Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/61

Rh was for her the severest of ordeals; here her exuberant facility itself was against her. She would exhaust the space allotted to her, and find herself obliged to break off just at the point when she felt herself "beginning to begin." But she justly valued this apprenticeship as a professional experience, bringing her into direct relations with the literary world she was entering as a perfect stranger. Once able to devote herself entirely to composition and to live for her work, she found her calling begin to assert itself despotically. In a letter to a friend, M. Duteil, at La Châtre, dated about six weeks after her arrival in Paris, she writes:—

Three weeks later we find her writing to her son's tutor, M. Boucoiran, in the same strain:—

But still she persisted, providing, as best she could, "copy" for the Figaro, at seven francs a column, and