Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/121

Rh result, so here, amid the forest landscapes of her own land, her imagination rushed off to Venice and the shores of the Brenta, and produced La Dernière Aldini.

This constant industry, which had now become her habit of life, was more of a practical necessity than ever. Nohant, as already mentioned, barely repaid the owner the expenses of keeping it up. Madame Sand, who desired to be liberal besides, to travel occasionally, to gratify little artistic fancies as they arose, must look to her literary work to furnish the means.

"Sometimes," she writes from Nohant, in October 1837, to Madame d'Agoult, then in Italy, "I am tempted to realise my capital, and come and join you; but out there I should do no work, and the galley-slave is chained up. If Buloz lets him go for a walk it is on parole, and parole is the cannon-ball the convict drags on his foot."

Nor was it for herself only that she worked in future, but for her children, the whole responsibility of providing for both of whose education she was now about definitely to take on her own shoulders. The power of interference left to M. Dudevant by the recent legal decision had been exercised in a manner leading to fresh vexatious contention, and continual alarm on Madame Sand's part lest the boy should be taken by force from her side. These skirmishes included the actual abduction of Solange from Nohant by M. Dudevant during her mother's absence at