quite truthful. Soon, however, she was to begin an episode which
has been more famous than any other in her curious history, for
she met Alfred de Musset, then a youth of twenty-three, but
already well known for his poems and his plays.

Musset was of noble birth. He would probably have been better for
a plebeian strain, since there was in him a touch of the
degenerate. His mother's father had published a humanitarian poem
on cats. His great-uncle had written a peculiar novel. Young
Alfred was nervous, delicate, slightly epileptic, and it is
certain that he was given to dissipation, which so far had
affected his health only by making him hysterical. He was an
exceedingly handsome youth, with exquisite manners, "dreamy rather
than dazzling eyes, dilated nostrils, and vermilion lips half
opened." Such was he when George Sand, then seven years his
senior, met him.

There is something which, to the Anglo-Saxon mind, seems far more
absurd than pathetic about the events which presently took place.
A woman like George Sand at thirty was practically twice the age
of this nervous boy of twenty-three, who had as yet seen little of
the world. At first she seemed to realize the fact herself; but
her vanity led her to begin an intrigue, which must have been
almost wholly without excitement on her part, but which to him,
for a time, was everything in the world.

Experimenting, as usual, after the fashion described by Dumas, she
went with De Musset for a "honeymoon" to Fontainebleau. But they
could not stay there forever, and presently they decided upon a
journey to Italy. Before they went, however, they thought it