From Spiridion to the Comtesse de Rudolstadt, then, we have this series of fantastical novels with ghosts, subterranean passages, secret hiding-places, hallucinations and apparitions.  The unfortunate part is that at present we scarcely know to what category of readers they would appeal.  As regards grown-up people, we all prefer something with a vestige of truth in it now-a-days.  As to our children, they would prefer Monte-Cristo to Consuelo, and Tom Thumb to Spiridion.  At the time that they were written, in spite of the fact that Buloz protested against all this philosophy, these novels were quite in accordance with the public taste.  A mania for anything fantastic had taken possession of the most serious people.  Ballanche wrote his La Palingenesie, and Edgar Quinet Ahasverus.  Things took place through the ages, and the reader travelled through the immensity of the centuries, just as though Wells had already invented his machine for exploring time.  In a country like France, where clear-mindedness and matter-of-fact intelligence are appreciated, all this seems surprising.  It was no doubt the result of infiltrations which had come from abroad.  There was something wrong with us just then, “something rotten in the kingdom of France.”  We see this by that fever of socialistic doctrines which burst forth among us about the year 1840.  We have the Phalanstere by Fourier, La Phalange by Considerant, the Icarie by Cabet, and his famous Voyage, which appeared that very year.  We were always to be devoured by the State, accompanied by whatever sauce we preferred.  The State was always to find us shelter, to dress us, to govern us and to tyrannize over us.  There was the State as employer, the State as general storekeeper, the State to feed us; all this was a dream of bliss.  Buonarotti, formerly Babeuf’s accomplice, preached Communism.  Louis Blanc published his Organisation du travail, in which he calls to his aid a political revolution, foretaste of a social revolution.  Proudhon published his Memoire sur la propriete, containing the celebrated phrase:  “Property means theft.”  He declared himself an anarchist, and as a matter of fact anarchy was already everywhere.  A fresh evil had suddenly made its appearance, and, by a cruel irony, it was the logical consequence of that industrial development of which the century was so proud.  The result of all that wealth had been to create a new form of misery, an envious, jealous form of misery, much more cruel than the former one, for it filled the heart with a ferment of hatred, a passion for destruction.

It was Pierre Leroux, also, who led George Sand on to Socialism.  She had been on the way to it by herself.  For a long time she had been raising an altar in her heart to that entity called the People, and she had been adorning it with all the virtues.  The future belonged to the people, the whole of the future, and first of all that of literature.