“Life is arid and terrible, repose is a dream, prudence is useless; mere reason alone serves simply to dry up the heart; there is but one virtue, the eternal sacrifice of oneself.”

Or George Sand speaking in her own person, in the Lettres d’un Voyageur—­

“Ah, no, I was not born to be a poet, I was born to love.  It is the misfortune of my destiny, it is the enmity of others, which have made me a wanderer and an artist.  What I wanted was to live a human life; I had a heart, it has been torn violently from my breast.  All that has been left me is a head, a head full of noise and pain, of horrible memories, of images of woe, of scenes of outrage.  And because in writing stories to earn my bread I could not help remembering my sorrows, because I had the audacity to say that in married life there were to be found miserable beings, by reason of the weakness which is enjoined upon the woman, by reason of the brutality which is permitted to the man, by reason of the turpitudes which society covers and protects with a veil, I am pronounced immoral, I am treated as if I were the enemy of the human race."[319]

If only, alas, together with her honesty and her courage, she could feel within herself that she had also light and hope and power; that she was able to lead those whom she loved, and who looked to her for guidance!  But no; her very own children, witnesses of her suffering, her uncertainty, her struggles, her evil report, may come to doubt her:—­

“My poor children, my own flesh and blood, will perhaps turn upon me and say:  ’You are leading us wrong, you mean to ruin us as well as yourself.  Are you not unhappy, reprobated, evil spoken of?  What have you gained by these unequal struggles, by these much trumpeted duels of yours with custom and belief?  Let us do as others do; let us get what is to be got out of this easy and tolerant world.’

“This is what they will say to me.  Or at best, if, out of tenderness for me, or from their own natural disposition, they give ear to my words and believe me, whither shall I guide them?  Into what abysses shall we go and plunge ourselves, we three?—­for we shall be our own three upon earth, and not one soul with us.  What shall I reply to them if they come and say to me; ’Yes, life is unbearable in a world like this.  Let us die together.  Show us the path of Bernica, or the lake of Stenio, or the glaciers of Jacques.’"[320]

Nevertheless the failure of the impassioned seekers of a new and better world proves nothing, George Sand maintains, for the world as it is.  Ineffectual they may be, but the world is still more ineffectual, and it is the world’s course which is doomed to ruin, not theirs.  “What has it done,” exclaims George Sand in her preface to Guerin’s Centaure, “what has it done for our moral education, and what is it doing for our children, this society shielded with such care?” Nothing.  Those whom it calls vain complainers and rebels and madmen, may reply:—­