can feel St. Paul within me.  He lives within me.”  Still another of its doctrines was that of the rehabilitation of the flesh.  Saint-Simonism proclaimed the equality of man and woman, that of industry and art and science, and the necessity of a fresh repartition of wealth and of a modification of the laws concerning property.  It also advocated increasing the attributions of the State considerably.  It was, in fact, the first of the doctrines offering to the lower classes, by way of helping them to bear their wretched misery, the ideal of happiness here below, lending a false semblance of religion to the desire for material well-being.  George Sand had one vulnerable point, and that was her generosity.  By making her believe that she was working for the outcasts of humanity, she could be led anywhere, and this was what happened.

Among other great minds affected by the influence of Saint-Simonism, it is scarcely surprising to find Lamennais.  When George Sand first knew him, he was fifty-three years of age.  He had broken with Rome, and was the apocalyptic author of Paroles d’un croyant.  He put into his revolutionary faith all the fervour of his loving soul, a soul that had been created for apostleship, and to which the qualification of “a disaffected cathedral” certainly applied.

After the famous trial, Liszt took him to call on George Sand in her attic.  This was in 1835.  She gives us the following portrait of him:  “Monsieur de Lamennais is short, thin, and looks ill.  He seems to have only the feeblest breath of life in his body, but how his face beams.  His nose is too prominent for his small figure and for his narrow face.  If it were not for this nose out of all proportion, he would be handsome.  He was very easily entertained.  A mere nothing made him laugh, and how heartily he laughed."(32) It was the gaiety of the seminarist, for Monsieur Feli always remained the Abbe de Lamennais.  George Sand had a passionate admiration for him.  She took his side against any one who attacked him in her third Lettre d’un voyageur, in her Lettre a Lerminier, and in her article on Amshaspands et Darvands.  This is the title of a book by Lamennais.  The extraordinary names refer to the spirits of good and evil in the mythology of Zoroaster.  George Sand proposed to pronounce them Chenapans et Pedants.  Although she had a horror of journalism, she agreed to write in Lamennais’ paper, Le Monde.

     (32) Histoire de ma vie.

“He is so good and I like him so much,” she writes, “that I would give him as much of my blood and of my ink as he wants."(33) She did not have to give him any of her blood, and he did not accept much of her ink.  She commenced publishing her celebrated Lettres a Marcie in Le Monde.  We have already spoken of these letters, in order to show how George Sand gradually attenuated the harshness of her early feminism.