Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/106

96 could not make up his mind to this course. No sooner had he drawn up an agreement consenting to a division of property, than he seemed to regret the sacrifice; upon which she ceased to press it.

Meantime Madame Dudevant, whose position at Nohant was that of a visitor merely, and becoming untenable, felt her hold on her cherished home and her children becoming more precarious day by day.

Some of her friends had strongly advised her to travel for a length of time, both as offering a moral remedy, and as a temporary escape from the practical perplexities of the moment. Her rescue, however, was to be otherwise effected, and a number of new intellectual interests that sprang up for her at this time all tended to retain her in her own country.

It was in the course of this spring that she made the acquaintance of M. de Lamennais, introduced to her by their common friend, the composer Franz Liszt. The famous author of the Paroles d'un Croyant had virtually severed himself from the Church of Rome by his recent publication of this little volume, pronounced by the Pope, "small in size, immense in perversity!" The eloquence of the poet-priest, and the doctrines of the anti-Catholic and humanitarian Christianity of which he came forward as the expounder, could not fail powerfully to impress her intelligence. Here seemed the harbour of refuge her half-wrecked faiths were seeking, and what the abbé’s antagonists denounced as the