always,
she manufactured a Pierre Leroux of her own, who was finer than the real
one. He was needy, but poverty becomes the man who has ideas. He was
awkward, but the contemplative man, on coming down from the region of
thought on to our earth once more, only gropes along. He was not clear,
but Voltaire tells us that when a man does not understand his own words,
he is talking metaphysics. Chopin had personified the artist for her;
Pierre Leroux, with his words as entangled as his hair, figured now to
her as the philosopher. She saw in him the chief and the master. _Tu
duca e tu maestro_.

In February, 1844, she wrote the following extraordinary lines: "I must
tell you that George Sand is only a pale reflection of Pierre Leroux, a
fanatical disciple of the same ideal, but a disciple mute and fascinated
when listening to his words, and quite prepared to throw all her own
works into the fire, in order to write, talk, think, pray and act under
his inspiration. I am merely the popularizer, with a ready pen and
an impressionable mind, and I try to translate, in my novels, the
philosophy of the master."

The most extraordinary part about these lines is that they were
absolutely true. The whole secret of the productions of George Sand for
the next ten years is contained in these words. With Pierre Leroux and
Louis Viardot she now founded a review, _La Revue independante_, in
which she could publish, not only novels (beginning with _Horace_, which
Buloz had refused), but articles by which philosophical-socialistic
ideas could have a free course. Better still than this, the novelist
could take the watchword from the sociologist, just as Mascarilla
put Roman history into madrigals, she was able to put Pierre Leroux's
philosophy into novels.

It would be interesting to know what she saw in Pierre Leroux, and which
of his ideas she approved and preferred. One of the ideas dear to Pierre
Leroux was that of immortality, but an immortality which had very little
in common with Christianity. According to it, we should live again after
death, but in humanity and in another world. The idea of metempsychosis
was very much in vogue at this epoch. According to Jean Reynaud and
Lamennais, souls travelled from star to star, but Pierre Leroux believed
in metempsychosis on earth.

"We are not only the children and the posterity of those who have
already lived, but we are, at bottom, the anterior generations
themselves. We have gone through