d us a trick in giving
lessons to that _Babylonian_, so that by the exercise of a magnetic
and disastrous power over us, he may lead our spirits astray.

And she would prove to the demagogue, out of his own mouth, that
everything cannot be reduced to "bread and shoes all round," as the
grand desideratum. Give these to men, it will not suffice. The eloquent
orator instinctively seeks besides to impart "hallowed emotions and
mystic enthusiasm to those who toil and sweat--he teaches them to hope,
to dream of God, to take courage and lift themselves above the sickening
miseries of human conditions by the thought of a future, chimerical it
may be, but strengthening and sublime."

For a period, however, she was too fascinated by the new ideas to judge
them, and she straightway sought in her art a means of popularizing
them. "These ideas," she writes in a later preface to her socialist
novel, _Le Peche de M. Antoine_, "at which, as yet but a small number of
conservative spirits had taken alarm, had, as yet, only really begun to
sprout in a small number of attentive, laborious minds. The government,
so long as no actual form of political application was assumed, was not
to be disquieted by theories, and let every man make his own, put forth
his dream, and innocently construct his city of the future, by his own
fire-side, in the garden of his imagination."

She was aware that her readers thought her novels getting more and more
tedious, in proportion as she communicated to her fictitious heroes and
heroines the pre-occupations of her brain, and that she was thus
stepping out of the domain of art. But she affirmed she could never help
writing of whatever was absorbing her thoughts and feelings at the
moment, and must take her chance of boring the public. Fortunately for
_Le Peche de M. Antoine_, nature and human nature are here allowed to
claim the larger share of our attention, and philosophy is a secondary
feature. The scene is laid in the picturesque Marche country on the
confines of Berry, a day's journey from Nohant, and we are glad to
linger with her along the rocky banks of the Creuse, or among the ruined
castles of Crozant and Chateaubrun. The novel contains much that is
original and admirable in the drawing of characters of the most opposite
classes.

Finally, in _Le Meunier d'Angibault_,[C] written as was the
last-mentioned work some four or five years later (1844-45), but which
may be named here, as makin