Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/90

80 M. Capo de Feuillide, of the Europe littéraire, it was warmly defended by M. Gustave Planche, in the Revue des Deux Mondes. The war of words grew so hot between them that a challenge and encounter were the result—surely unique in the annals of duelling. The swords of the critics fortunately proved more harmless than their words.

From the morbid depression that had tormented her mind and imagination, and has its literary memorial in Lélia, she was to find a timely, though but a temporary rescue, in the charm of a new acquaintance—the delighting society of a poetic mind of an order not inferior to her own.

It was in August 1833, at a dinner given by Buloz to the staff of the Revue des Deux Mondes, that George Sand first made the personal acquaintance of Alfred de Musset, then in his twenty-third year, and already famous through his just published poem, Rolla, and his earlier dramas, Andrea del Sarto and Les Caprices de Marianne. He rapidly became enamoured of the author of Lélia, who for her part felt powerfully the attraction of his many admirable qualities, mutual enchantment leading them so far as to believe they could be the hero and heroine of a happy love tale. In a letter of September 21, addressed to her friend and correspondent, Sainte-Beuve, whom she had made the confidant of her previous depression and strange moods of gloom, she writes of herself as