It is easy to see the meaning of all these things.  They show us how natural kindliness is to the heart of man.  If we try to find out why Germain and Marie appear so delightful to us, we shall discover that it is because they are simple-hearted, and follow the dictates of Nature.  Nature must not be deformed, therefore, by constraint nor transformed by convention, as it leads straight to virtue.

We have heard the tune of this song before, and we have seen the blossoming of some very fine pastoral poems and a veritable invasion of sentimental literature.  In those days tears were shed plentifully over poetry, novels and plays.  We have had Bernardin de Saint-Pierre, Sedaine, Florian and Berquin.  The Revolution, brutal and sanguinary as it was, did not interrupt the course of these romantic effusions.  Never were so many tender epithets used as during the years of the Reign of Terror, and in official processions Robespierre was adorned with flowers like a village bride.

This taste for pastoral things, at the time of the Revolution, was not a mere coincidence.  The same principles led up to the idyll in literature and to the Revolution in history.  Man was supposed to be naturally good, and the idea was to take away from him all the restraints which had been invented for curbing his nature.  Political and religious authority, moral discipline and the prestige of tradition had all formed a kind of network of impediments, by which man had been imprisoned by legislators who were inclined to pessimism.  By doing away with all these fetters, the Golden Age was to be restored and universal happiness was to be established.  Such was the faith of the believers in the millennium of 1789, and of 1848.  The same dream began over and over again, from Diderot to Lamartine and from Jean-Jacques to George Sand.  The same state of mind which we see reflected in La Mare au Diable was to make of George Sand the revolutionary writer of 1848.  We can now understand the role which the novelist played in the second Republic.  It is one of the most surprising pages in the history of this extraordinary character.

The joy with which George Sand welcomed the Republic can readily be imagined.  She had been a Republican ever since the days of Michel of Bourges, and a democrat since the time when, as a little girl, she took the side of her plebeian mother against “the old Countesses.”  For a long time she had been wishing for and expecting a change of government.  She would not have been satisfied with less than this.  She was not much moved by the Thiers-Guizot duel, and it would have given her no pleasure to be killed for the sake of Odilon Barrot.  She was a disciple of Romanticism, and she wanted a storm.  When the storm broke, carrying all before it, a throne, a whole society with its institutions, she hurried away from her peaceful Nohant.  She wanted to breathe the atmosphere of a revolution, and she was soon intoxicated by it.