with the business of her estate, and with the wants of the neighboring
poor; but she was unsuccessful in administering her expenses, and her
narrow revenue did not allow her to give large satisfaction to her
charitable impulses. After some years of seclusion and effort, she began
to dream of liberty, of wealth,--in a word, of trying her fortunes in
Paris. She felt a power within her for which she had found no adequate
task. She speaks vaguely, too, of a _Being_ platonically loved, and
loving in like manner, absent for most of the year, and seen only for
a few days at long intervals, whose correspondence had added a new
influence to her life. This attenuated relation was, however, broken
before she made her essay of a new life. Her half-brother, Hippolyte,
brought to Nohant a habit of joviality which soon degenerated into
chronic intemperance; and though she does not accuse her husband of
participation in this vice, or, indeed, of any wrong towards her, she
yet makes us understand that an occasional escape from Nohant became to
her almost a matter of necessity. She, therefore, made arrangements,
with her husband's free consent, to pass alternately three months in
Paris and three months at home, for an indefinite period; and leaving
Maurice in good hands, and the little Solange, her daughter, for a
short time only, she came to Paris in the winter with the intention of
writing.

Her hopes and pretensions were at first very modest. It had been agreed
that her husband should pay her an annual pension of fifteen hundred
francs. She would have been well satisfied to earn a like sum by her
literary efforts. She established herself in a small _mansarde_, a sort
of garret, and managed by great economy to furnish it so that Solange
could be made comfortable. She washed and ironed her fine linen with
her own hands. Not finding literary employment at once, and her slender
salary running very low, she adopted male attire for a while, as she