the
Extinction of Pauperism. She wrote back a flattering letter in which,
however, with characteristic sincerity, she is careful to remind him
that the party to which she belonged could never acknowledge any
sovereign but the people; that this they considered to be incompatible
with the sovereignty of one man; that no miracle, no personification of
popular genius in a single individual, could prove to them the right of
that individual to sovereign power.

Since then she had seen the people supreme, and been forced to own that
they knew not what they wanted, nor whither they were going, divided in
mind, ferocious in action. Among the leaders, she had seen some
infatuated by the allurements of personal popularity, and the rest
showing, by their inability to cope with the perplexities of
administrative government, that so far philosophical speculations were
of no avail in the actual solution of social problems.

The result of her disenchantment was in no degree the overthrow of her
political faith. A conviction was dawning on her that her social ideal
was absolutely impracticable in any future that she and her friends
could hope to live to see. But the belief on which she founded her
social religion was one in which she never wavered; a certainty that a
progress, the very idea of which now seemed chimerical, would some day
appear to all as a natural thing; nay, that the stream of tendency would
carry men towards this goal in spite of themselves.

CHAPTER IX.

PASTORAL TALES.

"So you thought," wrote Madame Sand to a political friend, in 1849,
"that I was drinking blood out of the skulls of aristocrats. Not I! I am
reading Virgil and learning Latin." And her best propaganda, as by and
by she came to own, was not that carried on in journals such as _La
Vraie Republique_ and _La Cause du Peuple_. Through her works of
imagination she has exercised an influence more powerful and universal,
if indirect.

Among the more than half a hundred romances of George Sand, there stands
out a little group of three, belonging to the period we have now
reached--the _mezzo cammin_ of her life--creations in a special style,
and over which the public voice, whether of fastidious critics or
general readers, in France or abroad, has been and remains unanimous in
praise.

In these, her pastoral tales, she hit on a new and happy vein which she
was peculiarly qualified to work, combining as she did, intimate
knowledge of French pea