Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/118

108 The affair thus concluded, Madame Sand entered formally into possession of Nohant; and early in September she started with her two children for Switzerland, where they spent the autumn holidays in a long-contemplated visit to her friend the Comtesse d'Agoult, then at Geneva. This tour is fancifully sketched in a closing number of the Lettres d'un Voyageur, a volume which stands as a sort of literary memorial of two years of unsettled, precarious existence, material and spiritual—a time of trial now happily at an end.

Simon, a tale dedicated to Madame d'Agoult, and published in the Revue des Deux Mondes, 1836—a graceful story, of no high pretensions—is noticeable as marking the commencement of a decided and agreeable change in the tone of George Sand's fiction. Hitherto the predominant note struck had been most often one of melancholy, if not despair—the more hopelessly painful the subject, the more fervent, apparently, the inspiration to the writer. In Indiana she had portrayed the double victim of tyranny and treachery; in Valentine, a helpless girl sacrificed to family ambition and social prejudice; in Lélia and Jacques, the incurable Weltschmerz, heroism unvalued and wasted; in Leone Leoni, the infatuation of a weak-minded woman for a phenomenal scoundrel; in André, the wretchedness which a timid selfish character, however amiable, may bring down on itself and on all connected