A child of the Romantic Age, George Sand had high standards for love, maintaining that life should be ruled by emotion and instinct, the heart rather than the brain. But underneath her romantic impulses was a bedrock of common sense. While other Romantics like Lord Byron and Alfred de Musset found no alternative to unattainable ideals but random sex, steady drinking, and early death, she examined her ideals coolly; if finding them wanting, she went on to something else. But she never lost faith that the future was brighter than the past and that the future meant freedom. "My profession," she said, "is to be free." Here, in this essay by the award-winning author Robert Wernick, is her unlikely and little-told story.