A whole correspondence exists between George Sand and Michel of Bourges.  Part of it was published not long ago in the Revue illustree under the title of Lettres de lemmze.  None of George Sand’s letters surpass these epistles to Michel for fervent passion, beauty of form, and a kind of superb impudeur.  Let us take, for instance, this call to her beloved.  George Sand, after a night of work, complains of fatigue, hunger and cold:  “Oh, my lover,” she cries, “appear, and, like the earth on the return of the May sunshine, I should be reanimated, and would fling off my shroud of ice and thrill with love.  The wrinkles of suffering would disappear from my brow, and I should seem beautiful and young to you, for I should leap with joy into your iron strong arms.  Come, come, and I shall have strength, health, youth, gaiety, hope. . . .  I will go forth to meet you like the bride of the song, ’to her well-beloved.’” The Well-beloved to whom this Shulamite would hasten was a bald-headed provincial lawyer who wore spectacles and three mufflers.  But it appears that his “beauty, veiled and unintelligible to the vulgar, revealed itself, like that of Jupiter hidden under human form, to the women whom he loved.”

We must not smile at these mythological comparisons.  George Sand had, as it were, restored for herself that condition of soul to which the ancient myths are due.  A great current of naturalist poetry circulates through these pages.  In Theocritus and in Rousard there are certain descriptive passages.  There is an analogy between them and that image of the horse which carries George Sand along on her impetuous course.

“As soon as he catches sight of me, he begins to paw the ground and rear impatiently.  I have trained him to clear a hundred fathoms a second.  The sky and the ground disappear when he bears me along under those long vaults formed by the apple-trees in blossom. . . .  The least sound of my voice makes him bound like a ball; the smallest bird makes him shudder and hurry along like a child with no experience.  He is scarcely five years old, and he is timid and restive.  His black crupper shines in the sunshine like a raven’s wing.”  This description has all the relief of an antique figure.  Another time, George Sand tells how she has seen Phoebus throw off her robe of clouds and rush along radiant into the pure sky.  The following day she writes:  “She was eaten by the evil spirits.  The dark sprites from Erebus, riding on sombre-looking clouds, threw themselves on her, and it was in vain that she struggled.”  We might compare these passages with a letter of July 10, 1836, in which she tells how she throws herself, all dressed as she is, into the Indre, and then continues her course through the sunny meadows, and with what voluptuousness she revels in all the joys of primitive life, and imagines herself living in the beautiful times of ancient Greece.  There are days and pages when George Sand, under the