have opinions yet, but not too young to
know what opinions he will have when he is free to have them. "You
can reply," says his mother, "that you are Republican by race and
by nature." She then adds a few aphorisms. "Princes are our natural
enemies," she says; and then again: "However good-hearted the child of
a king may be, he is destined to be a tyrant." All this is certainly a
great commotion to make about her little son accepting a glass of fruit
syrup and a few cakes at the house of a schoolfellow. But George Sand
was then under the domination of "Robespierre in person."

Michel had brought George Sand over to republicanism. Without wishing
to exaggerate the service he had rendered her by this, it appears to
me that it certainly was one, if we look at it in one way. Rightly or
wrongly, George Sand had seen in Michel the man who devotes himself
entirely to a cause of general interest. She had learnt something in
his school, and perhaps all the more thoroughly because it was in his
school. She had learnt that love is in any case a selfish passion. She
had learnt that another object must be given to the forces of sympathy
of a generous heart, and that such an object may be the service of
humanity, devotion to an idea.

This was a turn in the road, and led the writer on to leave the personal
style for the impersonal style.

There was another service, too, which Michel had rendered to George
Sand. He had pleaded for her in her petition for separation from her
husband, and she had won her case.

Ever since George Sand had taken back her independence in 1831, her
intercourse with Dudevant had not been disagreeable. She and her husband
exchanged cordial letters. When he came to Paris, he made no attempt to
stay with his wife, lest he should inconvenience her. "I shall put up
at Hippolyte's," he says in his letter to her. "I do not want to
inconvenience you in the least, nor to be inconvenienced myself, which
is quite natural." He certainly was a most discreet husband. When
she started for Italy, he begs her to take advantage of so good an
opportunity for seeing such a beautiful country. He was also a husband
ready to give good advice. Later on, he invited Pagello to spend a
little time at Nohant. This was certainly the climax in this strange
story.

During the months, though, that the husband and wife were together,
again at Nohant, the scenes began once more. Dudevant's irritability was
increased by the fact that he