After working for different newspapers and magazines, she was introduced by her grandfather, the Count Antoine Cartier D'Aure to George Sand, and spent a lot of time at Sand's house, in Nohant, helping her with her recording of events happening here. Sand mentions her in her journal. Her grandfather and Sand shared an interest for horses, and he had helped the writer buy some pure-breed race horses. As a thank she agreed to read a short novel written by his granddaughter, and to present her to the then editor of the Revue des Deux Mondes, François Buloz. This was the real beginning of her writing career. As an alias, she took her mother's maiden name, and generally was known as "Théodore Bentzon" a masculine penname that was voluntarily identifying her as a man, for a woman writing was not well perceived in the nineteenth century.