Mademoiselle La Quintinie is a work of hatred.  George Sand was not successful with it.  She had no vocation for writing such books, and she was not accustomed to writing them.  It is a novel full of tiresome dissertations, and it is extremely dull.

From that date, though, George Sand experienced the joy of a certain popularity.  At theatrical performances and at funerals the students manifested in her honour.  It was the same for Sainte-Beuve, but this does not seem to have made either of them any greater.

We will pass over all this, and turn to something that we can admire.  The robust and triumphant old age of George Sand was admirable.  Nearly every year she went to some fresh place in France to find a setting for her stories.  She had to earn her living to the very last, and was doomed to write novels for ever.  “I shall be turning my wheel when I die,” she used to say, and, after all, this is the proper ending for a literary worker.

In 1870 and 1871, she suffered all the anguish of the “Terrible Year.”  When once the nightmare was over, she set to work once more like a true daughter of courageous France, unwilling to give in.  She was as hardy as iron as she grew old.  “I walk to the river,” she wrote in 1872, “and bathe in the cold water, warm as I am. . . .  I am of the same nature as the grass in the field.  Sunshine and water are all I need.”

For a woman of sixty-eight to be able to bathe every day in the cold water of the Indre is a great deal.  In May, 1876, she was not well, and had to stay in bed.  She was ill for ten days, and died without suffering much.  She is buried at Nohant, according to her wishes, so that her last sleep is in her beloved Berry.

In conclusion, we would say just a few words about George Sand’s genius, and the place that she takes in the history of the French novel.

On comparing George Sand with the novelists of her time, what strikes us most is how different she was from them.  She is neither like Balzac, Stendhal, nor Merimee, nor any story-teller of our thoughtful, clever and refined epoch.  She reminds us more of the “old novelists,” of those who told stories of chivalrous deeds and of old legends, or, to go still further back, she reminds us of the aedes of old Greece.  In the early days of a nation there were always men who went to the crowd and charmed them with the stories they told in a wordy way.  They scarcely knew whether they invented these stories as they told them, or whether they had heard them somewhere.  They could not tell either which was fiction and which reality, for all reality seemed wonderful to them.  All the people about whom they told were great, all objects were good and everything beautiful.  They mingled nursery-tales with myths that were quite sensible, and the history of nations with children’s stories.  They were called poets.

George Sand did not employ a versified form for her stories, but she belonged to the family of these poets.  She was a poet herself who had lost her way and come into our century of prose, and she continued her singing.