Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/246

236 life, saying, "There are hours when I escape from myself, when I live in a plant, when I feel myself grass, a bird, a tree top, a cloud, a running stream." Shaking off, as it were, the sense of personality she felt more freely and fully the sense of kinship with the life and soul of the universe.

It was her habit every evening to sum up in a few lines the impressions of the day, and this journal, for the conspicuous absence of incident in its pages, she compares to the log-book of a ship lying at anchor. But one terrible and little anticipated break in its tranquil monotony was yet to come.

George Sand lived to see her country pass through every imaginable political experience. Born before the First Republic had expired, she had witnessed the First Empire, the restored Monarchy, the Revolution of 1830, the reign of Louis Philippe, the convulsions of 1848, the presidency of Louis Bonaparte, and the Second Empire. She was still to see and outlive its fall, the Franco-German War, the Commune, and to die, as she was born, under a republic.

To some of her friends who reproached her with showing too much indulgence for the state of things under Imperial rule, she replied that the only change in her was that she had acquired more patience in proportion as more was required. The régime she condemned,—and amid apparent prosperity had foretold the corrupting influence on the nation of the established