flesh. And Cleopatra--model and synonym for a worldful of super-women--was very comfortably spared the shame of walking chained and barefoot in a Roman Triumph. CHAPTER VIII GEORGE SAND THE HOPELESSLY UGLY SIREN A very famous woman discovered once that men are not paragons of fidelity. Or, finding that one man was not, she decided that all men were alike. And to Jules Sandeau, who had deceived her, she exclaimed, in fine, melodrama frenzy: "My heart is a grave!" "From the number of its occupants," drawled Sandeau, "I should rather call it a cemetery." The woman, too angry to grasp the meaning of the ungallant speech, raged on: "But I will be avenged. I shall write the tragedy of my love--in romance form--and--" "Why not in city-directory form?" suggested the man. And the loverly conversation ended in hysterics. The woman was Amandine Lucile Aurore Dupin Dudevant. History, literature, and the annals of superwomen know her as George Sand. As one may glean from her verbal tilt with Sandeau, she was not a recluse or a misanthropist. In fact, she numbered her ardent wooers by the dozen. Her love life began at a convent school when she was little more than a child, and it endured until old age set in. Perhaps a list of its victims, as Sandeau so cruelly hinted, would have resembled a city directory. It certainly would have borne a striking likeness to a cyclopedic index of Europe's nineteenth-century celebrities; for it embraced such immortal names as De Musset, Sandeau, Balzac, Chopin, Carlyle, Prosper Merimee, Liszt, Dumas and many another. So many demigods knelt at her shrine that at last she wrote: I am sick of great men. I would far rather see them in Plutarch than in real life. In Plutarch or in marble or in bronze, their human side would not disgust me so. And the personality, the appearance, the Venusberg charm of this heart monopolist? One instinctively pictures a svelte form, a "face that launched a thousand ships," and all the rest of the sirenic paraphernalia that instinctively attach themselves to one's mental vision of a wholesale fracturer of hearts. Here is Balzac's description of her. It is found in a letter written to Madame Hanska in 1838, when George Sand was at the acme of her super-woman career: