The last five years of her life saw her pen in full activity. In the Revue des Deux Mondes, Malgrétout, the novel of 1870, was succeeded by Flamarande and Les Deux Frères—compositions executed with unflagging energy and animation of style—La Tour de Percemont, and a series of graceful fairy-stories entitled, Contes d'une grand'mère. Nanon (1872), a rustic romance of the First Revolution, is a highly remarkable little work, possibly suggested by her recent experiences of the effect of public disturbances on remote country places.
She was also a constant contributor to the newspaper Le Temps. A critical notice by her hand of M. Renan's Dialogues et Fragments Philosophiques, reprinted from those columns, bears date May 1876, immediately before she succumbed to the illness which in a few days was to cut short her life.
At the beginning of this year she had written on this subject to Flaubert, in the brave spirit she would fain impart to her weaker brethren:—
Life is perhaps eternal, and work in consequence eternal. If so, let us finish our march bravely. If otherwise, if the individual perish utterly, let us have the honour of having done our task. That is duty, for our only obvious duties are to ourselves and our fellow creatures. What we destroy in ourselves we destroy in them. Our abasement abases them; our falls drag them down; we owe to them to stand fast, to save them from falling. The desire to die early is a weakness, as is the desire to live long.
George Sand, like most persons of an exceptional constitution, had little faith in the efficacy for herself of medical science. She was persuaded that the pre-
