afflux of physical life, is pagan.  Her genius then is that of the greenwood divinities, who, at certain times of the year, were intoxicated by the odour of the meadows and the sap of the woods.  If some day we were to have her complete correspondence given to us, I should not be surprised if many people preferred it to her letters to Musset.  In the first place, it is not spoiled by that preoccupation which the Venice lovers had, of writing literature.  Mingled with the accents of sincere passion, we do not find extraordinary conceptions of paradoxical metaphysics.  It is Nature which speaks in these letters, and for that very reason they are none the less sorrowful.  They, too, tell us of a veritable martyrdom.  We can easily imagine from them that Michel was coarse, despotic, faithless and jealous.  We know, too, that more than once George Sand came very near losing all patience with him, so that we can sympathize with her when she wrote to Madame d’Agoult in July, 1836: 

“I have had, my fill of great men (excuse the expression). . . .  I prefer to see them all in Plutarch, as they would not then cause me any suffering on the human side.  May they all be carved in marble or cast in bronze, but may I hear no more about them!” Amen.

What disgusted George Sand with her Michel was his vanity and his craving for adulation.  In July, 1837, she had come to the end of her patience, as she wrote to Girerd.  It was one of her peculiarities to always take a third person into her confidence.  At the time of Sandeau, this third person was Emile Regnault; at the time of Musset, Sainte-Beuve, and now it was Girerd.  “I am tired out with my own devotion, and I have fought against my pride with all the strength of my love.  I have had nothing but ingratitude and hardness as my recompense.  I have felt my love dying away and my soul being crushed, but I am cured at last. . . .”  If only she had had all this suffering for the sake of a great man, but this time it was only in imaginary great man.

The influence, though, that he had had over her thought was real, and in a certain way beneficial.

At the beginning she was far from sharing Michel’s ideas, and for some of them she felt an aversion which amounted to horror.  The dogma of absolute equality seemed an absurdity to her.  The Republic, or rather the various republics then in gestation, appeared to her a sort of Utopia, and as she saw each of her friends making “his own little Republic” for himself, she had not much faith in the virtue of that form of government for uniting all French people.  One point shocked her above all others in Michel’s theories.  This politician did not like artists.  Just as the Revolution did not find chemists necessary, he considered that the Republic did not need writers, painters and musicians.  These were all useless individuals, and the Republic would give them a little surprise by putting a labourer’s spade or a shoemaker’s awl into their hands.  George Sand considered this idea not only barbarous, but silly.