"So you thought," wrote Madame Sand to a political friend, in 1849, "that I was drinking blood out of the skulls of aristocrats. Not I! I am reading Virgil and learning Latin." And her best propaganda, as by and by she came to own, was not that carried on in journals such as _La Vraie Republique_ and _La Cause du Peuple_. Through her works of imagination she has exercised an influence more powerful and universal, if indirect. Among the more than half a hundred romances of George Sand, there stands out a little group of three, belonging to the period we have now reached--the _mezzo cammin_ of her life--creations in a special style, and over which the public voice, whether of fastidious critics or general readers, in France or abroad, has been and remains unanimous in praise. In these, her pastoral tales, she hit on a new and happy vein which she was peculiarly qualified to work, combining as she did, intimate knowledge of French peasant 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.