“All that results from our charming profession.  That is what it means to torment the soul and the body.  But perhaps this torment is our proper lot here below.”

To George Sand, who wrote as naturally as she breathed and almost as easily, seclusion and torment were by no means the necessary conditions of literary activity.  Enormously productive, with a hundred books to his half-a-dozen, she has never dedicated and consecrated herself to her profession but has lived heartily and a bit recklessly from day to day, spending herself in many directions freely, gaily, extravagantly.  Now that she has definitely said farewell to her youth, she finds that she is twenty years younger; and now that she is, in a sense, dissipating her personality and living in the lives of others, she finds that she is happier than ever before.  “It can’t be imperative to work so painfully”—­such is the burden of her earlier counsels to Flaubert; “spare yourself a little, take some exercise, relax the tendons of your mind, indulge a little the physical man.  Live a little as I do; and you will take your fatigues and illnesses and occasional dolours and dumps as incidents of the day’s work and not magnify them into the mountainous overshadowing calamities from which you deduce your philosophy of universal misery.”  No advice could have been more wholesome or more timely.  And with what pictures of her own busy felicity she reenforces her advice!  I shall produce three of them here in order to emphasize that precious thing which George Sand loved to impart, and which she had the gift of imparting, namely, joy, the spontaneous joyousness of her own nature.  The first passage is from a letter of June 14, 1867: 

“I am a little remorseful to take whole days from your work, I who am never bored with loafing, and whom you could leave for whole hours under a tree, or before two lighted logs, with the assurance that I should find there something interesting.  I know so well how to live outside of myself.  It hasn’t always been like that.  I also was young and subject to indignations.  It is over!  Since I have dipped into real nature, I have found there an order, a system, a calmness of cycles which is lacking in mankind, but which man can, up to a certain point, assimilate when he is not too directly at odds with the difficulties of his own life.  When these difficulties return, he must endeavor to avoid them; but if he has drunk the cup of the eternally true, he does not get too excited for or against the ephemeral and relative truth.”

The second passage is of June 21: 

“I love everything that makes up a milieu, the rolling of the carriages and the noise of the workmen in Paris, the cries of a thousand birds in the country, the movement of the ships on the waters.  I love also absolute, profound silence, and, in short, I love everything that is around me, no matter where I am.”

The last passage gives a glimpse of the seventeenth of January, 1869, a typical day in Nohant: