had borne obloquy, poverty, hunger, thirst, wretchedness, and the agony of a
martyr's death for the sake of Jesus. Her capacities for self-sacrifice became
perhaps her leading trait, always longing after a grand life like George Eliot's
Dorothea Brooke. She was allowed at the age of eleven to enter a convent,
where, shunning her companions, she courted solitude apart, under the trees,
reading and thinking. Artificial as the atmosphere was here, it no doubt inspired
her life with permanent tenderness of feeling and loftiness of purpose, and gave
a mystic quality to her imagination. Later she experienced to the full revulsion of
thought and experience which comes when doubt reacts upon youthful credulity.
It was the age of the encyclopedia, and now she came to doubt her creed and
even God and the soul, but clung to the Gospels as the best possible code of
morals, and later realized that while her intellect had wandered her heart had
remained constant. At seventeen she was, if not the moat beautiful, perhaps the
noblest woman in all France, and here the curtain moat drop upon her girlhood.
All her traits were, of course, set off by the great life she lived and the yet
greater death she died.
Gifted people seem to conserve their youth and to be all the more children, and
perhaps especially all the more intensely adolescents, because of their gifts, and
it is certainly one of the marks of genius that the plasticity and spontaneity of
adolescence persists into maturity. Sometimes even its passions, reveries, and
hoydenish freaks continue. In her "Histoire de Ma Vie," it is plain that George
Sand inherited at this age an unusual dower of gifts. She composed many and
interminable stories, carried on day after day, so that her confidants tried to tease
her by asking if the prince had got out of the forest yet, etc. She personated an
echo and conversed with it. Her day-dreams and plays were so intense that she
often came back from the world of imagination to reality with a shock. She spun
a weird zoological romance out of a rustic legend of la grande bête.
When her aunt sent her to a convent, she passed a year of rebellion and revolt,
and was the leader of les diables, or those who refused to be devout, and
engaged in all wild pranks. At fifteen she became profoundly interested in the
lives of the saints, although ridiculing miracles. She entered one evening the
convent church for service, without permission, which was an act of
disobedience. The mystery and holy charm of it penetrated her; she forgot
everything outward and was left alone, and some mysterious change stole over
her. She "breathed an atmosphere of ineffable sweetness" more with the mind
than the senses; had a sudden indescribable perturbation; her eyes swam; she