genious effect, she had studied
both historically and practically. She and her son found it so
fascinating that, years before this time, a miniature stage had been
constructed by the latter at Nohant, over which he presided, and which
they and their friends found an endless source of amusement. Madame Sand
wrote little dramas expressly for such representations, and would sit up
all night, making dresses for the puppets. In an agreeable little
article she has devoted to the subject, she describes how from the
crudest beginnings they succeeded in elaborating their art to a high
pitch; the _repertoire_ of their lilliputian theater including more than
twenty plays, their "company" over a hundred marionettes.

To the next year, 1860, belong the pleasant tale of artisan life, _La
Ville Noire_, and the well-known and popular _Marquis de Villemer_,
notable as a decided success in a _genre_ seldom adopted by her, that of
the purely society novel.

Already Madame Sand had outlived the period of which she was so
brilliant a representative. After the Romantic movement had spent its
force, a reaction had set in that was influencing the younger school of
writers, and that has continued to give the direction to successful
talent until the present day. Of the so-called "realism," Madame Sand
said that it was nothing new. She saw there merely another form of the
same revolt of nature against affectation and convention which had
prompted the Romantic movement, whose disciples had now become guilty of
affectation in their turn. _Madame Bovary_ she pronounced with truth to
be but concentrated Balzac. She was ready to perceive and do justice to
the great ability of the author, as to original genius in any school;
thus of Tourguenief she speaks with enthusiasm: "Realist to see all,
poet to beautify all, great heart to pity and understand all." But she
deplored the increasing tendency among artists to give the preference
among realities to the ugliest and the most painful. Her personal
leanings avowedly were towards the other extreme; but she was too
large-minded not to recognize that truth in one form or another must
always be the prime object of the artist's search. The manner of its
presentation will vary with the age.

Let the realists, if they like, go on proclaiming that all is
prose, and the idealists that all is poesy. The last will have
their rainy days, the first their days of sunshine. In all arts the
victory