own to the lowest of popular stages,
the Funambules, where reigned at that time a real artist in pantomime,
Debureau. His Pierrot, a sort of modified Pulchinello, was renowned; and
attracted more fastidious critics to his audience than the Paris
artisans whose idol he was. Since then Madame Sand had numbered among
her personal friends such leading dramatic celebrities as Madame Dorval,
Bocage, and Pauline Garcia. "I like actors," she says playfully, "which
has scandalized some austere people. I have also been found fault with
for liking the peasantry. Among these I have passed my life, and as I
found them, so have I described them. As these, in the light of the sun,
give us our daily bread for our bodies, so those by gaslight give us our
daily bread of fiction, so needful to the wearied spirit, troubled by
realities." Peasants and players seem to be the types of humanity
farthest removed from each other, and it is worthy of remark that George
Sand was equally successful in her presentation of both.

Her preference for originality and spontaneity before all other
qualities in a dramatic artist was characteristic of herself, though
not of her nation. Thus it was that Madame Dorval, the heroine of
_Antony_ and _Marion Delorme_, won her unbounded admiration. Even in
Racine she clearly preferred her to Mlle. Mars, as being a less studied
actress, and one who abandoned herself more to the inspiration of the
moment. The effect produced, as described by Madame Sand, will be
understood by all keenly alive, like herself, to the enjoyment of
dramatic art. "She" (Madame Dorval) "seemed to me to be myself, more
expansive, and to express in action and emotion all that I seek to
express in writing." And compared with such an art, in which conception
and expression are simultaneous, her own art of words and phrases would
at such moments appear to her as but a pale reflection.

Bocage, the great character actor of his time, was another who likewise
appealed particularly to her sympathies, as the personation, on the
boards, of the protest of the romantic school against the slavery of
convention and tradition. Her acquaintance with him dated from the first
representation of Hugo's _Lucrece Borgia_, February, 1833, when Bocage
and the author of _Indiana_, then strangers to each other, chanced to
sit side by side. In their joint enthusiasm over the play they made the
beginning of a thirty years' friendship, terminated only by Bocage's
deat