Page:George Sand by Bertha Thomas.djvu/220

210 night making dresses for the puppets. In an agreeable little article she has devoted to the subject, she describes how from the crudest beginnings they succeeded in elaborating their art to a high pitch; the répertoire of their lilliputian theatre including more than twenty plays, their "company" over a hundred marionnettes.

To the next year, 1860, belong the pleasant tale of artisan life, La Ville Noire, and the well-known and popular Marquis de Villemer, notable as a decided success in a genre seldom adopted by her, that of the purely society novel.

Already Madame Sand had outlived the period of which she was so brilliant a representative. After the Romantic movement had spent its force, a reaction had set in that was influencing the younger school of writers, and that has continued to give the direction to successful talent until the present day. Of the so-called "realism," Madame Sand said that it was nothing new. She saw there merely another form of the same revolt of nature against affectation and convention which had prompted the Romantic movement, whose disciples had now become guilty of affectation in their turn. Madame Bovary she pronounced with truth to be but concentrated Balzac. She was ready to perceive and do justice to the great ability of the author, as to original genius in any school; thus of Tourguénief she speaks with enthusiasm: "Realist to see all, poet