"I have never cursed any one, but now I am so
weary of life that I am near cursing Lucrezia. But she suffers
too, and suffers more because she grows older in wickedness. What
a pity about Soli! Alas! everything goes wrong with the world!" I
wonder what Mr. Hadow thinks of this reference to Sand!
"Soli" is Solange Sand, who was forced to leave her husband
because of ill-treatment. As her mother once boxed Clesinger's
ears at Nohant, she followed the example. In trying to settle the
affair Sand quarrelled hopelessly with her daughter. That
energetic descendant of "emancipated woman" formed a partnership,
literary of course, with the Marquis Alfieri, the nephew of the
Italian poet. Her salon was as much in vogue as her mother's, but
her tastes were inclined to politics, revolutionary politics
preferred. She had for associates Gambetta, Jules Ferry, Floquet,
Taine, Herve, Weiss, the critic of the "Debats," Henri Fouquier
and many others. She had the "curved Hebraic nose of her mother
and hair coal-black." She died in her chateau at Montgivray and
was buried March 20, 1899, at Nohant where, as my informant says,
"her mother died of over-much cigarette smoking.
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