CHAPTER XII.
LATER YEARS.
When, in 1869, Madame Sand was applied to by M. Louis Ulbach—a literary friend who purposed to write her biography—for some account of her life from that time onwards where her memoirs break off, she replied in a letter now appended to those memoirs, as follows:—
For the last five-and-twenty years there is nothing more that is of interest. It is old age, very quiet and very happy, en famille, crossed by sorrows entirely personal in their nature—deaths, defections and then the general state of affairs in which we have suffered, you and I, from the same causes. My time is spent in amusing the children, doing a little botany, long walks in summer—I am still a first-rate pedestrian—and writing novels, when I can secure two hours in the daytime and two in the evening. I write easily and with pleasure. This is my recreation, for my correspondence is enormous, and there lies work indeed! If one had none but one's friends to write to! But how many requests, some touching, some impertinent! Whenever there is anything I can do, I reply. Those for whom I can do nothing I do not answer. Some deserve that one should try, even with small hope of succeeding. Then one must answer that one will try. All this, with private affairs to which one must really give attention now and then, makes some ten letters a day.
