I love these letters. They are a perfect match for me at this time in my life. George Sand was a settled grandmother of fifty-seven when she began this correspondence with a despairing Flaubert. She had given up her wild life and gone to live among her family in the French countryside near Nohant. She had a little granddaughter named Aurore whom she adored and she was deeply involved in the lives of her family and friends. She wrote movingly to Flaubert of their illnesses during the long French winters. There is a great charm about these letters. “A hundred times in life,” she declares in one letter, “the good that one does seems to serve no immediate purpose: yet it maintains in one way or another the tradition of well wishing and well doing without which all would perish.” I was thinking of that this morning. I was out walking in my new neighborhood watching the early morning mist rising from these streets that were pasturelands when I left Jackson, Mississippi, eighteen years ago.
