(33) Correspondance:  To Jules Janin, February 15, 1837.

These letters alarmed Lamennais, nevertheless, and she was obliged to discontinue them.  Feminism was the germ of their disagreement.  Lamennais said:  “She does not forgive St. Paul for having said:  ’Wives, obey your husbands.’” She continued to acknowledge him as “one of our saints,” but “the father of our new Church” gradually broke away from her and her friends, and expressed his opinion about her with a severity and harshness which are worthy of note.

Lamennais’ letters to Baron de Vitrolles contain many allusions to George Sand, and they are most uncomplimentary.

“I hear no more about Carlotta” (Madame Marliani), he writes, “nor about George Sand and Madame d’Agoult.  I know there has been a great deal of quarrelling among them.  They are as fond of each other as Lesage’s two diables, one of whom said:  ’That reconciled us, we kissed each other, and ever since then we have been mortal enemies.’” He also tells that there is a report that in her novel, entitled Horace, she has given as unflattering a portrait as possible of her dear, sweet, excellent friend, Madame d’Agoult, the Arabella of the Lettres d’un voyageur.  “The portraits continue,” he writes, “all true to life, without being like each other.”  In the same book, Horace, there is a portrait of Mallefille, who was beloved “during one quarter of the moon,” and abhorred afterwards.  He concludes the letter with the following words:  “Ah, how fortunate I am to be forgotten by those people!  I am not afraid of their indifference, but I should be afraid of their attentions. . . .  Say what you like, my dear friend, those people do not tempt me at all.  Futility and spitefulness dissolved in a great deal of ennui, is a bad kind of medicine.”  He then goes on to make fun, in terms that it is difficult to quote, of the silly enthusiasm of a woman like Marliani, and even of George Sand, for the theories of Pierre Leroux, of which they did not understand the first letter, but which had taken their fancy.  George Sand may have looked upon Lamennais as a master, but it is very evident that she was not his favoured disciple.

It was due to his teaching that George Sand obtained her definite ideas about Catholicism, or rather against it.  She was decidedly its adversary, because she held that the Church had stifled the spirit of liberty, that it had thrown a veil over the words of Christ, and that it was the obstacle in the way of holy equality.  What she owed specially, though, to Lamennais was another lesson, of quite another character.  Lamennais was the man of the nineteenth century who waged the finest battle against individualism, against “the scandal of the adoration of man by man."(34)

     (34) Compare Brunetiere, Evolution de la poesie lyrique,
     vol. i. p. 310.

Under his influence, George Sand began to attach less importance to the personal point of view, she ceased applying everything to herself, and she discovered the importance of the life of others.  If we study this attentively, we shall see that a new phase now commenced in the history of her ideas.  Lamennais was the origin of this transformation, although it is personified in another man, and that other man, was named Pierre Leroux.