George Sand, the pseudonym of Madame Amandine Lucile Aurore Dudevant, née Dupin, the most prolific female author in the history of literature, and unapproached among the women novelists of France. Her life was as strange and adventurous as any of her novels, which are for the most part idealized versions of the multifarious incidents of her life. In her self-revelations she followed Rousseau, her first master in style, but while Rousseau in his Confessions darkened all the shadows, George Sand is the heroine of her story, often frail and faulty, but always a woman more sinned against than sinning. Thanks, however, to her voluminous correspondence that was later published and to family documents that her French biographers have unearthed, there are now full materials for tracing the history of her public and private career, and for forming a clear and unbiased estimate of her character and genius.

Her father was Maurice Dupin, a retired lieutenant in the army of the republic; her mother, Sophie Delaborde, the daughter of a Paris bird-fancier. Their ill-assorted marriage took place only a month before the birth of the child (July 1, 1804; at Paris). Her paternal grandfather was M. Dupin de Francueil, a farmer-general of the revenue, who married the widow of Count Horn, a natural son of Louis XV, she in her turn being the natural daughter of Maurice de Saxe, the most famous of the many illegitimate children of Augustus the Strong, by the lovely countess of Königsmarck. George Sand, who was a firm believer in the doctrine of heredity, devotes a whole volume of her autobiography (Histoire de ma vie, 1857 seq.) to the elaboration of this strange pedigree. She boasts of the royal blood which ran through her veins, and disregarding the bar sinister she claims affinity with Charles X and Louis XVII, but she is no less frank in declaring that she is vilaine et très vilaine, a daughter of the people, who shares by birth their instincts and sympathies. Her birth itself was romantic. Her father was playing a country dance at the house of a fellow officer, the future husband of Sophie/s sister, when he was told that his wife, who had not long left the room, had borne him a daughter. "She will be fortunate", said the aunt, "she was born among the roses to the sound of music."

Passing by her infantine recollections, which go back further than even those of Charles Dickens, we find her at the age of three crossing the Pyrenees to join her father who was on Murat`s staff, occupying with her parents a suite of rooms in the royal palace, adopted as the child of the regiment, nursed by rough old sergeants, and dressed in a complete suit of uniform to please the general.

For the next ten years she lived at Nohant, near La Châtre in Berri, the country house of her grandmother. Here her character was shaped; here she imbibed that passionate love of country scenes and country life which neither absence, politics nor dissipation could uproot; here she learned to understand the ways and thoughts of the peasants, and laid up that rich store of scenes and characters which a marvellously retentive memory enabled her to draw upon at will. The progress of her mind during these early years well deserves to be recorded. Education, in the strict sense of the word, she had none. A few months after her return from Spain her father was killed by a fall from his horse. He was a man of remarkable literary gifts as well as a good soldier. "Character", says