were like those of the old peasant of Holbein, but whose clothes told no tale of poverty, was gravely driving his plough of an antique shape, drawn by two tranquil oxen, with coats of a pale buff, real patriarchs of the fallow, tall of make, somewhat thin, with long and backward-sloping horns, the kind of old workmen who by habit have got to be brothers to one another, as throughout our country-side they are called, and who, if one loses the other, refuse to work with a new comrade, and fret themselves to death.  People unacquainted with the country will not believe in this affection of the ox for his yoke-fellow.  They should come and see one of the poor beasts in a corner of his stable, thin, wasted, lashing with his restless tail his lean flanks, blowing uneasily and fastidiously on the provender offered to him, his eyes forever turned towards the stable door, scratching with his foot the empty place left at his side, sniffing the yokes and bands which his companion has worn, and incessantly calling for him with piteous lowings.  The ox-herd will tell you:  There is a pair of oxen done for! his brother is dead, and this one will work no more.  He ought to be fattened for killing; but we cannot get him to eat, and in a short time he will have starved himself to death."[322]

How faithful and close it is, this contact of George Sand with country things, with the life of nature in its vast plenitude and pathos!  And always in the end the human interest, as is right, emerges and predominates.  What is the central figure in the fresh and calm rural world of George Sand?  It is the peasant.  And what is the peasant?  He is France, life, the future.  And this is the strength of George Sand, and of her second movement, after the first movement of energy and revolt was over, towards nature and beauty, towards the country, towards primitive life, the peasant.  She regarded nature and beauty, not with the selfish and solitary joy of the artist who but seeks to appropriate them for his own purposes, she regarded them as a treasure of immense and hitherto unknown application, as a vast power of healing and delight for all, and for the peasant first and foremost.  Yes she cries, the simple life is the true one! but the peasant, the great organ of that life, “the minister in that vast temple which only the sky is vast enough to embrace,” the peasant is not doomed to toil and moil in it forever, overdone and unawakened, like Holbein’s laborer, and to have for his best comfort the thought that death will set him free. Non, nous n’avons plus affaire a la mort, mais a la vie.[323] “Our business henceforth is not with death, but with life.”

Joy is the great lifter of men, the great unfolder. Il faut que la vie soit bonne afin qu’elle soit feconde. “For life to be fruitful, life must be felt as a blessing":—­