“You are dedicating to Juana l’Espagnole and to various other fantastical beauties verses that I do not approve.  Are you a bourgeois poet or a poet of the people?  If the former, you can sing in honour of all the voluptuousness and all the sirens of the universe, without ever having known either.  You can sup with the most delicious houris or with all the street-walkers, in your poems, without ever leaving your fireside or having seen any greater beauty than the nose of your hall-porter.  These gentlemen write their poetry in this way, and their rhyming is none the worse for it.  But if you are a child of the people and the poet of the people, you ought not to leave the chaste breast of Desiree, in order to run about after dancing-girls and sing about their voluptuous arms."(38)

     (38) See the letters addressed to Charles Poncy in the
     Correspondance.

It is to be hoped that Poncy returned to the chaste Desiree.  But why should he not read to the young woman the works of Pierre Leroux?  We need a little gaiety in our life.  In George Sand’s published Correspondance, we only have a few of her letters to Charles Poncy.  They are all in excellent taste.  There is an immense correspondence which M. Rocheblave will publish later on.  This will be a treat for us, and it will no doubt prove that there was a depth of immense candour in the celebrated authoress.

It does not seem to me that the writings of the working-men poets have greatly enriched French literature.  Fortunately George Sand’s sympathy with the people found its way into literature in another way, and this time in a singularly interesting way.  She did not get the books written by the people themselves, but she put the people into books.  This was the plan announced by George Sand in her preface to the Compagnon du tour de France.  There is an entirely fresh literature to create, she writes, “with the habits and customs of the people, as these are so little known by the other classes.”  The Compagnon du tour de France was the first attempt at this new literature of the people.  George Sand had obtained her documents for this book from a little work which had greatly struck her, entitled Livre du compagnonnage, written by Agricol Perdiguier, surnamed Avignonnais-la-Vertu, who was a compagnon carpenter.  Agricol Perdiguier informs us that the Compagnons were divided into three chief categories:  the Gavots, the Devorants and the Drilles, or the Enfants de Salomon, the Enlants de Maitre Jacques and the Enfants du Pere Soubise.  He then describes the rites of this order.  When two Compagnons met, their watchword was “Tope.”  After this they asked each other’s trade, and then they went to drink a glass together.  If a Compagnon who was generally respected left the town, the others gave him what was termed a “conduite