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Being at Venice, in very cold weather and under very depressing circumstances, the carnival roaring and whistling outside with the icy north wind, I experienced the painful contrast which results from inward suffering, alone amid the wild excitement of a population of strangers.

I occupied a vast apartment in the former Nasi palace, now a hotel, which fronts on the quay, near the Bridge of Sighs. All travellers who have visited Venice know that hotel, but I doubt if many of them have ever happened to be there on Mardi Gras, in the heart of the classic carnival city, in a frame of mind so painfully meditative as mine.

Striving to escape the spleen by forcing my imagination to labor, I began at hazard a novel which opened with a description of the locality, of the festival out-of-doors and of the solemn apartment in which I was writing. The last book I had read before leaving Paris was Manon Lescaut. I had discussed it, or rather listened to others discussing it, and I had said to myself that to make Manon Lescaut a man and Desgrieux a woman would be worth trying, and would present many tragic opportunities, vice being often very near crime in man, and enthusiasm closely akin to despair in woman.

I wrote this book in a week and hardly read it over before sending it to Paris. It had answered my purpose and expressed my thoughts; I could have added nothing to it if I had thought it over. And why should a work of the imagination need to be thought over? What moral could we expect to deduce from a fiction which everyone knows to be quite possible in the world of reality? Some people who are very rigid in theory—no one knows just why—have pronounced it a dangerous book. After the lapse of twenty years, I look it over, and can detect no such tendency in it. The Leone Leoni type, although not untrue to life, is exceptional, thank God! and I do not see that the infatuation he inspires in a weak mind is rewarded by very enviable joys. However, I have, at the present moment, a well-fixed opinion concerning the alleged morals of the novel, and I have expressed elsewhere my deliberate ideas thereon.

GEORGE SAND.

Nohant, January, 1853.