What is her essential objection to marriage?  The fact that marriage fetters the liberty of two beings.  “Society dictates to you the formula of an oath.  You must swear that you will be faithful and obedient to me, that you will never love any one but me, and that you will obey me in everything.  One of those oaths is absurd and the other vile.  You cannot be answerable for your heart, even if I were the greatest and most perfect of men.”  Now comes the question of love for another man.  Until then it was considered that such love was a weakness, and that it might become a fault.  But, after all, is not passion a fatal and irresistible thing?

“No human creature can command love, and no one is to be blamed for feeling it or for ceasing to feel it.  What lowers a woman is untruth.”  A little farther on we are told:  “They are not guilty, for they love each other.  There is no crime where there is sincere love.”  According to this theory, the union of man and woman depends on love alone.  When love disappears, the union cannot continue.  Marriage is a human institution, but passion is of Divine essence.  In case of any dissension, it is always the institution of marriage which is to be blamed.

The sole end in view of marriage is charm, either that of sentiment or that of the senses, and its sole object is the exchange of two fancies.  As the oath of fidelity is either a stupidity or a degradation, can anything more opposed to common sense, and a more absolute ignorance of all that is noble and great, be imagined than the effort mankind is making, against all the chances of destruction by which he is surrounded, to affirm, in face of all that changes, his will and intention to continue?  We all remember the heart-rending lamentation of Diderot:  “The first promises made between two creatures of flesh,” he says, “were made at the foot of a rock crumbling to dust.  They called on Heaven to be a witness of their constancy, but the skies in the Heaven above them were never the same for an instant.  Everything was changing, both within them and around them, and they believed that their heart would know no change.  Oh, what children, what children always!” Ah, not children, but what men rather!  We know these fluctuations in our affections.  And it is because we are afraid of our own fragility that we call to our aid the protection of laws, to which submission is no slavery, as it is voluntary submission.  Nature does not know these laws, but it is by them that we distinguish ourselves from Nature and that we rise above it.  The rock on which we tread crumbles to dust, the sky above our heads is never the same an instant, but, in the depth of our hearts, there is the moral law—­and that never changes!

In order to reply to these paradoxes, where shall we go in search of our arguments?  We can go to George Sand herself.  A few years later, during her intercourse with Lamennals, she wrote her famous Lettres a Marcie for Le Monde.  She addresses herself to an imaginary correspondent, to a woman supposed to be suffering from that agitation and impatience which she had experienced herself.