er to have suspected. When Liszt eventually, like
Tannhaeuser, mutineered against the charms of the Venusberg and returned
to Paris, he wrote many letters to the comtesse, in which, as he
himself said, he gained his "first practice in the lofty French style."

But this intrigue was followed by his appearance in the procession of
George Sand's lovers. Ramann, in his biography, writes of the curious
state of society of the Paris of this Revolutionary period: "Women were
beginning to demand freedom and to experiment with the writing of
perfervid romances, which questioned the very foundation principles of
marriage and made a religion of Affinity."

George Sand was a chief crusader against the curse of monogamy. She
practiced this anarchy in the guise of religion, as the old crusaders
out-heathened the barbarians, and raided civilisation in the name of
the Cross. George Sand's gospel, summed up briefly by Ramann, is as
follows:

"'Love,' says the authoress, 'is Christian compassion concentrated on a
single being. It belongs to the sinner, and not to the just; only for
the former it moves restlessly, passionately, and vehemently. When
thou, O noble and upright man,' she continues, with deceitfully
fantastic warmth, 'when thou feelest a violent passion for a miserable
fallen creature, be reassured that is genuine love; blush not
therefore! so has Christ loved who crucified him.' According to this
view, the love that sins from love must be virtue. One can scarcely be
alarmed then when she says: 'The greater the crime, so much the more
genuine the love which it accomplishes;' or, when Leone Leoni, steeped
in passion and crime, but talented and adorned with manly beauty,
exclaims to his beloved, 'As long as you hope for my amendment you have
never loved my personal self.' It also appears to correspond with this
casuistry of erotic fancy, when the heroes of her tragedies, of
sky-storming earnestness, but adorned with all unnatural qualities,
give themselves up to the latter as to an intoxicating spell, and in
the delirium of self-delusion hold sin for virtue, and the unnatural
for higher truth and beauty. With this creed, experimental love was a
logical sequence, and great constancy was already to be unprogressive
stubbornness. 'All love exhausts itself,' said Sand in 'Lelia';
'disgust and sadness follow; the union of the woman with the man should
therefore be transitory.'"

If the putting of preachment into practice is vir