[Footnote:  On May 26, 1833, she writes to her friend Francois Rollinat with regard to this book:  “It is an eternal chat between us.  We are the gravest personages in it.”  Three years later, writing to the Comtesse d’Agoult, her account differs somewhat:  “I am adding a volume to ‘Lelia.’  This occupies me more than any other novel has as yet done.  Lelia is not myself, je suis meilleure enfant; but she is my ideal.”—­Correspondance,” vol.  I., pp. 248 and 372.]

These letters, moreover, contain much that is damaging to her claim to chastity.  Indeed, one sentence in a letter written in June, 1835 (Correspondance, vol.  I., p. 307), disposes of this claim decisively.  The unnecessarily graphic manner in which she here deals with an indelicate subject would be revolting in a man addressing a woman, in a woman addressing a man it is simply monstrous.

As a thinker, George Sand never attained to maturity; she always remained the slave of her strong passions and vitiated principles.  She never wrote a truer word than when she confessed that she judged everything by sympathy.  Indeed, what she said of her childhood applies also to her womanhood:  “Il n’y avait de fort en moi que la passion...rien dans man cerveau fit obstacle.”  George Sand often lays her finger on sore places, fails, however, not only to prescribe the right remedy, but even to recognise the true cause of the disease.  She makes now and then acute observations, but has not sufficient strength to grapple successfully with the great social, philosophical, and religious problems which she so boldly takes up.  In fact, reasoning unreasonableness was a very frequent condition of George Sand’s mind.  That the unreasonableness of her reasoning remains unseen by many, did so at any rate in her time, is due to the marvellous beauty and eloquence of her language.  The best that can be said of her subversive theories was said by a French critic—­namely, that they were in reality only “le temoignage d’aspirations genereuses et de nobles illusions.”  But even this is saying too much, for her aspirations and illusions are far from being always generous and noble.  If we wish to see George Sand at her best we must seek her out in her quiet moods, when she contents herself with being an artist, and unfolds before us the beauties of nature and the secrets of the human heart.  Indeed, unless we do this, we cannot form a true idea of her character.  Not all the roots of her talent were imbedded in corruption.  She who wrote Lelia wrote also Andre, she who wrote Lucrezia Floriani wrote also La petite Fadette.  And in remembering her faults and shortcomings justice demands that we should not forget her family history, with its dissensions and examples of libertinism, and her education without system, continuity, completeness, and proper guidance.