On the 28th the travellers reached Florence.  The aspect of this city and his researches in the Chroniques florentines supplied the poet with the subject for Lorenzaccio.  It appears that George Sand and Musset each treated this subject, and that a Lorenzaccio by George Sand exists.  I have not read it, but I prefer Musset’s version.  They reached Venice on January 19, 1834, and put up at the Hotel Danieli.  By this time they were at loggerheads.

The cause of their quarrel and disagreement is not really known, and the activity of retrospective journalists has not succeeded in finding this out.  George Sand’s letters only give details about their final quarrel.  On arriving, George Sand was ill, and this exasperated Musset.  He was annoyed, and declared that a woman out of sorts was very trying.  There are good reasons for believing that he had found her very trying for some time.  He was very elegant and she a learned “white blackbird.”  He was capricious and she a placid, steady bourgeois woman, very hard-working and very regular in the midst of her irregularity.  He used to call her “personified boredom, the dreamer, the silly woman, the nun,” when he did not use terms which we cannot transcribe.  The climax was when he said to her:  “I was mistaken, George, and I beg your pardon, for I do not love you.”

Wounded and offended, she replied:  “We do not love each other any longer, and we never really loved each other.”

They therefore took back their independence.  This is a point to note, as George Sand considered this fact of the greatest importance, and she constantly refers to it.  She was from henceforth free, as regarded her companion.

Illness kept them now at Venice.  George Sand’s illness first and then Musset’s alarming malady.  He had high fever, accompanied by chest affection and attacks of delirium which lasted six consecutive hours, during which it took four men to hold him.

George Sand was an admirable nurse.  This must certainly be acknowledged.  She sat up with him at night and she nursed him by day, and, astonishing woman that she was, she was also able to work and to earn enough to pay their common expenses.  This is well known, but I am able to give another proof of it, in the letters which George Sand wrote from Venice to Buloz.  These letters have been communicated to me by Madame Pailleron, nee Buloz, and by Madame Landouzy, veuve Buloz, whom I thank for the public and for myself.  The following are a few of the essential passages: 

“February 4. Read this when you are alone.