was for her the severest of ordeals; here her exuberant facility itself was against her. She would exhaust the space allotted to her, and find herself obliged to break off just at the point when she felt herself "beginning to begin." But she justly valued this apprenticeship as a professional experience, bringing her into direct relations with the literary world she was entering as a perfect stranger. Once able to devote herself entirely to composition and to live for her work, she found her calling begin to assert itself despotically. In a letter to a friend, M. Duteil, at La Châtre, dated about six weeks after her arrival in Paris, she writes:—
If I had foreseen half the difficulties that I find, I should not have undertaken this enterprise. Well, the more I encounter the more I am resolved to proceed. Still, I shall soon be returning home again, perhaps without having succeeded in launching my boat, but with hopes of doing better another time, and with plans of working harder than ever.
Three weeks later we find her writing to her son's tutor, M. Boucoiran, in the same strain:—
I am more than ever determined to follow the literary career. In spite of the disagreeables I often meet with, in spite of days of sloth and fatigue that come and interrupt my work, in spite of the more than humble life I lead here, I feel that henceforward my existence is filled. I have an object, a task, better say it at once, a passion. The profession of a writer is a violent one, and, so to speak, indestructible. Once let it take possession of your wretched head, you cannot stop. I have not been successful, my work was thought too unreal by those whom I asked for advice.
But still she persisted, providing, as best she could, "copy" for the Figaro, at seven francs a column, and
