LELIA.--ITALIAN JOURNEY.
It was less than two years since she had come up to the capital, to seek
her fortunes there in literature. Aurore Dudevant, hereafter to be
spoken of as George Sand (for she made her adopted name more her own
than that she had borne hitherto, and became George Sand for her private
friends as well as for the public,) found herself raised to eminence
among the eminent. And it was at an exceptionally brilliant epoch in
French imaginative literature that the distinction had been won. Such a
burst of talent as that which signalized the opening years of Louis
Philippe's reign is unexampled in French literary history. With Hugo,
Dumas, De Musset, Balzac, not to mention lesser stars, the author of
_Indiana_ and _Valentine_, although a woman, was acknowledged as worthy
to rank. The artist in her, a disturbing element in her inner life which
had driven her out of the spiritual bondage and destitution of a petty
provincial environment to secure for herself freedom and expansion, had
justified the audacity of the move by a triumphant artistic success.
From this time onward her artistic faculty dominated her life, often,
probably, unknown to herself an invincible force of instinct she obeyed,
whilst assigning, in all good faith, other motives for her course of
action, and for real or apparent inconsequences, that have been
constantly misrepresented and misunderstood.
So sudden and abrupt a change would have turned all heads but the
strongest. Publishers competed with one another to secure her next work.
Buloz, proprietor of the _Revue des Deux Mondes_, engaged her to write
regularly for his periodical, to which, for the next ten years, she
never ceased to be a regular and extensive contributor. Although the
scale of remuneration was not then very high she was clearly secure, so
long as she allowed nothing to interfere with her literary work, of
earning a sufficient income for her own needs. She had learnt the
importance of pecuniary independence, and never pretended to despise the
reward of her industry. To luxury she was indifferent, but the necessity
of strict economy was a burden she was impatient of; she liked to have
plenty to give away, and was always excessively liberal to the poor. Her
little dwelling on the Quai Malplaquet was no longer the hermitage of
an anonymous writer of no account. The great in art and letters,
leading critics, such as Sainte-Beuve and Gustave Planche, came eager to
seek her acquaintance, and delighting to honor the obscure student of a
year ago.
Writing to M. Boucoiran after her return to Paris in December, 1832, she
describes her altered position:--
All day long I am beset with visitors, who are not all
entertaining. It is a calamity of my profession, which I am partly
obliged to bear. But in the evening I shut myself up with my pens
and ink, Solange, my piano, and a fire. With all these I pass some
right pleasant hours. No noise but the sounds of a harp, coming I
know not whence, and of the playing of a fountain under my window.
This is highly poetical--pray don't make game of me!
There was another side to her success. Fame brought trials and
annoyances that fell with double severity on her as a woman. Her door
was besieged by a troop of professional beggars, impostors, impertinent
idlers, and inquisitive newsmongers. Jealousy and ill-will, inevitably
attendant on sudden good fortune such as hers, busied themselves with
direct calumny and insidious misrepresentation. No statement so
unfounded, so wildly improbable about her, but it obtained circulation
and credit. Till the end of her life she remained the centre of a cloud
of myths, many, to the present day, accepted as gospel. People insisted
on identifying her with the heroines of her novels. Incidents, personal
descriptions, nay, whole letters extracted from these novels will be
found literally transcribed into alleged biographies of herself and her
friends, as her own statement of matters of fact. Now, though the spirit
of her life is strongly and faithfully represented by her fiction taken
as a whole, those who would read in any special novel the literal record
of any of the special events of her existence cannot be too much on
their guard. Whatever the material under treatment, George Sand must
retouch, embellish, transform, artist-fashion, as her genius shall
dictate, till often little resemblance is left between the original and
the production it has done no more than suggest. Romance and reality are
so fused together in these apparent outpourings of spirit that her
nearest friends were at a loss how to separate them. As an actress into
many a favorite part, so could she throw herself into her favorite
characters; but seldom if ever will much warrant be found in actual fact
for identifying these creations with their creatress.
How, indeed, could so many-sided a nature as hers be truly represented
in a single novel? Her rare physical and mental energies enabled her to
combine a life of masculine intellectual activity with the more highly
emotional life of a woman, and with vigilance in her maternal cares.
Maurice was placed in the spring of 1833 at the College Henri IV., at
Paris; thus she had now both son and daughter near her, and watched
indefatigably over them, their childish illnesses and childish
amusements, their moral and intellectual training absorbing a large
share of her time and attention. Heine, a friendly visitor at her house,
says:--
I have often been present for hours whilst she gave her children a
lesson in French, and it is a pity that the whole of the French
Academy could not have been present too, as it is quite certain
that they might have derived great profit from it.
Not all the distractions of fame and work, of passionate pleasure or
passionate sorrow, ever relaxed her active solicitude for the present
and future welfare of her two young children. "They give me the only
real joys of my life," she repeats again and again.
_Lelia_, begun immediately after _Valentine_ was published in the spring
of 1833, and created an immense sensation. Hailed by her admirers as a
sign of an accession of power, of power exerted in quite a new
direction, it brought down on the writer's head a storm of hostile
criticism, as a declared enemy of religion and domestic
morality--enhancing her celebrity not a little.
_Lelia_, a lyrical novel--an outburst of poetical philosophy in prose,
stands alone among the numerous productions of George Sand. Here she
takes every sort of poetical license, in a work without the restrictions
of poetic form, which are the true conditions of so much latitude.
"Manfred" and "Alastor" are fables not further removed from real life
than is _Lelia_. The personages are like allegorical figures, emblematic
of spiritual qualities on a grand scale, the scenes like the
paradisiacal gardens that visited the fancy of Aurore Dupin when a
child. There is no action. The interest is not in the characters and
what they do, but in what they say. The declamatory style, then so
popular, is one the taste for which has so completely waned that _Lelia_
will find comparatively few readers in the present day, fewer who will
not find its perusal wearisome, none perhaps whose morality, however
weak, will be seriously shaken by utterances ever and anon hovering on
the perilous confines of the sublime and the ludicrous.
_Lelia_, a female Faust or Manfred, a mysterious muse-like heroine, who
one night sleeps on the heathery mountain-side, the next displays the
splendor of a queen in palaces and fairy-like villas; her sorely tried
and hapless lover, Stenio, the poet, who pours forth odes to his own
accompaniment on the harp, and lingers the night long among Alpine
precipices brooding over the abyss; Trenmor, the returned gentleman
convict and Apostle of the Carbonari, whose soul has been refreshed,
made young and regenerated at the galleys; and the mad Irish priest,
Magnus, are impossible personages, inviting to easy ridicule, and
neither wisdom nor folly from their lips is likely to beguile the ears
of the present generation.
It is no novel, but a poetical essay, fantastically conceived and
executed with the _sans gene_ of an improvisatore. For those who admire
the genius of George Sand its interest as a psychological revelation
remains unabated. Into _Lelia_, she owns, she put more of her real self
than into any other of her books--of herself, that is, and her state of
mind at the dawn of a period of moral disturbance and revolt. All must
continue to recognize there an extraordinary exhibition of poetical
power and musical style. As a work of art George Sand has herself
pronounced it absurd, yet she always cherished for it a special
predilection, and, as will be seen, took the trouble to rewrite it some
years later, when in a happier and healthier frame of mind than that
which inspired this unique and most characteristic composition.
The note of despair struck in _Lelia_, the depth of bitter feeling, the
capacity for mental and moral speculation and suffering it seemed to
disclose, astounded many of her familiar acquaintance. "_Lelia_ is a
fancy-type," so writes to the author her friend and neighbor in Berry,
Jules Neraud, an ardent naturalist, whose botanical and entomological
pursuits she had often shared: "it is not like you--you who are merry,
dance the _bourree_, appreciate lepidoptera, do not despise puns, who
are not a bad needlewoman, and make very good preserves. Is it possible
you should have thought so much, felt so much, without anyone having any
idea of it?"
_Lelia_ was certainly the expression of a new phase in her mind's
history, a moral crisis she could not escape, which was all the more
severe for her having, as she remarks, reached her thirtieth year
without having opened her eyes to the realities of life. Till the time
of her coming to Paris, for very dearth of outward impressions, she had
lived chiefly in dreams, the life of all others most favorable to the
prolongation of ignorance and credulity. The liberty and activity she
had enjoyed for the last two years were fatal to Utopian theories.
It was not only the bitterness that springs from disenchantment in
individuals, the sense of the miserable insufficiency of human love to
satisfy her spiritual aspirations producing "that widely concluding
unbelief which," as her sister in greatness has said, "we call knowledge
of the world, but which is really disappointment in you and in me."
George Sand was one to whom scepticism was intolerable. Pessimistic
doctrines were fatal to her mind's equilibrium, and private experience
and outward intellectual influences were driving her to distrust all
objects of her previous worship, human and divine. The moment was one
when the most fundamental social and religious principles were being
called in question.
"Nothing in my old beliefs," she writes, "was sufficiently formulated in
me, from a social point of view, to help me to struggle against this
cataclysm; and in the religious and socialistic theories of the moment I
did not find light enough to contend with the darkness." The poet's
creed, with which her mind had hitherto rested satisfied, was shaken,
and appeared to prove a false one. She was staggered by the infinity of
evil, misery, and injustice, which dwellers in great cities are not
allowed to forget, the problem of humanity, the eternal mystery of
suffering and wrong predominant in a world on the beneficence of whose
Supreme Power all her faiths were founded.
Her mental revolt and suffering found vent in _Lelia_, which it was an
immense relief to her to write. Characteristic as an exhibition of
feeling and of mastery of language, it is not in the least typical of
her fiction. Yet, but for _Lelia_, and its successor _Jacques_, it is
impossible to point to a work of hers that would ever have lastingly
stamped her, in the public mind, as an expounder of dangerous theories.
In _Lelia_, however, which is strongly imbued with Byronic coloring, she
had chosen to pose somewhat as the proud angel in rebellion; and the
immediate effect of hostile criticism was to confirm her in the position
taken up. Neither _Lelia_ nor _Jacques_ combined the elements of lasting
popularity with those of instant success; but they roused a stir and
strife which created an impression of her as a writer systematically
inimical to religion and marriage--an impression almost ludicrously at
variance with facts, taking her fiction as a whole, but which has only
recently begun to give way, in this country, to a juster estimate of its
tendencies.
The morality of _Lelia_, which it is rather difficult to discuss
seriously in the present day, both the personages and their environment
being too preternatural for any direct application to be drawn from
them, as reflecting modern society, found indiscreet champions as
determined as its aggressors. Violently denounced by M. Capo de
Feuillide, of the _Europe litteraire_, it was warmly defended by M.
Gustave Planche, in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. The war of words grew
so hot between them that a challenge and encounter were the
result--surely unique in the annals of duelling. The swords of the
critics fortunately proved more harmless than their words.
From the morbid depression that had tormented her mind and imagination,
and has its literary memorial in _Lelia_, she was to find a timely,
though but a temporary rescue, in the charm of a new acquaintance--the
delighting society of a poetic mind of an order not inferior to her own.
It was in August, 1833, at a dinner given by Buloz to the staff of the
_Revue des Deux Mondes_, that George Sand first made the personal
acquaintance of Alfred de Musset, then in his twenty-third year, and
already famous through his just published poem, _Rolla_, and his earlier
dramas, _Andrea del Sarto_ and _Les Caprices de Marianne_. He rapidly
became enamored of the author of _Lelia_, who for her part felt
powerfully the attraction of his many admirable qualities, mutual
enchantment leading them so far as to believe they could be the hero and
heroine of a happy love tale. In a letter of September 21, addressed to
her friend and correspondent Sainte-Beuve, whom she had made the
confidant of her previous depression and strange moods of gloom, she
writes of herself as lifted out of such dangers by a happiness beyond
any she had imagined, restoring youth to her heart--the happiness
accorded her by the poet's society and his preference for her own. De
Musset, at this time, would have given the world to have been able to
make her his wife.
The story of their short-lived infatuation and of the swift-following
mutual disenchantment,--a story which, says Sainte-Beuve, has become
part of the romance of the nineteenth century,--is perhaps of less
consequence here than in the life of De Musset,[A] in whom the
over-sensitiveness of genius was not allied with the extraordinary
healthy vitality which enabled George Sand to come out of the most
terrible mental experiences unembittered, with the balance of her mind
unshaken, and her powers unimpaired. Yet that he acquired an empire over
her no other ever acquired there is much to indicate. It took her from
France for a while, from her children, her friends--and the breaking of
the spell set her at war, not only with him, but for a while with
herself, with life, and her fellow creatures.
In the last days of 1833, she and the author of _Rolla_ started on a
journey to Italy, where George Sand spent six months, and where she has
laid the scene of a number of her novels: the first and best part of
_Consuelo_, _La Derniere Aldini_, _Leone_, _Leoni_, _La Daniella_, and
others. The spirit of that land she has caught and reproduced perhaps
more successfully than any other of the many novelists who have chosen
it for a frame--of Italy as the artist's native country, that is--not
the Italy of political history, nor of the Medici, but the Italy that is
the second home of painters, poets, and musicians. Can anything be more
enjoyable, and at the same time more vividly true, than George Sand's
delineations of Venice; and, in the first of the _Lettres d'un
Voyageur_, the pictures given of her wanderings on the shores of the
Brenta, of Bassano, the Brenta valley, Oliero, Possagno, Asolo, a
delicious land, till quite recently as little tourist-trodden as in
1834? What a contrast to the purely imaginary descriptions in _Lelia_,
written before those beauties had appeared to her except in dreams!
From Genoa the travellers journeyed to Pisa, Florence, and thence to
Venice, where first George Sand felt herself really at home in Italy.
The architecture, the simplicity of Venetian life and manners, the
theatres--from the opera-houses, where Pasta and Donzelli were singing,
down to the national drama of Pulchinello--the pictures, the sea, the
climate, combined to make of it a place of residence so perfectly to her
mind, that again and again in her letters she expresses her wish that
she could bring over her children and there fix her abode.
"It is the only town I can love for its own sake," she says of it.
"Other cities are like prisons, which you put up with for the sake of
your fellow-prisoners." This Italian journey marks a fresh stage in her
artistic development, quite apart from the attendant romantic
circumstances, the alleged disastrous consequences to a child of genius
less wise and fortunate than herself, which has given an otherwise
disproportionate notoriety to this brief episode.
George Sand was no doubt fatally in error when she persuaded herself,
and even succeeded in persuading the poet's anxious mother, that she had
it in her to be his guardian angel, and reform him miraculously in a
short space of time; and that because he had fallen in love with her she
would know how to make him alter a way of life he had no abiding desire
to abandon. Such a task demands a readiness not merely for
self-sacrifice, but for self-suppression; and her individuality was far
too pronounced to merge itself for long in ministering to another's. She
never seems to have possessed the slightest moral ascendancy over him,
beyond the power of wounding him very deeply by the change in her
sentiments, however much he might feel himself to blame for it.
The history of the separation of the lovers--of De Musset's illness,
jealousy, and departure from Venice alone--is a thrice-told tale. Like
the subject of "The Ring and the Book," it has been set forth, by
various persons, variously interested, with correspondingly various
coloring. The story, as told by George Sand in her later novel, _Elle et
Lui_, is substantially the same as one related by De Musset in his
_Confession d'un Enfant du Siecle_, published two years after these
events, and in which, if it is to be regarded as reflecting personal
idiosyncrasies in the slightest degree, the poet certainly makes himself
out as the most insupportable of human companions. None the less did the
publication of _Elle et Lui_, a quarter of a century later, provoke a
savage retort from the deceased poet's brother, in _Lui et Elle_.
Finally, in _Lui_, a third novelist, Madame Colet, presented the world
with a separate version of the affair from one who imagined she could
have made up to the poet for what he had lost.
But it needs no deep study of human nature, or yet of these novels, to
understand the impracticability of two such minds long remaining
together in unity. Genius, in private life, is apt to be a torment--its
foibles demanding infinite patience, forbearance, nay, affectionate
blindness, in those who would minister to its happiness, and mitigate
the worst results of those foibles themselves. Certainly George Sand,
for a genius, was a wonderfully equable character; her "satanic" moods
showed themselves chiefly in pen and ink; her nerves were very strong,
the balance of her physical and mental organization was splendidly even,
as one imagines Shakespeare's to have been. But the very vigor of her
character, its force of self-assertion, unfitted her to be the
complement to any but a very yielding nature. The direct influence a
passive, merely receptive spirit would have accepted, and gratefully,
was soon felt as an intolerable burden by a mind in many ways different
from her own, but with the same imperious instinct of freedom, and as
little capable of playing anvil to another mind for long. He rebelled
against her ascendancy, but suffered from the spell. She was no Countess
Guiccioli, content to adore and be adored, and exercise an indirect
power for good on a capricious lover. Her logical mind, energetic and
independent, grew impatient of the seeming inconsistencies of her gifted
companion; and when at last she began to perceive in them the fatal
conditions of those gifts themselves, only compassion survived in her,
as she thought, and compassion was cold.
How could De Musset, with such an excellent example of prudence, regular
hours, good sense, calm self-possession, and ceaseless literary industry
as hers before his eyes, not be stirred up to emulate such admirable
qualities? But her reason made him unreasonable; the indefatigability of
her pen irritated his nerves, and made him idle out of contradiction;
her homilies provoked only fresh imprudences--as though he wanted to
make proof of his independence whilst secretly feeling her dominion--a
phenomenon with which highly nervous people will sympathize not a
little, but which was perfectly inexplicable to George Sand.
His genius was of a more delicate essence than hers; he has struck, at
times, a deeper note. But his nature was frailer, his muse not so easily
within call, his character as intolerant of restraint as her own, but
less self-sufficing; and the morbid taint of thought then prevalent, and
which her natural optimism and better balanced faculties enabled her to
throw off very shortly, had entered into him ineffaceably. Whether or
not she brought a fresh blight on his mind, she certaintly failed to
cure it.
The spring had hardly begun when De Musset was struck down by fever.
George Sand, who had previously been very ill herself, nursed him
through his attack with great devotion; and in six weeks' time he was
restored to health, if not to happiness. Theirs was at an end, as they
recognized, and agreed to part--"for a time, perhaps, or perhaps for
ever," she wrote,--with their attachment broken but not destroyed.
It was early in April that De Musset started on his homeward journey.
George Sand saw him on his way as far as Vicenza, and ere returning to
Venice, made a little excursion in the Alps, along the course of the
Brenta. "I have walked as much as four-and-twenty miles a day," she
writes to M. Boucoiran, "and found out that this sort of exercise is
very good for me, both morally and physically. Tell Buloz I will write
some letters for the _Revue_, upon my pedestrian tours. I came back into
Venice with only seven centimes in my pocket, otherwise I should have
gone as far as the Tyrol; but the want of baggage and money obliged me
to return. In a few days I shall start again, and cross over the Alps by
the gorges of the Piave."
And the spring's delights on the Alpine borders of Lombardy are
described by her _con amore_, in the promised letters:--
The country was not yet in its full splendor; the fields were of a
faint green, verging on yellow, and the leaves only coming into bud
on the trees. But here and there the almonds and peaches in flower
mixed their garlands of pink and white with the dark clumps of
cypress. Through the midst of this far-spreading garden the Brenta
flowed swiftly and silently over her sandy bed, between two large
banks of pebbles, and the rocky _debris_ which she tears out of the
heart of the Alps, and with which she furrows the plains in her
days of anger. A semi-circle of fertile hills, overspread with
those long festoons of twisting vine that suspend themselves from
all the trees in Venetia, made a near frame to the picture; and the
snowy mountain-heights, sparkling in the first rays of sunshine,
formed an immense second border, standing, as if cut out in silver,
against the solid blue of the sky.
None of these excursions, however, were ever carried very far. For the
next three months she remained almost entirely stationary at Venice, her
head-quarters. She had taken apartments for herself in the interior of
the city, in a little low-built house, along the narrow, green, and yet
limpid canal, close to the Ponte dei Barcaroli. "There," she tells us,
"alone all the afternoon, never going out except in the evening for a
breath of air, working at night as well, to the song of the tame
nightingales that people all Venetian balconies, I wrote _Andre_,
_Jacques_, _Mattea_, and the first _Lettres d'un Voyageur_."
None can read the latter and suppose that the suffering of the recent
parting was all on one side. The poet continued to correspond with her,
and the consciousness of the pain she had inflicted she was clearly not
sufficiently indifferent herself to support. But neither De Musset nor
any other in whom, through the "prism of enthusiasm," she may have seen
awhile a hero of romance, was ever a primary influence on her life.
These were two. Firstly, her children, who although at a distance were
seldom absent from her thoughts. Of their well-being at school and at
home respectively, she was careful to keep herself informed, down to the
minutest particulars, by correspondents in Paris and at Nohant, whence
no opposition whatever was raised by its occupier to her prolonged
absence abroad. Secondly, her art-vocation. She wrote incessantly; and
independently of the pecuniary obligations to do so which she put
forward, it is obvious that she had become wedded to this habit of work.
"The habit has become a faculty--the faculty a need. I have thus come to
working for thirteen hours at a time without making myself ill; seven
or eight a day on an average, be the task done better or worse," she
writes to M. Chatiron, from Venice, in March. Sometimes, as with _Leone
Leoni_, she would complete a novel in a week; a few weeks later it was
in the _Revue des Deux Mondes_. Such haste she afterward deprecated,
and, like all other workers, she aspired to a year's holiday in which to
devote herself to the study of the masterpieces of modern literature;
but the convenient season for such suspension of her own productive
activity never came. And whilst at Venice she found herself literally in
want of money to leave it. Buloz had arranged with her that she should
contribute thirty-two pages every six weeks to his periodical for a
yearly stipend of L160. She had anticipated her salary for the expenses
of her Italian journey, and must acquit herself of the arrears due
before she could take wing.
_Jacques_, the longest of the novels written at Venice, afforded fresh
grounds to those who taxed her works with hostility to social
institutions. Without entering into the vexed question of the right of
the artist in search of variety to exercise his power on any theme that
may invite to its display, and of the precise bearing of ethical rules
on works of imagination, it is permissible to doubt that _Jacques_,
however bitter the sentiments of the author at that time regarding the
marriage tie, ever seriously disturbed the felicity of any domestic
household in the past or present day. It is too lengthy and too
melancholy to attract modern readers, who care little to revel in the
luxuries of woe, so relished by those of a former age. We cannot do
better than quote the judgment pronounced by Madame Sand herself, thirty
years later, on this work of pure sentimentalism--generated by an epoch
thrown into commotion by the passionate views of romanticism--the epoch
of Rene, Lara, Childe Harold, Werther, types of desperate men; life
weary, but by no means weary of talking. "_Jacques_," she observes,
"belonged to this large family of disillusioned thinkers; they had their
_raison d'etre_, historical and social. He comes on the scene in the
novel, already worn by deceptions; he thought to revive through his
love, and he does not revive. Marriage was for him only the drop of
bitterness that made the cup overflow. He killed himself to bequeath to
others the happiness for which he cared not, and in which he believed
not."
_Jacques_, taken as a _plaidoyer_ against domestic institutions,
singularly misses its aim. As critics have remarked, some of the most
eloquent pages are those that treat of married bliss. Our sympathies
are entirely with the wronged husband against his silly little wife. It
is a kindred work to _Lelia_, and its faults are the same; but whilst
dealing ostensibly with real life and possible human beings it cannot,
like _Lelia_, be placed apart, and retain interest as a literary
curiosity.
_Andre_ is a very different piece of work and a little masterpiece of
its kind. The author, in her preface, tells us how, whilst mechanically
listening to the incessant chatter of the Venetian sempstresses in the
next room to her own, she was struck by the resemblance between the mode
of life and thought their talk betrayed, and that of the same class of
girls at La Chatre; and how in the midst of Venice, to the sound of the
rippling waters stirred by the gondolier's oar, of guitar and serenade,
and within sight of the marble palaces, her thoughts flew back to the
dark and dirty streets, the dilapidated houses, the wretched moss-grown
roofs, the shrill concerts of the cocks, cats, and children of the
little French provincial town. She dreamt also of the lovely meadows,
the scented hay, the little running streams, and the floral researches
she had been fond of. This tenacity of her instincts was a safeguard she
may have sometimes rebelled against as a chain; it was with her an
essential feature, and, despite all vagaries, gave a great unity to her
life.
"Venice," she writes to M. Chatiron in June, "with her marble staircases
and her wonderful climate, does not make me forget anything that has
been dear to me. Be sure that nothing in me dies. My life has its
agitations; destiny pushes me different ways, but my heart does not
repudiate the past. Old memories have a power none can ignore, and
myself less than another. I love on the contrary to recall them, and we
shall soon find ourselves together again in the old nest at Nohant."
_Andre_ she considered the outcome of this feeling of nostalgia. In it
she has put together the vulgar elements of inferior society in a
common-place country town, and produced a poem, though one of the
saddest. If the florist heroine, Genevieve, is a slightly idealized
figure, the story and general character-treatment are realistic to a
painful degree. There is more power of simple pathos shown here than is
common in the works of George Sand. _Andre_ is a refreshing contrast, in
its simplicity and brevity, to the inflation of _Lelia_ and _Jacques_.
It was an initial essay, and a model one, in a style with better claims
to enduring popularity.
As the summer advanced, George Sand found herself free to depart, and
started on her way back to France, famishing, as she tells us, for the
sight of her children. Her grand anxiety was to reach her destination
in time for the breaking-up day and distribution of prizes at the
College Henri IV. "I shall be at Paris before then," she writes from
Milan, to her son, "if I die on the way, and really the heat is such
that one might die of it." From Milan she journeyed over the Simplon to
the Rhone valley, Martigny, Chamounix, and Geneva, performing great part
of the way on foot. She reached Paris in the middle of August, and a few
days later started with her boy for Nohant, where Solange had spent the
time during her mother's absence, and where they remained together for
the holidays. Here too she was in the midst of a numerous circle of
friends of both sexes, in whose staunch friendliness she found a solace
of which she stood in real need.