country or for Scotland.  She made me sit by her and poured out for me the insipid and depressing beverage, boisson fade et melancolique, as Balzac called it, for which English people are thought abroad to be always thirsting,—­tea.  She conversed of the country through which I had been wandering, of the Berry peasants and their mode of life, of Switzerland, whither I was going; she touched politely, by a few questions and remarks, upon England and things and persons English,—­upon Oxford and Cambridge, Byron, Bulwer.  As she spoke, her eyes, head, bearing, were all of them striking; but the main impression she made was an impression of what I have already mentioned, —­of simplicity, frank, cordial simplicity.  After breakfast she led the way into the garden, asked me a few kind questions about myself and my plans, gathered a flower or two and gave them to me, shook hands heartily at the gate, and I saw her no more.  In 1859 M. Michelet[305] gave me a letter to her, which would have enabled me to present myself in more regular fashion.  Madame Sand was then in Paris.  But a day or two passed before I could call, and when I called, Madame Sand had left Paris and had gone back to Nohant.  The impression of 1846 has remained my single impression of her.

Of her gaze, form, and speech, that one impression is enough; better perhaps than a mixed impression from seeing her at sundry times and after successive changes.  But as the first anniversary of her death [306] draws near, there arises again a desire which I felt when she died, the desire, not indeed to take a critical survey of her,—­very far from it.  I feel no inclination at all to go regularly through her productions, to classify and value them one by one, to pick out from them what the English public may most like, or to present to that public, for the most part ignorant of George Sand and for the most part indifferent to her, a full history and a judicial estimate of the woman and of her writings.  But I desire to recall to my own mind, before the occasion offered by her death passes quite away,—­to recall and collect the elements of that powerful total-impression which, as a writer, she made upon me; to recall and collect them, to bring them distinctly into view, to feel them in all their depth and power once more.  What I here attempt is not for the benefit of the indifferent; it is for my own satisfaction, it is for myself.  But perhaps those for whom George Sand has been a friend and a power will find an interest in following me.

Le sentiment de la vie ideale, qui n’est autre que la vie normale telle que nous sommes appeles a la connaitre;[307]—­“the sentiment of the ideal life, which is none other than man’s normal life as we shall some day know it,”—­those words from one of her last publications give the ruling thought of George Sand, the ground-motive, as they say in music, of all her strain.  It is as a personage inspired by this motive that she interests us.