Madame Sand said, "C'est vous," and offered her hand to Margaret, who, taking it, answered, "Il me fait du bien de vous voir" ("It does me good to see you"). They went into the study. Madame Sand spoke of Margaret's letter as _charmante_, and the two ladies then talked on for hours, as if they had always known each other. Madame Sand had at that moment a work in the press, and was hurried for copy, and beset by friends and visitors. She kept all these at a distance, saying to Margaret: "It is better to throw things aside, and seize the present moment." Margaret gives this _résumé_ of the interview: "We did not talk at all of personal or private matters. I saw, as one sees in her writings, the want of an independent, interior life, but I did not feel it as a fault. I heartily enjoyed the sense of so rich, so prolific, so ardent a genius. I liked the woman in her, too, very much; I never liked a woman better."
To complete the portrait, Margaret mentions the cigarette, which her new friend did not relinquish during the interview. The impression received as to character did not materially differ from that already made by her writings. In seeing her, Margaret was not led to believe that all her mistakes were chargeable upon the unsettled condition of modern society. Yet she felt not the less convinced of the generosity and nobleness of her nature. "There may have been something of the Bacchante in her life," says Margaret, some reverting to the wild ecstasies of heathen nature-worship, "but she was never coarse, never gross."
Margaret saw Madame Sand a second time, surrounded by her friends, and with her daughter, who was then on the eve of her marriage with the sculptor Clésinger. In this _entourage_ she had "the position of an intellectual woman and good friend; the same as my own," says Margaret, "in the circle of my acquaintance as distinguished from my intimates."
Beneath the same roof Margaret found Chopin, "always ill, and as frail as a snow-drop, but an exquisite genius. He played to me, and I liked his talking scarcely less." The Polish poet, Mickiewicz, said to her, "Chopin gives us the Ariel view of the universe."
Margaret had done her best while in London to see what the English stage had to offer. The result had greatly disappointed her. In France she found the theatre living, and found also a public which would not have tolerated "one touch of that stage-strut and vulgar bombast of tone which the English actor fancies indispensable to scenic illusion."