he was not the pure, loving,
devoted, harmless being she represents herself in the "Histoire de ma
Vie." Chateaubriand said truly that: "le talent de George Sand a
quelque ratine dans la corruption, elle deviendrait commune en devenant
timoree." Alfred Nettement, who, in his "Histoire de la litterature
franqaise sous le gouvernement de Juillet," calls George Sand a "painter
of fallen and defiled natures," remarks that--

most of her romances are dazzling rehabilitations of
adultery, and in reading their burning pages it would seem
that there remains only one thing to be done--namely, to break
the social chains in order that the Lelias and Sylvias may go
in quest of their ideal without being stopped by morality and
the laws, those importune customs lines which religion and
the institutions have opposed to individual whim and
inconstancy.

Perhaps it will be objected to this that the moral extravagances and
audacious sophistries to be met with in "Lelia," in "Leoni," and other
novels of hers, belong to the characters represented, and not to the
author. Unfortunately this argument is untenable after the publication
of George Sand's letters, for there she identifies herself with Lelia,
and develops views identical with those that shocked us in Leoni and
elsewhere.

[Footnote: On May 26, 1833, she writes to her friend Francois Rollinat
with regard to this book: "It is an eternal chat between us. We are the
gravest personages in it." Three years later, writing to the Comtesse
d'Agoult, her account differs somewhat: "I am adding a volume to
'Lelia.' This occupies me more than any other novel has as yet
done. Lelia is not myself, je suis meilleure enfant; but she is my
ideal."--Correspondance, vol. I., pp. 248 and 372.]

These letters, moreover, contain much that is damaging to her claim
to chastity. Indeed, one sentence in a letter written in June, 1835
(Correspondance, vol. I., p. 307), disposes of this claim decisively.
The unnecessarily graphic manner in which she here deals with an
indelicate subject would be revolting in a man addressing a woman, in a
woman addressing a man it is simply monstrous.

As a thinker, George Sand never attained to maturity; she always
remained the slave of her strong passions and vitiated principles.
She never wrote a truer word than when she confessed that she judged
everything by sympathy. Indeed, what she said of her childhood
applies also to her womanhood: "Il