a Marcie_
for _Le Monde_. She addresses herself to an imaginary correspondent,
to a woman supposed to be suffering from that agitation and impatience
which she had experienced herself.

"You are sad," says George Sand to her, "you are suffering, and you are
bored to death." We will now take note of some of the advice she gives
to this woman. She no longer believes that it belongs to human dignity
to have the liberty of changing. "The one thing to which man aspires,
the thing which makes him great, is permanence in the moral state. All
which tends to give stability to our desires, to strengthen the human
will and affections, tends to bring about the _reign of God_ on earth,
which means love and the practice of truth." She then speaks of vain
dreams. "Should we even have time to think about the impossible if we
did all that is necessary? Should we despair ourselves if we were to
restore hope in those people who have nothing left them but hope?" With
regard to feminist claims, she says: "Women are crying out that they are
slaves: let them wait until men are free! . . . In the mean time we must
not compromise the future by our impatience with the present. . . . It
is to be feared that vain attempts of this kind and unjustifiable claims
may do harm to what is styled at present the cause of women. There is
no doubt that women have certain rights and that they are suffering
injustice. They ought to lay claim to a better future, to a wise
independence, to a greater participation in knowledge, and to more
respect, interest and esteem from men. This future, though, is in their
own hands."

This is wisdom itself. It would be impossible to put it more clearly,
and to warn women in a better way, that the greatest danger for
their cause would be the triumph of what is called by an ironical
term--feminism.

These retractions, though, have very little effect. There is a certain
piquancy in showing up an author who is in contradiction with himself,
in showing how he refutes his own paradoxes. But these are striking
paradoxes which are not readily forgotten. What I want to show is that
in these first novels by George Sand we have about the whole of
the feminist programme of to-day. Everything is there, the right to
happiness, the necessity of reforming marriage, the institution, in
a more or less near future, of free unions. Our feminists of to-day,
French, English, or Norwegian authoresses, and theoricians like Ellen
Key, with her b