sant life with sympathetic interest in her
subject and lively poetic fancy. Here she affronts no prejudices,
advances no startling theories, handles no subtle, treacherous social
questions, and to these compositions in a perfectly original _genre_ she
brought the freshness of genius which "age cannot wither," together with
the strength and finish of a practiced hand.

Peasants had figured as accessories in her earlier works. The rustic
hermit and philosopher, Patience, and Marcasse the rat-catcher, in
_Mauprat_, are note-worthy examples. In 1844 had appeared _Jeanne_, with
its graceful dedication to Francoise Meillant, the unlettered
peasant-girl who may have suggested the work she could not read--one of
a family of rural proprietors, spoken of by Madame Sand in a letter of
1843 as a fine survival of a type already then fast vanishing--of
patriarchally constituted family-life, embodying all that was grand and
simple in the forms of the olden time.

In _Jeanne_, Madame Sand had first ventured to make a peasant-girl the
central figure of her novel, though still so far deferring to the
received notions of what was essential in order to interest the "gentle"
reader as to surround her simple heroine with personages of rank and
education. Jeanne herself, moreover, is an exceptional and a highly
idealized type--as it were a sister to Joan of Arc, not the inspired
warrior-maid, but the visionary shepherdess of the Vosges. Yet the
creation is sufficiently real. The author had observed how favorable was
the life of solitude and constant communion with nature led by many of
these country children in their scattered homesteads, to the development
of remarkable and tenacious individuality. So with the strange and
poetical Jeanne, too innately refined to prosper in her rough human
environment, yet too fixedly simple to fare much better in more
cultivated circles. She is the victim of a sort of celestial stupidity
we admire and pity at once. In this study of a peasant heroine resides
such charm as the book possesses, and the attempt was to lead on the
author to the productions above alluded to, _La Mareau Diable_,
_Francois le Champi_, and _La Petite Fadette_. Of this popular trio the
first had been published already two years before the Revolution, in
1846; the second was appearing in the Feuilleton of the _Journal des
Debats_ at the very moment of the breaking of the storm, which
interrupted its publication awhile. When those tumul