Page:The Galaxy (New York, Sheldon & Co.) Volume 24 (1877).djvu/64

 in the eyes of the world. But the old man reassures her, and asks, with a "sourire malin et affectueux," why she should care for the judgment of a world which has viewed so harshly her own irregularity of conduct.

Mme. Sand is for ever striking these false notes; we meet in her pages the most singular mixings up. In "Jacques" there is the queerest table of relations between the characters. Jacques is possibly the brother of Silvia, who is probably, on another side, sister of his wife, who is the mistress of Octave, Silvia's dismissed amant! Add to this that if Jacques is not the brother of Silvia, who is an illegitimate child, he is convertible into her lover. On a'y perd. Silvia, a clever woman, is the guide, philosopher, and friend of this melancholy Jacques; and when his wife, who desires to become the mistress of Octave (her discarded lover), and yet, not finding it quite plain sailing to do so, weeps over the crookedness of her situation, she writes to the injured husband that she has been obliged to urge Fernande not to take things so hard: "je suis forcée de la consoler et de la relever à ses propres yeux." Very characteristic of Mme. Sand is this fear lest the unfaithful wife should take too low a view of herself. One wonders what had become of her sense of humor. Fernande is to be "relevée" before her fall, and the operation is somehow to cover her fall prospectively.

Take another example from "Léone Léoni." The subject of the story is the sufferings of an infatuated young girl, who follows over Europe the most faithless, unscrupulous, and ignoble, but also the most irresistible of charmers. It is "Manon Lescaut," with the incurable fickleness of Manon attributed to a man; and as in the Abbé Prevost's story the touching element is the devotion and constancy of the injured and deluded Desgrieux, so in "Léone Léoni" we are invited to feel for the too closely-clinging Juliette, who is dragged through the mire of a passion which she curses and yet which survives unnamable outrage. She tells the tale herself, and it might have been expected that, to deepen its effect, the author would have represented her as withdrawn from the world and cured of the malady of love. But we find her living with another charmer, jewelled and perfumed; in her own words, she is a fille entretenue, and it is to her new lover that she relates the story of the stormy life she led with the old. The situation requires no comment beyond our saying that the author had morally no taste. Of this want of moral taste I remember another striking instance. MLle. Merquem, who gives her name to one of the later novels, is a young girl of the most elevated character, beloved by a young man, the intensity of whose affection she desires to test. To do this she contrives the graceful plan of introducing into her house a mysterious infant, of whose parentage she offers an explanation so obtrusively vague, that the young man is driven regretfully to the induction that its female parent is none other than herself. I forget to what extent he is staggered, but, if I rightly remember, he withstands the test. I do not judge him, but it is permitted to judge the young lady.

I have called George Sand an improvisatrice, and it is in this character that, in dealing with the conduct of people in love, she goes sometimes so strangely astray. When she deals with other things, with matters of a more "objective" cast, she is always delightful; nothing could be more charming than her tales of mystery, intrigue, and adventure. "Consuelo," "L'Homme de Neige," "Le Piccinino," "Teverino," "Le Beau Laurence" and its sequel, "Pierre qui Roule," "Antonia," "Tamaris," "La Famille de Germandre," "La Filleule," "Le dernière Aldini," "Cadio," "Flamarande"—these things have all the spontaneous inventiveness of the romances of Alexandre Dumas, his open-air quality, his pleasure in a story for a story's sake, together with