“I am not afraid of anything that can be said about me,” observes Claudie, “for, on knowing the truth, kind-hearted, upright people will acknowledge that I do not deserve to be insulted.”  Her old grandfather, Remy, has completely absolved her.

“You have repented and suffered enough, and you have worked and wept and expiated enough, too, my poor Claudie,” he says.  Through all this she has become worthy to make an excellent marriage.  It is a case of that special moral code by which, after free love, the fault must be recompensed.

Claudie is later on the Jeannine of the Idees de Madame Aubray, the Denise of Alexandre Dumas.  She is the unmarried mother, whose misfortunes have not crushed her pride, who, after being outraged, has a right now to a double share of respect.  The first good young man is called upon to accept her past life, for there is a law of solidarity in the world.  The human species is divided into two categories, the one is always busy doing harm, and the other is naturally obliged to give itself up to making good the harm done.

The Mariage de Victorine belongs to a well-known kind of literary exercise, which was formerly very much in honour in the colleges.  This consists in taking a celebrated work at the place where the author has left it and in imagining the “sequel.”  For instance, after the Cid, there would be the marriage of Rodrigue and Chimene for us.  As a continuation of L’Ecole des Femmes, there is the result of the marriage of the young Horace with the tiresome little Agnes.  Corneille gave a sequel to the Menteur himself.  Fabre d’Eglantine wrote the sequel to Le Misanthrope, and called it Le Philinte de Moliere.  George Sand gives us here the sequel of Sedaine’s chef-d’oeuvre (that is, a chef-d’oeuvre for Sedaine), Le Philosophe sans le savor.

In Le Philosophe sans le savoir Monsieur Vanderke is a nobleman, who has become a merchant in order to be in accordance with the ideas of the times.  He is a Frenchman, but he has taken a Dutch name out of snobbishness.  He has a clerk or a confidential servant named Antoine.  Victorine is Antoine’s daughter.  Vanderke’s son is to fight a duel, and from Victorine’s emotion, whilst awaiting the result of this duel, it is easy to see that she is in love with this young man.  George Sand’s play turns on the question of what is to be done when the day comes for Victorine to marry.  An excellent husband is found for her, a certain Fulgence, one of Monsieur Vanderke’s clerks.  He belongs to her own class, and this is considered one of the indispensable conditions for happiness in marriage.  He loves her, so that everything seems to favour Victorine.  We are delighted, and she, too, seems to be in good spirits, but, all the time that she is receiving congratulations and presents, we begin to see that she has some great trouble.