For her infidelities George Sand felt no compunction. She wrote frankly concerning them: I have never imposed constancy upon myself. When I have felt that love is dead, I have said so without shame or remorse, and have obeyed Providence that was leading me elsewhere. By her marriage with Dudevant, she had had a son and a daughter. The daughter, Solange, inherited much of her mother's lawlessness, with none of the latter's inspiration. And now George Sand was to see how her own nature worked in another of the same blood. She arranged a splendid marriage for Solange, a marriage with a man of rank and money. And on the very eve of the wedding Solange proceeded to elope with a poor sculptor, Clesinger by name. The mother was equal to the emergency. She ran after the fugitives, caught them, bullied Clesinger into marrying Solange, hushed all scandal, and installed the young couple in a Paris flat, settling on them the bulk of her property. In revenge, Clesinger permanently estranged Solange from her mother. Soon afterward George Sand's sway over men's hearts ceased. Whether she was weary of love, or whether love was weary of her, the old fascination deserted her. No more as lovers, but as profound admirers of her intellect, great men still flocked about her--Matthew Arnold, Flaubert, Feuillet, and a host of others. But it was now her brain alone they worshiped. By many years George Sand outlived her charm, dying in 1876 at the age of seventy-two, her grandchildren about her--a smugly proper, if sadly anticlimactic, ending to a career in which anticlimax had been almost as infrequent as propriety. CHAPTER NINE MADAME DU BARRY THE SEVEN-MILLION-DOLLAR SIREN. She came from the same neighborhood that had produced Joan of Arc. She even claimed relationship to the long-dead Maid. But at that point all likeness between the two comes to a very abrupt end. She is known to history as "Marie Jeanne Gomard de Vaubernier, Comtesse du Barry." The parish register of her birthplace describes her, less flamboyantly, as "Marie Jeanne, natural daughter of Anne Becu, known as Quantigny; born Aug., A.D. 1746." There are many details in Marie Jeanne du Barry's story that I am going to omit--at my own request; not only because they are unwriteable, but because their sordid vulgarity is also drearily stupid. I apologize in advance for the omissions. But even after the process of weeding out, I think there will be quite enough left to hold the interest. When Marie was six, Anne Becu drifted to Paris--the Mecca of her trade. And soon afterward, an admirer of Anne's, one Dumonceau, was coaxed into lavishing two dollars and forty cents a month on Marie's education. Dumonceau had been one of Anne's wooers in the village days, and it has been suggested that his interest in little Marie was prompted by more than mere kindness--in fact, that he and the infant were "more than kin and less than kind."