fluence over me. My mind, which has always
been wild and unfettered, has never accepted any guidance. . . . You
came, and you have taught me." Then again she says: "It is you whom
I love, whom I have loved ever since I was born, and through all
the phantoms in whom I thought, for a moment, that I had found you."
According to this, it was Michel she loved through Musset. Let us hope
that she was mistaken.

A whole correspondence exists between George Sand and Michel of Bourges.
Part of it was published not long ago in the _Revue illustree_ under
the title of _Lettres de lemmze_. None of George Sand's letters surpass
these epistles to Michel for fervent passion, beauty of form, and a
kind of superb _impudeur_. Let us take, for instance, this call to
her beloved. George Sand, after a night of work, complains of fatigue,
hunger and cold: "Oh, my lover," she cries, "appear, and, like the earth
on the return of the May sunshine, I should be reanimated, and would
fling off my shroud of ice and thrill with love. The wrinkles of
suffering would disappear from my brow, and I should seem beautiful and
young to you, for I should leap with joy into your iron strong arms.
Come, come, and I shall have strength, health, youth, gaiety, hope.
. . . I will go forth to meet you like the bride of the song, 'to her
well-beloved.'" The Well-beloved to whom this Shulamite would hasten was
a bald-headed provincial lawyer who wore spectacles and three mufflers.
But it appears that his "beauty, veiled and unintelligible to the
vulgar, revealed itself, like that of Jupiter hidden under human form,
to the women whom he loved."

We must not smile at these mythological comparisons. George Sand had,
as it were, restored for herself that condition of soul to which the
ancient myths are due. A great current of naturalist poetry circulates
through these pages. In Theocritus and in Rousard there are certain
descriptive passages. There is an analogy between them and that image of
the horse which carries George Sand along on her impetuous course.

"As soon as he catches sight of me, he begins to paw the ground and rear
impatiently. I have trained him to clear a hundred fathoms a second.
The sky and the ground disappear when he bears me along under those long
vaults formed by the apple-trees in blossom. . . . The least sound of my
voice makes him bound like a ball; the smallest bird makes him shudder
and hurry along like a child with no experience. He is s