Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/167

Rh the reconciliation both perhaps desired was never to take place. Political events had intervened to widen the gap between their paths. Chopin had neither part nor lot in the revolutionary movement that just then was throwing all minds and lives into a ferment, and which was completely to engross Madame Sand's energies for many months to come. It drove him away to England, and he only returned to Paris, in 1849, to die.

In May 1847 the tranquillity of life at Nohant had been varied by a family event, the marriage of Madame Sand's daughter Solange with the sculptor Clésinger. The remainder of the twelvemonth was spent in the country, apparently with very little anticipation on Madame Sand's part that the breaking of the political storm, that was to draw her into its midst, was so near.

The new year was to be one of serious agitations, different to any that had yet entered into her experience. Political enterprise for the time cast all purely personal interests and emotions into the background. "I have never known how to do anything by halves," she says of herself very truly; and whatever may be thought of the tendency of her political influence and the manner of its exertion, no one can tax her with sparing herself in a contest to which, moreover, she came disinterested; vanity and ambition having, in one of her sex, nothing to gain by it. But in political matters it