for copy, and beset by friends and visitors. She kept
all these at a distance, saying to Margaret: "It is
better to throw things aside, and seize the present
moment." Margaret gives this résumé of the interview: "We did not talk at all of personal or private
matters, I saw, as one sees in her writings, the
want of an independent, interior life, but I did not
feel it as a fault. I heartily enjoyed the sense of so
rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman
in her, too, very much; I never liked a woman better."
To complete the portrait, Margaret mentions the cigarette, which her new friend did not relinquish during the interview. The impression received as to character did not materially differ from that already made by her writings. In seeing her,, Margaret was not led to believe that all her mistakes were chargeable upon the unsettled condition of modern society. Yet she felt not the less convinced of the generosity and nobleness of her nature. “ There may have been something of the Bacchante in her life," says Mar- garet, sonje reverting to the wild ecstasies of heathen nature-worship, “but she was never coarse, never gross."
Margaret saw Madame Sand a second time, surrounded by her friends, and with her daughter, who was then on the eve of her marriage with the sculptor Clésinger. In this entourage she had “the position of an intellectual woman and good friend; the same as my own," says Margaret, “in the circle of my acquaintance as distinguished from my intimates."
Beneath the same roof Margaret found Chopin, "always ill, and as frail as a snow-drop, but an exquisite genius. He played to me, and I liked his talking scarcely less." The Polish poet, Mickiewicz,
