Nearly all the facts of the quarrel with Solange are to be found in Samuel Rocheblave's George Sand et Sa Fille. After Solange left Clésinger she formed a literary partnership with the Marquis Alfieri, nephew of the great Italian poet. "Soli" opened a salon in Paris, to which came Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Hervé, Henry Fouquier, and Weiss, the critic who describes her as having the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair cold black." She, too, must write novels. She died at Nohant, her mother's old home, in 1899. Maurice Sand, her brother, died ten years earlier. Jules Claretie tells an amusing story about Sand. In 1870, when she was old and full of honours, she went one day to visit the Minister of Instruction. There, being detained in the antechamber, she fell into a pleasant conversation with a well-groomed, decorated old gentleman. After ten minutes' chat the unknown consulted his watch, arose, and bowed to Mme. Sand. "If I could always find such a charming companion I would visit the Ministry often," he gallantly said, and went away. The novelist called an attendant. "Who is that amiable gentleman?" she asked. "Ah, that is M. Jules Sandeau of the French Academy." And he, her first flame in Paris, inquired the name of the lady. What a lot of head-shaking and moralising must have ensued! The story is pretty enough to have been written in the candied thunder of Sand herself. De Lenz, author of several rather neglected volumes about musicians, did not like Sand because she was rude to him when introduced by Chopin. He asked her concierge, "What is Madame properly called--Dudevant?" "Ah, Monsieur, she has many names," was the reply. But it is her various names, and not her novels, that interest us, and will intrigue the attention of posterity. CHAPTER VII THE GREAT AMERICAN NOVEL I