She was at that period of her varied career acting as well as writing in a manner which attracted the attention of Louis Philippe’s very vigilant and abnormally suspicious police. She had recently left Paris for an excursion in the _tête-à-tête_ company of the well known Abbé de Lamenais, who was at that time giving much trouble and disquietude to the official guardians of the altar and the throne. His comings and goings were the object of vigilant supervision on the part of the police authorities; and it so happened by a strange chance that the report of the official observers of this little excursion, which reached the official head-quarters, reached me also. And all the watchers had to tell was that the abbé and the lady his companion shared the same bedchamber at the end of their first day’s journey. Now the Abbé de Lamenais was an old, little, wizened, dried-up, dirty--very dirty--priest. It is possible, but I have reason to think highly improbable, that economy was the motive of this strange chamber comradeship. But I was then, and am still, very strongly convinced that the sole purpose of it was to outrage the lady’s (and the priest’s) censors, to act differently from everybody else, and to give evidence of superiority to conventionality and “prejudice.” I wrote very carefully and conscientiously some few years subsequently a long article on Georges Sand in the _Foreign Quarterly_ which attracted some attention at the time. I should write in many respects differently now. The lady in subsequent years put a considerable quantity of “water into her wine”--and though not altogether in the same sense,--I have done so too.