The origins of these unreconciled antipathies lie deep beneath the personal relationship of George Sand and Gustave Flaubert; lie deep beneath their successors, who with more or less of amenity in their manners are still debating the same questions today.  The main currents of the nineteenth century, with fluent and refluent tides, clash beneath the controversy; and as soon as one hears its “long withdrawing roar,” and thinks it is dying away, and is become a part of ancient history, it begins again, and will be heard, no doubt, by the last man as a solemn accompaniment to his final contention with his last adversary.

George Sand was, on the whole, a natural and filial daughter of the French Revolution.  The royal blood which she received from her father’s line mingled in her veins with that of the Parisian milliner, her mother, and predestined her for a leveller by preparing in her an instinctive ground of revolt against all those inherited prejudices which divided the families of her parents.  As a young girl wildly romping with the peasant children at Nohant she discovered a joy in untrammeled rural life which was only to increase with years.  At the proper age for beginning to fashion a conventional young lady, the hoyden was put in a convent, where she underwent some exalting religious experiences; and in 1822 she was assigned to her place in the “established social order” by her marriage at seventeen to M. Dudevant.  After a few years of rather humdrum domestic life in the country, she became aware that this gentleman, her husband, was behaving as we used to be taught that all French husbands ultimately behave; he was, in fact, turning from her to her maids.  The young couple had never been strongly united—­ the impetuous dreamy girl and her coarse hunting mate; and they had grown wide apart.  She should, of course, have adjusted herself quietly to the altered situation and have kept up appearances.  But this young wife had gradually become an “intellectual”; she had been reading philosophy and poetry; she was saturated with the writings of Rousseau, of Chateaubriand, of Byron.  None of the spiritual masters of her generation counselled acquiescence in servitude or silence in misery.  Every eloquent tongue of the time-spirit urged self-expression and revolt.  And she, obedient to the deepest impulses of her blood and her time, revolted.

At the period when Madame Dudevant withdrew her neck from the conjugal yoke and plunged into her literary career in Paris, the doctrine that men are created for freedom, equality and fraternity was already somewhat hackneyed.  She, with an impetus from her own private fortunes, was to give the doctrine a recrudescence of interest by resolutely applying it to the status of women.  We cannot follow her in detail from the point where she abandons the domestic sewing-basket to reappear smoking black cigars in the Latin Quarter.  We find her, at about 1831, entering into competition with the brilliant literary generation of Balzac,