d to me one chance more of arriving at that austerity
towards which I felt myself being drawn with a kind of religious
enthusiasm."(30)

(30) _Histoire de via vie._

We can only imagine that she was deceiving herself. To accept a lover
for the sake of giving up lovers altogether seems a somewhat heroic
means to an end, but also somewhat deceptive. It is certainly true that
there was something more in this love than the attraction she felt for
Musset and for Michel. In the various forms and degrees of our feelings,
there is nothing gained by attempting to establish decided divisions
and absolute demarcations for the sake of classifying them all. Among
sentiments which are akin, but which our language distinguishes when
defining them, there may be some mixture or some confusion with regard
to their origin. Alfred de Vigny gives us in _Samson_, as the origin of
love, even in man, the remembrance of his mother's caresses:

_Il revera toujours a la chaleur du sein._

It seems, therefore, that we cannot apply the same reasoning, with
regard to love, when referring to the love of a man or of a woman. With
the man there is more pride of possession, and with the woman there
is more tenderness, more pity, more charity. All this leads us to
the conclusion that maternal affection in love is not an unnatural
sentiment, as has so often been said, or rather a perversion of
sentiment. It is rather a sentiment in which too much instinct and
heredity are mingled in a confused way. The object of the education of
feeling is to arrive at discerning and eliminating the elements which
interfere with the integrity of it. Rousseau called Madame de Warens
his mother, but he was a man who was lacking in good taste. George Sand
frequently puts into her novels this conception of love which we see her
put into practice in life. It is impossible when analyzing it closely
not to find something confused and disturbing in it which somewhat
offends us.

It now remains for us to study what influence George Sand's friendship
with some of the greatest artists of her times had on her works. Beside
Liszt and Chopin, she knew Delacroix, Madame Dorval, Pauline Viardot,
Nourrit and Lablache. Through them she went into artistic circles.
Some of her novels are stories of the life of artists. _Les Maitres
Mosaistes_ treats of the rivalry between two studios. _La derniere
Aldini_ is the story of a handsome gondolier who, as a tenor, turned the
heads of pa