beautifully.  Oscar Commettant said he fainted in the artist’s room.  Sand and Chopin met but once again.  She took his hand, which was “trembling and cold,” but he escaped without saying a word.  He permitted himself in a letter to Grzymala from London dated November 17-18, 1848, to speak of Sand.  “I have never cursed any one, but now I am so weary of life that I am near cursing Lucrezia.  But she suffers too, and suffers more because she grows older in wickedness.  What a pity about Soli!  Alas! everything goes wrong with the world!” I wonder what Mr. Hadow thinks of this reference to Sand!

“Soli” is Solange Sand, who was forced to leave her husband because of ill-treatment.  As her mother once boxed Clesinger’s ears at Nohant, she followed the example.  In trying to settle the affair Sand quarrelled hopelessly with her daughter.  That energetic descendant of “emancipated woman” formed a partnership, literary of course, with the Marquis Alfieri, the nephew of the Italian poet.  Her salon was as much in vogue as her mother’s, but her tastes were inclined to politics, revolutionary politics preferred.  She had for associates Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet, Taine, Herve, Weiss, the critic of the “Debats,” Henri Fouquier and many others.  She had the “curved Hebraic nose of her mother and hair coal-black.”  She died in her chateau at Montgivray and was buried March 20, 1899, at Nohant where, as my informant says, “her mother died of over-much cigarette smoking.”  She was a clever woman and wrote a book “Masks and Buffoons.”  Maurice Sand died in 1883.  He was the son of his mother, who was gathered to her heterogeneous ancestors June 8, 1876.

In literature George Sand is a feminine pendant to Jean Jacques Rousseau, full of ill-digested, troubled, fermenting, social, political, philosophical and religious speculations and theories.  She wrote picturesque French, smooth, flowing and full of color.  The sketches of nature, of country life, have positive value, but where has vanished her gallery of Byronic passion-pursued women?  Where are the Lelias, the Indianas, the Rudolstadts?  She had not, as Mr. Henry James points out, a faculty for characterization.  As Flaubert wrote her:  “In spite of your great Sphinx eyes you have always seen the world as through a golden mist.”  She dealt in vague, vast figures, and so her Prince Karol in “Lucrezia Floriana,” unquestionably intended for Chopin, is a burlesque—­ little wonder he was angered when the precious children asked him “Cher M. Chopin, have you read ‘Lucrezia’?  Mamma has put you in it.”  Of all persons Sand was pre-elected to give to the world a true, a sympathetic picture of her friend.  She understood him, but she had not the power of putting him between the coversof a book.  If Flaubert, or better still, Pierre Loti, could have known Chopin so intimately we should possess a memoir in which every vibration of emotion would be recorded, every shade noted, and all pinned with the precise adjective, the phrase exquisite.