love for another man. Until
then it was considered that such love was a weakness, and that it might
become a fault. But, after all, is not passion a fatal and irresistible
thing?

"No human creature can command love, and no one is to be blamed for
feeling it or for ceasing to feel it. What lowers a woman is untruth." A
little farther on we are told: "They are not guilty, for they love each
other. There is no crime where there is sincere love." According to
this theory, the union of man and woman depends on love alone. When love
disappears, the union cannot continue. Marriage is a human institution,
but passion is of Divine essence. In case of any dissension, it is
always the institution of marriage which is to be blamed.

The sole end in view of marriage is charm, either that of sentiment or
that of the senses, and its sole object is the exchange of two fancies.
As the oath of fidelity is either a stupidity or a degradation, can
anything more opposed to common sense, and a more absolute ignorance
of all that is noble and great, be imagined than the effort mankind
is making, against all the chances of destruction by which he is
surrounded, to affirm, in face of all that changes, his will and
intention to continue? We all remember the heart-rending lamentation of
Diderot: "The first promises made between two creatures of flesh," he
says, "were made at the foot of a rock crumbling to dust. They called on
Heaven to be a witness of their constancy, but the skies in the Heaven
above them were never the same for an instant. Everything was changing,
both within them and around them, and they believed that their heart
would know no change. Oh, what children, what children always!" Ah,
not children, but what men rather! We know these fluctuations in our
affections. And it is because we are afraid of our own fragility that
we call to our aid the protection of laws, to which submission is no
slavery, as it is voluntary submission. Nature does not know these laws,
but it is by them that we distinguish ourselves from Nature and that
we rise above it. The rock on which we tread crumbles to dust, the sky
above our heads is never the same an instant, but, in the depth of our
hearts, there is the moral law--and that never changes!

In order to reply to these paradoxes, where shall we go in search of our
arguments? We can go to George Sand herself. A few years later, during
her intercourse with Lamennals, she wrote her famous _Lettres