than admits--a mere curmudgeonly
pedantry in most cases of great or good fiction, prose or verse. One
knows what to think of people who make crimes of these things in
Shakespeare or Scott, in Dumas or Thackeray. But when a writer makes a
great point of Purpose and sets a high value on Questions, it is not
unfair to expect him or her to mind their P's and Q's in other matters.
George Sand is never tired, in other books, of insisting on the
blessedness of the Revolution itself, on the immense and glorious
emancipation from feudal tyranny, etc. But how does it come about that
there is not the very slightest sign of that tyranny in the earlier part
of the story, or of any general disturbance in the middle and later
part? _Glissons; n'appuyons pas_ on this point, but it may be permitted
to put it.

[Sidenote: _La Mare au Diable._]

In another book of this group--I think chronologically the earliest,
also very popular, and quite "on the side of the angels"--the heroine,
another divine little peasant-girl--who, if George Sand had been fond of
series-titles, might have caused the book to be named _La Petite
Marie_--omits any, however slightly, "horrid" stage altogether. She is,
if not "the whole" good--which, as Empedocles said long ago, few can
boast to find,--good, and nothing but good, except pretty, and other
things which are parts or forms of goodness. The piece really is, in the
proper sense which so few people know, or at least use, an idyll, a
little picture of Arcadian life. Speaking precisely--that is to say in
_precis_--it is nothing but the story of a journey in which the
travellers get benighted, and which ends in a marriage. Speaking
analytically, it consists of a prologue--one of the best examples of
George Sand's style and of her power of description, dealing with the
ploughlands of Berry and the ways of their population; of the
proposition to a young widower that he shall undertake re-marriage with
a young widow, well-to-do, of another parish; of his going a-wooing with
the rather incongruous adjuncts of a pretty young servant girl, who is
going to a "place," and his own truant elder sonlet; of the benighting
of them as above by the side of a mere or marsh of evil repute; of the
insult offered to Marie on the arrival at her new place; of the
discomfiture of Germain, the hero, at finding that the young widow keeps
a sort of court of pretenders dangling about her; of his retirement and
vengeance on Marie's ins