whom said: 'That reconciled us, we kissed each other,
and ever since then we have been mortal enemies.'" He also tells that
there is a report that in her novel, entitled _Horace_, she has given
as unflattering a portrait as possible of her dear, sweet, excellent
friend, Madame d'Agoult, the _Arabella_ of the _Lettres d'un voyageur_.
"The portraits continue," he writes, "all true to life, without being
like each other." In the same book, _Horace_, there is a portrait
of Mallefille, who was beloved "during one quarter of the moon," and
abhorred afterwards. He concludes the letter with the following words:
"Ah, how fortunate I am to be forgotten by those people! I am not afraid
of their indifference, but I should be afraid of their attentions. . . .
Say what you like, my dear friend, those people do not tempt me at all.
Futility and spitefulness dissolved in a great deal of _ennui_, is a
bad kind of medicine." He then goes on to make fun, in terms that it is
difficult to quote, of the silly enthusiasm of a woman like Marliani,
and even of George Sand, for the theories of Pierre Leroux, of which
they did not understand the first letter, but which had taken their
fancy. George Sand may have looked upon Lamennais as a master, but it is
very evident that she was not his favoured disciple.

It was due to his teaching that George Sand obtained her definite
ideas about Catholicism, or rather against it. She was decidedly its
adversary, because she held that the Church had stifled the spirit of
liberty, that it had thrown a veil over the words of Christ, and that it
was the obstacle in the way of holy equality. What she owed specially,
though, to Lamennais was another lesson, of quite another character.
Lamennais was the man of the nineteenth century who waged the finest
battle against individualism, against "the scandal of the adoration of
man by man."(34)

(34) Compare Brunetiere, _Evolution de la poesie lyrique_,
vol. i. p. 310.

Under his influence, George Sand began to attach less importance to the
personal point of view, she ceased applying everything to herself, and
she discovered the importance of the life of others. If we study this
attentively, we shall see that a new phase now commenced in the history
of her ideas. Lamennais was the origin of this transformation, although
it is personified in another man, and that other man, was named Pierre
Leroux.

What a strange mystery it is, among so many other mys