Part of it was published not long ago in the _Revue illustree_ under the title of _Lettres de lemmze_. None of George Sand's letters surpass these epistles to Michel for fervent passion, beauty of form, and a kind of superb _impudeur_. Let us take, for instance, this call to her beloved. George Sand, after a night of work, complains of fatigue, hunger and cold: "Oh, my lover," she cries, "appear, and, like the earth on the return of the May sunshine, I should be reanimated, and would fling off my shroud of ice and thrill with love. The wrinkles of suffering would disappear from my brow, and I should seem beautiful and young to you, for I should leap with joy into your iron strong arms. Come, come, and I shall have strength, health, youth, gaiety, hope. . . . I will go forth to meet you like the bride of the song, `to her well-beloved.'"The Well-beloved to whom this Shulamite would hasten was a bald-headed provincial lawyer who wore spectacles and three mufflers. But it appears that his "beauty, veiled and unintelligible to the vulgar, revealed itself, like that of Jupiter hidden under human form, to the women whom he loved."We must not smile at these mythological comparisons. George Sand had, as it were, restored for herself that condition of soul to which the ancient myths are due. A great current of naturalist poetry circulates through these pages. In Theocritus and in Rousard there are certain descriptive passages. There is an analogy between them and that image of the horse which carries George Sand along on her impetuous course.
"As soon as he catches sight of me, he begins to paw the ground and rear impatiently. I have trained him to clear a hundred fathoms a second. The sky and the ground disappear when he bears me along under those long vaults formed by the apple-trees in blossom. . . .
The least sound of my voice makes him bound like a ball; the smallest bird makes him shudder and hurry along like a child with no experience.
He is scarcely five years old, and he is timid and restive.
His black crupper shines in the sunshine like a raven's wing."This description has all the relief of an antique figure.
Another time, George Sand tells how she has seen Phoebus throw off her robe of clouds and rush along radiant into the pure sky.
The following day she writes: "She was eaten by the evil spirits.
The dark sprites from Erebus, riding on sombre-looking clouds, threw themselves on her, and it was in vain that she struggled."We might compare these passages with a letter of July 10, 1836, in which she tells how she throws herself, all dressed as she is, into the Indre, and then continues her course through the sunny meadows, and with what voluptuousness she revels in all the joys of primitive life, and imagines herself living in the beautiful times of ancient Greece. There are days and pages when George Sand, under the afflux of physical life, is pagan. Her genius then is that of the greenwood divinities, who, at certain times of the year, were intoxicated by the odour of the meadows and the sap of the woods.
If some day we were to have her complete correspondence given to us, I should not be surprised if many people preferred it to her letters to Musset. In the first place, it is not spoiled by that preoccupation which the Venice lovers had, of writing literature.
Mingled with the accents of sincere passion, we do not find extraordinary conceptions of paradoxical metaphysics. It is Nature which speaks in these letters, and for that very reason they are none the less sorrowful. They, too, tell us of a veritable martyrdom.
We can easily imagine from them that Michel was coarse, despotic, faithless and jealous. We know, too, that more than once George Sand came very near losing all patience with him, so that we can sympathize with her when she wrote to Madame d'Agoult in July, 1836:
"I have had, my fill of great men (excuse the expression). . . .
I prefer to see them all in Plutarch, as they would not then cause me any suffering on the human side. May they all be carved in marble or cast in bronze, but may I hear no more about them!" _Amen_.
What disgusted George Sand with her Michel was his vanity and his craving for adulation. In July, 1837, she had come to the end of her patience, as she wrote to Girerd. It was one of her peculiarities to always take a third person into her confidence.
At the time of Sandeau, this third person was Emile Regnault;at the time of Musset, Sainte-Beuve, and now it was Girerd.
"I am tired out with my own devotion, and I have fought against my pride with all the strength of my love. I have had nothing but ingratitude and hardness as my recompense. I have felt my love dying away and my soul being crushed, but I am cured at last. . . ."If only she had had all this suffering for the sake of a great man, but this time it was only in imaginary great man.
The influence, though, that he had had over her thought was real, and in a certain way beneficial.
At the beginning she was far from sharing Michel's ideas, and for some of them she felt an aversion which amounted to horror.
The dogma of absolute equality seemed an absurdity to her.
The Republic, or rather the various republics then in gestation, appeared to her a sort of Utopia, and as she saw each of her friends making "his own little Republic" for himself, she had not much faith in the virtue of that form of government for uniting all French people.
One point shocked her above all others in Michel's theories.
This politician did not like artists. Just as the Revolution did not find chemists necessary, he considered that the Republic did not need writers, painters and musicians. These were all useless individuals, and the Republic would give them a little surprise by putting a labourer's spade or a shoemaker's awl into their hands. George Sand considered this idea not only barbarous, but silly.
