ideal of frivolity, and that a crash of some kind must ensue. Her judgment on the Emperor after his fall is worth noting, if only because it is dispassionate. Since his elevation to the Imperial dignity she had lost all old illusions as to his public intentions. With regard to these, on the occasion of her interviews with him at the Élysée, he had completely deceived her, and designedly she had at first thought. Nor had she concealed her disgust.
I left Paris, and did not come to an appointment he had offered me. They did not tell me "The King might have had to wait!" but they wrote "The Emperor waited." However, I continued to write to him, whenever I saw hopes of saving some victim, to ponder his answers, and watch his actions; and I became convinced that he did not intentionally impose upon anyone. He imposed on himself and on everybody else . . . In private life, he had genuine qualities. I happened to see in him a side that was really generous and sincere. His dream of grandeur for France was not that of a sound mind, but neither of an ordinary mind. Really France would have sunk too low if she had submitted for twenty years to the supremacy of a crétin, working only for himself. One would then have to give her up in despair for ever and ever. The truth is that she mistook a meteor for a star, a silent dreamer for a man of depth. Then, seeing him sink under disasters she ought to have foreseen, she took him for a coward.
George Sand's Journal d'un Voyageur pendant la guerre, has a peculiar and a painful interest. It is merely a note-book of passing impressions from September 1870 to January 1871; but its pages give a most striking picture of those effects of war which have no place in military annals.
The army disasters of the autumn were preceded
