The Portraits of George Sand
day when, retiring to the country like a literary Rosa Bonheur, she renounced all vanity, and all pretensions to please otherwise than by those later works which are so full of tenderness, and often of sound arguments against social injustice.
GEORGE SAND
In 1870
Photograph by Nadar
Madame Sand, her hair simply dressed in waving bandeaux, clad in an African gandourah—a sort of blouse with wide velvet facings—made no further variations in her costume; so we see her in Lafosse's lithograph of 1866; so we find her in her numerous photographs by Nadar, with placid face and kindly eyes, her whole person expressing the truth of Joubert's charming axiom of resignation: "The evening of life brings its lamp with it."
Was George Sand ever beautiful? This is a question we cannot decide. Portraits are often unfaithful, but her features were probably always rather too virile, and her eyes too large,
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