< Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu
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DÉBUT IN LITERATURE.

55

ment with which you credit me. Society, sights, finery, are not what I want,—you only are under this mistake about me,—it is liberty. To be all alone in the street and able to say to myself, I shall dine at four or at seven, according to my good pleasure; I shall go to the Tuileries by way of the Luxembourg instead of going by the Champs Elysées; this is what amuses me far more than silly compliments and stiff drawing-room assemblies.

Such audacious self-emancipation, she was well aware, must estrange her from her friends of her own sex in the upper circles of Parisian society, and she anticipated this by making no attempt to renew such connections. For the moment she thought only of taking the shortest, and, as she judged, the only way for a "torpid country wife," like herself, to acquire the freedom of action and the enlightenment she needed. Those most nearly related to her offered no opposition. It was otherwise with her mother-in-law, the baronne Dudevant, with whom she had a passage of arms at the outset on the subject of her literary campaign, here disapproved in toto.

"Is it true," enquired this lady, "that it is your intention to print books?"

"Yes, madame."

"Well, I call that an odd notion!"

"Yes, madame."

"That is all very good and very fine, hut I hope you are not going to put the name that I bear on the covers of printed books?"

"Oh, certainly not, madame, there is no danger."

The liberty to which other considerations were

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