GEORGE SAND. 555 little Solange, was to join her as soon as she was com- fortably established ; her son, whom she did not wish to remove from his excellent tutor, if indeed his father would have let him go, was to remain at Nohant, where she would herself reside during six months of the year. She was to be allowed six hundred dollars per annum from her own fortune, on condition that she never exceeded that sum, and the rest of her property was to remain in the hands of M. Dudevant. To this singular compromise he at once assented, and she set out for the capital in 1831. She carried introductions to one or two literary people, but they gave her small encouragement. A novelist to whom she first applied told her that women ought not to write at all. Another tried to cheer her with the informa- tion that if she persevered she might some day make as much as three hundred dollars a year by writing, although he condemned as valueless such specimens as she showed him of her fiction. He took her, however, upon the staff of Figaro, of which paper he was the editor, and paid her for her labor at the rate of seven francs ($1.35) a column. Her talents were not suited to journalism ; but she worked hard and faithfully for Figaro. In those days she was excluded by her sex from places to which, in her profes- sion, it was desirable she should have access. She there- fore assumed once more the masculine disguise to which she had become accustomed in her girlhood, and was enabled to pass anywhere as a student of sixteen. After she had become famous, much odium was cast upon her on account of this habit of hers by the scandal-mongers. She soon made friends among the literary Bohemians of Paris, and many of her earlier and briefer works were written in collaboration with one of them, M. Jules Sandeau, afterwards the author of several successful novels and plays. These joint performances included a
