Famous Women: George Sand

reading Virgil and learning Latin." And her best propaganda, as by and by she came to own, was not that carried on in journals such as La Vra

he period we have now reached-the mezzo cammin of her life-creations in a special style, and over which the public v

sympathetic interest in her subject and lively poetic fancy. Here she affronts no prejudices, advances no startling theories, handles no subtle, treacherous social questions,

anne, with its graceful dedication to Fran?oise Meillant, the unlettered peasant-girl who may have suggested the work she could not read-one of a family of rural proprietors, spoken of by Madame

these country children in their scattered homesteads, to the development of remarkable and tenacious individuality. So with the strange and poetical Jeanne, too innately refined to prosper in her rough human environment, yet too fixedly simple to fare much better in more cultivated circles. She is the victim of a sort of celestial stupidity we admire and pity at once. In this study of a peasant heroine resides such charm as the book possesses, and the attempt was to lead on the author to the productions above alluded to, La Mareau Diable, Fran?ois le Champi, and La Petite Fadette. Of this popular trio the first had b

his genre. It was suggested to her, she tells us, by Holbein's dismal engraving of death coming to the husbandman,

as allowably be represented in art as the dreary one, and which she had seen and studied. In Berry extreme poverty was the exception, and the agriculturist's

adage more freshly and prettily illustrated; yet how slight are the materials, how plain is the outline! Germain, the well-to-do, widowed laborer, in the course of a few miles' ride, a journey undertaken in order to present himself and his addresses to the rich widow his father desires him to woo, discovers the real life-companion he wants in the poor girl-neighbor, whom he patronizingly escorts on her way to the farm where she is hired for service. It all slowly dawns upon him, in the m

ight of understanding; little Marie is wise and affectionate, but as unsentimentally-minded as the veriest realist could desire. The native c

parental affection predestine such unhappy children, through the tenderness his forlorn condition inspires in a single heart-that of Madeline Blanchet, the childless wife, whose own wrongs, patiently borne, have quickened her c

s Sonneurs, French critics are disagreed, though for the most part they regret it. It is not for a foreigner to decide between them. One would certainly regret the absence of some of the ext

larly attractive in the portraits of the twin brothers-partly estranged by character, wholly united by affection,-and in the

eople live in town, that is in Paris the centre, know little of what is unconnected with it, and most of them cannot tell wheat from barley, potatoes from beetroot." It was a happy inspiration that prompted Madame Sand to fill in the blank, in a way all her own, and her task as we have seen was completed, revolutions notwithstanding. She owns to having then felt the attraction experienced in all time by those hard hit by public calamities, "to throw themselves back o

turn, Fanchons, Maries, Nanons, as she described them, tending their flock of from five to a dozen sheep, or a few geese, a goat and a donkey, all day long between the tall hedgerows, or on the common, spinning the while, or possibly dreaming. A certain refinement of cast distinguishes the type. Eugène Delacroix, in a letter describing a village festival at Nohant, remarks that if positive beauty is rare among the natives, uglines

bear out such a supposition. In them the author chooses exactly the same virtues to exalt, the same vices to condemn, as in her novels of refined society. She shows us intolerance, selfishness, and tyranny of custom marring or endangering individual happiness among the working-classes, as with their superiors. There are Philistines in her thatched cottages, as well as in her marble halls. Germain, in La Mare au Diable, has some difficulty to discover for himself, as well as to convince his family and neighbors, that in espousing the penniless Marie he is not marrying beneath him in every sense. Fran?ois le Champi is a pariah, an outcast in the estimation of the rustic world. Fanchon Fadet, b

hardships of yours, I have more to suffer than you from sadness and dejection, ... and am less in safety." Threatened by the violence and hatred of th

ther of her correspondents she desires, but no longer expects, to see fulfilled. She compares the moral state of France to the

at the time of the disturbanc

f Barbès and Mazzini. It is true they are men, and they have no children. Besides, in my opinion it is not in fight, not by civil war, that we shall win the cause of humanity in France. We have got universal suffrage. The worse

w, amid their light-heartedness, she had for a period to battle with an extreme inward sadness, confirmed by the fresh evidence brought by these years of the demoralization in all ranks of opinion. "Your head is no

ce, with her own art of fiction, and the types of heroism that were her favorite creations. But if the shadow of a morbid pessimism crept over her mind, she could view it n

em now, she found there work that suited her mood, as dealing with the pa

nspired her: "I turn back to fiction and produce, in art, popular types such as I see no longer; but as they ought to be and might be." She alludes to a play on which she was e

to have regarded the coup d'état as likely to prove more disastrous to the cause of progress than any other of the violent ends which threatened the existin

ims were comrades of her childhood, numbers of her friends and acquaintance and their relatives-as well in Berry as in the capital-many a

e future Emperor granted her two audiences within a week at the Elysée, in answer to her request, and he succeeded on the first occasion in convincing her that the acts of iniquity and intimidation perpetrated as by his authority were as completely in defiance of his public intentions as of his private principles. As a personal favor to herself, he readily offered her the release of any of the political prisoners that she choose to name, and promised that a general amnesty should speedily follow. She left him, reassured to some extent as to the fate in store for her country. The second interview she had solicited in order to plead the cause of one of her personal friends, condemned to

r a most unthankful one. She persisted however in unwearying applications for justice and mercy, addressed both to the dictator directly, and through his cousin, Prince Napoleon (Jerome), between whom and herself there existed a cordial esteem. She

etter than to send in her political resignation; and it is impossible to share the regret of some of her fellow-republicans at finding

? We have made too many, and have fallen to disputing, which is the grave of all truth and all strength. I am, and always have been, artist before everything else. I know that mere politicians look on artists, with great contempt, judging them by some of those mountebank-types which are a disgrace to art. But you, my friend, you well know that a real artist is as useful as the priest and the warrior, and that when he respects what

he year 1853, is what most will consider a very good e

the imaginative artist. The agreeable preponderates in the story, but it has its tragic features and its serious import. A picturesque and uncommon setting adds materially to its charm. Every thread tells in this delicate piece of fancy-work, and the weaver's art is indescribable. But one may note the ingenuity with which four or five interesting yet perfectly natural types are brought into a group and contrasted; improbable incidents so handled as not to strike a discordant note, the characteristics of the past introduced without ever losing hold of the links, the points of identity between past and present. The scene is the hamlet of Nohant itself; the time is a century ago, when the country, half covered with forest, was wilder, the customs rougher, the local coloring stronger than even Madame Sand in her childhood had known them. The personages belong to the rural proprietor class. The leading characters are all somewhat out of the common, but such exist in equal proportions in

the ancien régime. Several of these properties, as it happened, had fallen to women or minors-widows, elderly maiden ladies, who, and their agents, spared the holders and cultivators of the soil the exactions which, by right or by might, its lords were used to levy. "So the peasants," she writes, "were accustomed not to put themselves to any inconvenience; and when came the Revolution

id to her charge; and although of all her pastorals it must suffer the most when rendered in any language but the original,