“You are sad,” says George Sand to her, “you are suffering, and you are bored to death.”  We will now take note of some of the advice she gives to this woman.  She no longer believes that it belongs to human dignity to have the liberty of changing.  “The one thing to which man aspires, the thing which makes him great, is permanence in the moral state.  All which tends to give stability to our desires, to strengthen the human will and affections, tends to bring about the reign of God on earth, which means love and the practice of truth.”  She then speaks of vain dreams.  “Should we even have time to think about the impossible if we did all that is necessary?  Should we despair ourselves if we were to restore hope in those people who have nothing left them but hope?” With regard to feminist claims, she says:  “Women are crying out that they are slaves:  let them wait until men are free! . . .  In the mean time we must not compromise the future by our impatience with the present. . . .  It is to be feared that vain attempts of this kind and unjustifiable claims may do harm to what is styled at present the cause of women.  There is no doubt that women have certain rights and that they are suffering injustice.  They ought to lay claim to a better future, to a wise independence, to a greater participation in knowledge, and to more respect, interest and esteem from men.  This future, though, is in their own hands.”

This is wisdom itself.  It would be impossible to put it more clearly, and to warn women in a better way, that the greatest danger for their cause would be the triumph of what is called by an ironical term—­feminism.

These retractions, though, have very little effect.  There is a certain piquancy in showing up an author who is in contradiction with himself, in showing how he refutes his own paradoxes.  But these are striking paradoxes which are not readily forgotten.  What I want to show is that in these first novels by George Sand we have about the whole of the feminist programme of to-day.  Everything is there, the right to happiness, the necessity of reforming marriage, the institution, in a more or less near future, of free unions.  Our feminists of to-day, French, English, or Norwegian authoresses, and theoricians like Ellen Key, with her book on Love and Marriage, all these rebels have invented nothing.  They have done nothing but take up once more the theories of the great feminist of 1832, and expose them with less lyricism but with more cynicism.

George Sand protested against the accusation of having aimed at attacking institutions in her feminist novels.  She was wrong in protesting, as it is just this which gives her novels their value and significance.  It is this which dates them and which explains the enormous force of expansion that they have had.  They came just after the July Revolution, and we must certainly consider them as one of the results of that.  A throne had just been overturned, and, by way of