(41) Correspondance.

She had the Opera from her windows and an Olympic circus at every cross-road.  Paris was certainly en fete.  In the evenings it was just as lively.  There were the Clubs, and there were no less than three hundred of these.  Society women could go to them and hear orators in blouses proposing incendiary movements, which made them shudder deliciously.  Then there were the theatres.  Rachel, draped in antique style, looking like a Nemesis, declaimed the Marseillaise.  And all night long the excitement continued.  The young men organized torchlight processions, with fireworks, and insisted on peaceably-inclined citizens illuminating.  It was like a National Fete day, or the Carnival, continuing all the week.

All this was the common, everyday aspect of Paris, but there were the special days as well to break the monotony of all this.  There were the manifestations, which had the great advantage of provoking counter-manifestations.  On the 16th of March, there was the manifestation of the National Guard, who were tranquil members of society, but on the 17th there was a counter-manifestation of the Clubs and workingmen.  On such days the meeting-place would be at the Bastille, and from morning to night groups, consisting of several hundred thousand men, would march about Paris, sometimes in favour of the Assembly against the Provisional Government, and sometimes in favour of the Provisional Government against the Assembly.  On the 17th of April, George Sand was in the midst of the crowd, in front of the Hotel de Ville, in order to see better.  On the 15th of May, as the populace was directing its efforts against the Palais Bourbon, she was in the Rue de Bourgogne, in her eagerness not to miss anything.  As she was passing in front of a cafe, she saw a woman haranguing the crowd in a very animated way from one of the windows.  She was told that this woman was George Sand.  Women were extremely active in this Revolution.  They organized a Legion for themselves, and were styled "Les Vesuviennes.”  They had their clubs, their banquets and their newspapers.  George Sand was far from approving all this feminine agitation, but she did not condemn it altogether.  She considered that “women and children, disinterested as they are in all political questions, are in more direct intercourse with the spirit that breathes from above over the agitations of this world."(42) It was for them, therefore, to be the inspirers of politics.  George Sand was one of these inspirers.  In order to judge what counsels this Egeria gave, we have only to read some of her letters.  On the 4th of March, she wrote as follows to her friend Girerd:  “Act vigorously, my dear brother.  In our present situation, we must have even more than devotion and loyalty; we must have fanaticism if necessary.”  In conclusion, she says that he is not to hesitate “in sweeping away all that is of a bourgeois nature.”  In April she wrote to Lamartine, reproaching him with his moderation and endeavouring to excite his revolutionary spirit.  Later on, although she was not of a very warlike disposition, she regretted that they had not, like their ancestors of 1793, cemented their Revolution at home by a war with the nations.