The Project Gutenberg EBook of Mauprat, by George Sand

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Title: Mauprat

Author: George Sand

Translator: Stanley Young

Release Date: March 25, 2006 [EBook #2194]

Language: English

Character set encoding: ASCII

*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MAUPRAT ***

Produced by Dagny; and John Bickers

MAUPRAT

by George Sand

Translated by Stanley Young

CONTENTS

George Sand Pearl Mary-Teresa Craigie (John Oliver Hobbes)

Life of George Sand Edmund Gosse

The Author's Preface

Mauprat

GEORGE SAND

Napoleon in exile declared that were he again on the throne he should
make a point of spending two hours a day in conversation with women,
from whom there was much to be learnt. He had, no doubt, several types
of women in mind, but it is more than probable that the banishment of
Madame de Stael rose before him as one of the mistakes in his career. It
was not that he showed lack of judgment merely by the persecution of a
rare talent, but by failing to see that the rare talent was pointing out
truths very valuable to his own safety. This is what happened in France
when George Sand--the greatest woman writer the world has known, or is
ever likely to know--was attacked by the orthodox critics of her time.
They feared her warnings; they detested her sincerity--a sincerity
displayed as much in her life as in her works (the hypocrite's Paradise
was precisely her idea of Hell); they resented bitterly an independence
of spirit which in a man would have been in the highest degree
distinguished, which remained, under every test, untamable. With a kind
of _bonhomie_ which one can only compare with Fielding's, with a passion
as great as Montaigne's for acknowledging the truths of experience,
with an absence of self-consciousness truly amazing in the artistic
temperament of either sex, she wrote exactly as she thought, saw and
felt. Humour was not her strong point. She had an exultant joy in
living, but laughter, whether genial or sardonic, is not in her work.
Irony she seldom, if ever, employed; satire she never attempted. It was
on the maternal, the sympathetic side that her femininity, and therefore
her creative genius, was most stro