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XLIII. GEORGE SAKD. GEORGE SAND is a name which the English-speak- ing world still pronounces with something less than respect. She was not of our race, nor of our manners, and her immediate ancestors were extreme types of every- thing in human character most remote from ourselves and our sense of the right and becoming. To begin with, she was the great-granddaughter of that brilliant, dissolute Maurice de Saxe, Marshal of France, who in 1745 won for Louis XV and in his presence the battle of Fontenoy. Her great-grandmother, a scarcely less remarkable personage, was Aurora, the beautiful Countess von Koenigsmark. Her grandmother, the child of this famous, disorderly pair, a lady deeply imbued with aristocratic feeling, was proud of her illustrious, irregular descent, and preserved in her demeanor the formality of a past period. In her youth she experienced strange vicissitudes. Withdrawn at an early age from a convent in order to marry Count de Horn, of whom she knew nothing, she was left a widow while fStes were in progress in honor of the newly married couple. She lived for some time upon a modest pension allowed her by the Dauphiness ; then, that Princess dying, she was left des- titute. It was a fashion then in Europe for persons who had no other resource to apply for aid to Voltaire, and to him the young Countess appealed. Madame Sand always preserved among her treasures her grandmother's letter to the chief of the " philosophers," and his reply. (546)