by him shortly after this time, she wrote the _Lettres
a Marcie_, an unfinished series, treating of moral and spiritual
problems and trials. Finally, the position M. de Lamennais had taken up
as the apostle of the people further enlisted her sympathies in his
cause, which made religious one with social reform, and amalgamated the
protest against moral enslavement with the liberation-schemes then
fermenting in young and generous minds all over Europe.

The belief in the possibility of their speedy realization was then
wide-spread--a conviction that, as Heine puts it, some grand recipe for
freedom and equality, invented, well drawn up, and inserted in the
_Moniteur_, was all that was needed to secure those benefits for the
world at large. If George Sand, led afterwards into searching for this
empirical remedy for the wrongs and sufferings of the masses, believed
the elixir to have been found in the establishment of popular
sovereignty by universal suffrage, it was through the persuasive
arguments of the leaders of the movement, with whom at this period she
was first brought into personal relations. Her own unbiassed judgment,
to which she reverted long years after, when she had seen these
illusions perish sadly, was less sanguine in its prognostications for
the immediate future, as appears in her own reflections in a letter of
this time:--

What I see in the midst of the divergencies of all these reforming
sects is a waste of generous sentiments and of noble thoughts, a
tendency towards social amelioration, but an impossibility for the
time to bring forth through the want of a head to that great body
with a hundred hands, that tears itself to pieces, for not knowing
what to attack. So far the struggles make only dust and noise. We
have not yet come to the era that will construct new societies, and
people them with perfected men.

She had recently been introduced to a political and legal celebrity of
his day, the famous advocate Michel, of Bourges. He was then at the
height of his reputation, which, won by his eloquent and successful
defense of political prisoners on various occasions, was considerable.
Madame Sand had been advised to consult him professionally about her
business affairs, and for this purpose went over one day with some of
her Berrichon friends to see him at Bourges. But the man of law had, it
appears, been reading _Lelia_, and instead of talking of business with