haunted her as a dream long before it took definite shape.
It was not in literature that she first fancied she saw her way to earning an independent income. She had begun to make amateur essays in novel-writing, but was as dissatisfied with them as with the compositions of her childhood, and with a religious novelette she had produced whilst in the convent, and speedily committed to the flames. Again, alluding to her attempts, in 1825, at descriptions of the Pyrenees, she says: "I was not capable then of satisfying myself by what I wrote, for I finished nothing, and did not even acquire a taste for writing."
But she had dabbled in painting, and remained fond of it. "The finest of the arts," she calls it, writing to her mother in 1830, "and the most pleasant, as a life-occupation, whether taken up for a profession, or for amusement merely. If I had real talent, I should consider such a lot the finest in the world." But neither did the decoration of fans and snuff-boxes nor the production of little water-colour likenesses of her children and friends, beyond which her art did not go, promise anything brilliant in the way of remuneration.
In her circle of friends at La Châtre—old family friends who had known her all her life—were those who had recognised and admired her superior ability. Here, too, she met more than one young spirit with literary aspirations, and one, at least, M. Jules San-
