carcely five
years old, and he is timid and restive. His black crupper shines in the
sunshine like a raven's wing." This description has all the relief of an
antique figure. Another time, George Sand tells how she has seen Phoebus
throw off her robe of clouds and rush along radiant into the pure sky.
The following day she writes: "She was eaten by the evil spirits.
The dark sprites from Erebus, riding on sombre-looking clouds, threw
themselves on her, and it was in vain that she struggled." We might
compare these passages with a letter of July 10, 1836, in which she
tells how she throws herself, all dressed as she is, into the Indre,
and then continues her course through the sunny meadows, and with
what voluptuousness she revels in all the joys of primitive life, and
imagines herself living in the beautiful times of ancient Greece. There
are days and pages when George Sand, under the afflux of physical life,
is pagan. Her genius then is that of the greenwood divinities, who, at
certain times of the year, were intoxicated by the odour of the meadows
and the sap of the woods. If some day we were to have her complete
correspondence given to us, I should not be surprised if many people
preferred it to her letters to Musset. In the first place, it is not
spoiled by that preoccupation which the Venice lovers had, of writing
literature. Mingled with the accents of sincere passion, we do not find
extraordinary conceptions of paradoxical metaphysics. It is Nature which
speaks in these letters, and for that very reason they are none the less
sorrowful. They, too, tell us of a veritable martyrdom. We can easily
imagine from them that Michel was coarse, despotic, faithless and
jealous. We know, too, that more than once George Sand came very near
losing all patience with him, so that we can sympathize with her when
she wrote to Madame d'Agoult in July, 1836:

"I have had, my fill of great men (excuse the expression). . . . I
prefer to see them all in Plutarch, as they would not then cause me any
suffering on the human side. May they all be carved in marble or cast in
bronze, but may I hear no more about them!" _Amen_.

What disgusted George Sand with her Michel was his vanity and his
craving for adulation. In July, 1837, she had come to the end of her
patience, as she wrote to Girerd. It was one of her peculiarities to
always take a third person into her confidence. At the time of
Sandeau, this third person was Emile Regnault; at t