Is it very likely that Madame Sand will always find the same charm in what she now composes?  Will not the merit and the enthusiasm of twenty lose their value in her mind as the works of my first days are depreciated in mine?  There is nothing changeless except the labors of the antique muse, and they are sustained by a nobility of manners, a beauty of language, and a majesty of sentiments, which belong to the entire human species.  The fourth book of the Eneid remains forever exposed to the admiration of men because it is suspended in heaven.  The ships bearing the founder of the Roman Empire,—­Dido, the foundress of Carthage, stabbing herself after having announced Hannibal: 

  Exoriare aliquis nostius exossibus ulta.—­

Love causing the rivality of Rome and Carthage to leap from the flame of his torch, lighting with his own hand the funeral pile, whose blaze the fugitive Eneas perceives upon the waves,—­is altogether another thing than the promenade of a dreamer in the woods, or the disappearance of a libertine who drowns himself in the sea.  Madame Sand will, I trust, yet associate her talents with subjects as durable as her genius.

Madame Sand can only be converted by the preaching of that missionary with bald forehead and hoary beard, called Time.  A voice less austere meanwhile enchains the captive ear of the poet.  In fact, I am persuaded that the talent of Madame Sand has some of its roots in corruption; in becoming modest she would become commonplace.  It would have been otherwise had she always remained in that sanctuary not frequented by men; her power of love, restrained and concealed beneath the virginal fillet, would have drawn from her heart those decent melodies which belong at once to the woman and the angel.  However that may be, audacity of ideas and voluptuousness of manners form a spot not before cleared up by a daughter of Adam, and which, submitted to a woman’s culture, has yielded a harvest of unknown flowers.  Let us permit Madame Sand to produce these perilous marvels till the approach of winter; she will sing no more when the North wind has come.  Meanwhile, less improvident than the grasshopper, let her make provision of glory for the time when there will be a famine of pleasure.  The mother of Musarion was wont to repeat to her child:  “Thou wilt not always be sixteen; will Choereas always remember his oath, his tears and his caresses?”

For the rest, women have often been seduced, and as it were carried off, by their own youth, but toward the days of autumn, restored to the maternal hearth, they have added to their harps the grave or plaintive chord on which either religion or unhappiness finds expression.  Old age is a traveler in the night time; the earth is hidden from sight and he can see nothing but the heavens shining above his head.

I have not seen Madame Sand dressed in men’s clothes or wearing the blouse and the iron-shod staff of the mountaineer.  I have not seen her drinking from the cup of bacchanals and smoking indolently reclining on a sofa like a sultana,—­natural or affected eccentricities which for me could add nothing to her charms or her genius.