“Suffer us to bewail our martyrs, poets without a country that we are, forlorn singers, well versed in the causes of their misery and of our own.  You do not comprehend the malady which killed them; they themselves did not comprehend it.  If one or two of us at the present day open our eyes to a new light, is it not by a strange and unaccountable good Providence; and have we not to seek our grain of faith in storm and darkness, combated by doubt, irony, the absence of all sympathy, all example, all brotherly aid, all protection and countenance in high places?  Try yourselves to speak to your brethren heart to heart, conscience to conscience!  Try it!—­but you cannot, busied as you are with watching and patching up in all directions your dykes which the flood is invading.  The material existence of this society of yours absorbs all your care, and requires more than all your efforts.  Meanwhile the powers of human thought are growing into strength, and rise on all sides around you.  Amongst these threatening apparitions, there are some which fade away and reenter the darkness, because the hour of life has not yet struck, and the fiery spirit which quickened them could strive no longer with the horrors of this present chaos; but there are others that can wait, and you will find them confronting you, up and alive, to say:  ’You have allowed the death of our brethren, and we, we do not mean to die.’”

She did not, indeed.  How should she faint and fail before her time, because of a world out of joint, because of the reign of stupidity, because of the passions of youth, because of the difficulties and disgusts of married life in the native seats of the homme sensuel moyen, the average sensual man, she who could feel so well the power of those eternal consolers, nature and beauty?  From the very first they introduce a note of suavity in her strain of grief and passion.  Who can forget the lanes and meadows of Valentine?

George Sand is one of the few French writers who keep us closely and truly intimate with rural nature.  She gives us the wild-flowers by their actual names,—­snowdrop, primrose, columbine, iris, scabious.  Nowhere has she touched her native Berry and its little-known landscape, its campagnes ignorees, with a lovelier charm than in Valentine.  The winding and deep lanes running out of the high road on either side, the fresh and calm spots they take us to, “meadows of a tender green, plaintive brooks, clumps of alder and mountain ash, a whole world of suave and pastoral nature,”—­how delicious it all is!  The grave and silent peasant whose very dog will hardly deign to bark at you, the great white ox, “the unfailing dean of these pastures,” staring solemnly at you from the thicket; the farmhouse “with its avenue of maples, and the Indre, here hardly more than a bright rivulet, stealing along through rushes and yellow iris, in the field below,”—­who, I say, can forget them?  And that one lane in