A woman of genius, but a woman with sensual appetites, with insatiable desires, accustomed to satisfy them at any price, should she even have to break the cup after draining it, equally wanting in balance, wisdom, and purity of mind, and in decorum, reserve, and dignity of conduct.

Many of the current rumours about her doings were no doubt inventions of idle gossips and malicious enemies, but the number of well-ascertained facts go far to justify the worst accusations.  And even though the evidence of deeds were wanting, have we not that of her words and opinions as set forth in her works?  I cannot help thinking that George Sand’s fondness for the portraiture of sensual passion, sometimes even of sensual passion in its most brutal manifestations, is irreconcilable with true chastity.  Many a page in her novels exhibits indeed a surprising knowledge of the physiology of love, a knowledge which presupposes an extensive practical acquaintance with as wellas attentive study of the subject.  That she depicts the most repulsive situations with a delicacy of touch which veils the repulsiveness and deceives the unwary rather aggravates the guilt.  Now, though the purity of a work of art is no proof of the purity of the artist (who may reveal only the better part of his nature, or give expression to his aspirations), the impurity of a work of art always testifies indubitably to the presence of impurity in the artist, of impurity in thought, if not in deed.  It is, therefore, not an unwarranted assumption to say that the works of George Sand prove conclusively that she was not the pure, loving, devoted, harmless being she represents herself in the “Histoire de ma Vie.”  Chateaubriand said truly that:  “le talent de George Sand a quelque ratine dans la corruption, elle deviendrait commune en devenant timoree.”  Alfred Nettement, who, in his “Histoire de la litterature franqaise sous le gouvernement de Juillet,” calls George Sand a “painter of fallen and defiled natures,” remarks that—­

most of her romances are dazzling rehabilitations of adultery, and in reading their burning pages it would seem that there remains only one thing to be done—­namely, to break the social chains in order that the Lelias and Sylvias may go in quest of their ideal without being stopped by morality and the laws, those importune customs lines which religion and the institutions have opposed to individual whim and inconstancy.

Perhaps it will be objected to this that the moral extravagances and audacious sophistries to be met with in “Lelia,” in “Leoni,” and other novels of hers, belong to the characters represented, and not to the author.  Unfortunately this argument is untenable after the publication of George Sand’s letters, for there she identifies herself with Lelia, and develops views identical with those that shocked us in Leoni and elsewhere.