But there is more in these letters than a satisfaction for the biographical appetite, which, indeed, finds its account rather in the earlier chapters of the correspondents’ history.  What impresses us here is the banquet spread for the reflective and critical faculties in this intercourse of natural antagonists.  As M. Faguet observes in a striking paragraph of his study of Flaubert: 

“It is a curious thing, which does honor to them both, that Flaubert and George Sand should have become loving friends towards the end of their lives.  At the beginning, Flaubert might have been looked upon by George Sand as a furious enemy.  Emma [Madame Bovary] is George Sand’s heroine with all the poetry turned into ridicule.  Flaubert seems to say in every page of his work:  ’Do you want to know what is the real Valentine, the real Indiana, the real Lelia?  Here she is, it is Emma Roualt.’  ’And do you want to know what becomes of a woman whose education has consisted in George Sand’s books?  Here she is, Emma Roualt.’  So that the terrible mocker of the bourgeois has written a book which is directly inspired by the spirit of the 1840 bourgeois.  Their recriminations against romanticism ’which rehabilitates and poetises the courtesan,’ against George Sand, the Muse of Adultery, are to be found in acts and facts in Madame Bovary.”

Now, the largest interest of this correspondence depends precisely upon the continuance, beneath an affectionate personal relationship, of a fundamental antagonism of interests and beliefs, resolutely maintained on both sides.  George Sand, with her lifelong passion for propaganda and reformation, labors earnestly to bring Flaubert to her point of view, to remould him nearer to her heart’s desire.  He, with a playful deference to the sex and years of his friend, addresses her in his letters as “Dear Master.”  Yet in the essentials of the conflict, though she never gives over her effort, he never budges a jot; he has taken his ground, and in his last unfinished work, Bouvard and Pecuchet, he dies stubbornly fortifying his position.  To the last she speaks from a temperament lyrical, sanguine, imaginative, optimistic and sympathetic; he from a temperament dramatic, melancholy, observing, cynical, and satirical.  She insists upon natural goodness; he, upon innate depravity.  She urges her faith in social regeneration; he vents his splenetic contempt for the mob.  Through all the successive shocks of disillusioning experience, she expects the renovation of humanity by some religious, some semi-mystical, amelioration of its heart; he grimly concedes the greater part of humanity to the devil, and can see no escape for the remnant save in science and aristocratic organization.  For her, finally, the literary art is an instrument of social salvation—­it is her means of touching the world with her ideals, her love, her aspiration; for him the literary art is the avenue of escape from the meaningless chaos of existence—­it is his subtly critical condemnation of the world.