as tending to eliminate the ills of extreme inequalities in the social structure, and to preserve everything in it that is worth preserving. CHAPTER VIII. NOVELIST AND POLITICIAN. By her novels classed as "socialistic," Madame Sand had, as we have seen, incurred the public hostility of those whom her doctrines alarmed. And yet her "communist" heroes and heroines are the most pacific and inoffensive of social influences. They merely aspire to isolate themselves, and personally to practice principles and virtues of the highest order; unworldliness such as, if general, might indeed turn the earth into the desired Utopia. Nothing can be said against their example, unless that it is too good, and that there is little hope of its being widely followed. Charges of another sort, no less bitter, and though exaggerated, somewhat better founded, assailed her after the appearance in 1847 of _Lucrezia Floriani_, a novel of character-analysis entirely, but into which she was accused of having introduced an unflattering portrait of Frederic Chopin, whose long and long-requited attachment to her entitled him to better treatment at her hands. With respect to the general question of such alleged fictitious reproductions, few novelists escape getting into trouble on this head. It has been aptly observed by Mr. Hamerton that the usual procedure of the reading public in such cases is to fix on some real personage as distinctly unlike the character in the book as possible, for the original, and then to complain of the unfaithfulness of the resemblance. Madame Sand's taste and higher art-instincts would have revolted against the practice--now unfortunately no longer confined to inferior writers--of forcing attention to a novel by making it the gibbet of well-known personalities, with little or no disguise; and Chopin himself, morbidly sensitive and fanciful though he was, read her work without perceiving in it any intention there to portray their relations to each other, which, indeed, had differed essentially from those of the personages in the romance. _Lucrezia Floriani_ is a _cantatrice_ of genius, who, whilst still young, has retired from the world, indifferent to fame, and effectually disenchanted--so she believes--with passion. Despite an experience strange and stormy, even for a member of her Bohemian profession, Lucrezia has miraculously preserved intact her native nobility of soul, and appears as a meet object of worship to a fastidious young prince on his travels, who becomes passionately enamored of her. He over-persuades Lucrezia into trusting that they will find their felicity in each other. Their happiness is of the briefest duration, owing to the unreasonable character of the prince, who leads the actress a miserable life; his love taking the form of petty tyranny and retrospective jealousy. After long years of this material and moral captivity, the heroic Lucrezia fades and dies.