Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/176

166 uncertain whether the arrest of Barbès might not be followed by her own. Some of her friends advised her to seek safety in Italy, where at that time the partisans of liberty were more united and sanguine. She turned a deaf ear. But she was severed now from all influential connection with those in authority. Before the end of May she left for Nohant, with her hopes for the rapid regeneration of her country on the wane. "I am afraid for the future," she writes to the imprisoned Barbès, shortly after these events. " I suffer for those who do harm and allow harm to be done without understanding it I see nothing but ignorance and moral weakness preponderating on the face of the globe."

Through the medium of the Press, notably of the journal La Vraie République, she continued to give plain expression to her sentiments, regardless of the political enmities she might excite, and of the personal mortification to which she was exposed, even at Nohant, which with its inmates had recently become the mark for petty hostile "demonstrations." Alluding to these, she writes:—

The term "communist," caught up and passed from