glorious luminousness.  However, I do not think that her indiscretions and misrepresentations deserve always to be stigmatised as intentional malice and conscious falsehood.  On the contrary, I firmly believe that she not only tried to deceive others, but that she actually deceived herself.  The habit of self-adoration had given her a moral squint, a defect which was aggravated by a powerful imagination and excellent reasoning faculties.  For, swayed as these were by her sentiments and desires, they proved themselves most fertile in generating flattering illusions and artful sophisms.  George Sand was indeed a great sophist.  She had always in readiness an inexhaustible store of interpretations and subterfuges with which to palliate, excuse, or even metamorphose into their contraries the most odious of her words and actions.  It is not likely that any one ever equalled, much less surpassed, her expertness in hiding ugly facts or making innocent things look suspicious.  To judge by her writings and conversations she never acted spontaneously, but reasoned on all matters and on all occasions.

At no time whatever [writes Paul Lindau in his “Alfred de Musset”] is there to be discovered in George Sand a trace of a passion and inconsiderateness, she possesses an imperturbable calmness.  Love sans phrase does not exist for her.  That her frivolity may be frivolity, she never will confess.  She calculates the gifts of love, and administers them in mild, well-measured doses.  She piques herself upon not being impelled by the senses.  She considers it more meritorious if out of charity and compassion she suffers herself to be loved.  She could not be a Gretchen [a Faust’s Margaret], she would not be a Magdalen, and she became a Lady Tartuffe.

George Sand’s three great words were “maternity,” “chastity,” and “pride.”  She uses them ad nauseam, and thereby proves that she did not possess the genuine qualities.  No doubt, her conceptions of the words differed from those generally accepted:  by “pride” (orgueil), for instance, she seems to have meant a kind of womanly self-respect debased by a supercilious haughtiness and self-idolatry.  But, as I have said already, she was a victim to self-deception.  So much is certain, the world, with an approach to unanimity rarely attained, not only does not credit her with the virtues which she boasts of, but even accuses her of the very opposite vices.  None of the writers I have consulted arrives, in discussing George Sand’s character, at conclusions which tally with her own estimate; and every person, in Paris and elsewhere, with whom I have conversed on the subject condemned her conduct most unequivocally.  Indeed, a Parisian—­who, if he had not seen much of her, had seen much of many who had known her well—­did not hesitate to describe her to me as a female Don Juan, and added that people would by-and-by speak more freely of her adventures.  Madame Audley (see “Frederic Chopin, sa vie et ses oeuvres,” p. 127) seems to me to echo pretty exactly the general opinion in summing up her strictures thus:—­