to get out of the dangerous adventure by a public avowal.  In order to save the situation, two of the guilty party, Trelat and Michel of Bourges, took the responsibility of the drawing up of the manifesto and the apposition of the signatures upon themselves.  They were sentenced by the Court of Peers, Trelat to four years of prison and Michel to a month."(22) This was the most shocking inequality, and Michel could not forgive Trelat for getting such a fine sentence.

     (22) Thureau Dangin, Histoire de la Monarchie de Juillet,
     II. 297.

What good was one month of prison?  Michel’s career certainly had been a very ordinary one.  He hesitated and tacked about.  In a word, he was just a politician.  George Sand tells us that he was obliged “to accept, in theory, what he called the necessities of pure politics, ruse, charlatanism and even untruth, concessions that were not sincere, alliances in which he did not believe, and vain promises.”  We should say that he was a radical opportunist.  To be merely an opportunist, though, is not enough for ensuring success.  There are different ways of being an opportunist.  Michel had been elected a Deputy, but he had no role to play.  In 1848, he could not compete with the brilliancy of Raspail, nor had he the prestige of Flocon.  He went into the shade completely after the coup d’etat.  For a long time he had really preferred business to politics, and a choice must be made when one is not a member of the Government.

It is easy to see what charmed George Sand in Michel.  He was a sectarian, and she took him for an apostle.  He was brutal, and she thought him energetic.  He had been badly brought up, but she thought him simply austere.  He was a tyrant, but she only saw in him a master.  He had told her that he would have her guillotined at the first possible opportunity.  This was an incontestable proof of superiority.  She was sincere herself, and was consequently not on her guard against vain boasting.  He had alarmed her, and she admired him for this, and at once incarnated in him that stoical ideal of which she had been dreaming for years and had not yet been able to attribute to any one else.

This is how she explained to Michel her reasons for loving him.  “I love you,” she says, “because whenever I figure to myself grandeur, wisdom, strength and beauty, your image rises up before me.  No other man has ever exercised any moral influence over me.  My mind, which has always been wild and unfettered, has never accepted any guidance. . . .  You came, and you have taught me.”  Then again she says:  “It is you whom I love, whom I have loved ever since I was born, and through all the phantoms in whom I thought, for a moment, that I had found you.”  According to this, it was Michel she loved through Musset.  Let us hope that she was mistaken.