Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/253

Rh impaired her strength, she outlived the war's ending, and the horrible social crisis which she had foreseen must succeed the political one. Happier than Prosper Mérimée, than Alexandre Dumas, and others, she saw the dawn of a new era of prosperity for her country, whose vital forces, as she had also foretold, were to prevail in the end over successive ills—the enervation of corruption, of military disaster, and the "orgie of pretended renovators" at home that signalized the first months of peace abroad.

In January 1872 we again find her writing cheerily to Flaubert:—

In a later letter she writes in a more serious strain:—