This taste for pastoral things, at the time of the Revolution, was not a mere coincidence. The same principles led up to the idyll in literature and to the Revolution in history. Man was supposed to be naturally good, and the idea was to take away from him all the restraints which had been invented for curbing his nature. Political and religious authority, moral discipline and the prestige of tradition had all formed a kind of network of impediments, by which man had been imprisoned by legislators who were inclined to pessimism. By doing away with all these fetters, the Golden Age was to be restored and universal happiness was to be established. Such was the faith of the believers in the millennium of 1789, and of 1848. The same dream began over and over again, from Diderot to Lamartine and from Jean-Jacques to George Sand. The same state of mind which we see reflected in _La Mare au Diable_ was to make of George Sand the revolutionary writer of 1848. We can now understand the _role_ which the novelist played in the second Republic. It is one of the most surprising pages in the history of this extraordinary character. The joy with which George Sand welcomed the Republic can readily be imagined. She had been a Republican ever since the days of Michel of Bourges, and a democrat since the time when, as a little girl, she took the side of her plebeian mother against "the old Countesses." For a long time she had been wishing for and expecting a change of government. She would not have been satisfied with less than this. She was not much moved by the Thiers-Guizot duel, and it would have given her no pleasure to be killed for the sake of Odilon Barrot. She was a disciple of Romanticism, and she wanted a storm. When the storm broke, carrying all before it, a throne, a whole society with its institutions, she hurried away from her peaceful Nohant. She wanted to breathe the atmosphere of a revolution, and she was soon intoxicated by it. "Long live the Republic," she wrote in her letters. "What a dream and what enthusiasm, and then, too, what behaviour, what order in Paris. I have just arrived, and I saw the last of the barricades. The people are great, sublime, simple and generous, the most admirable people in the universe. I spent nights without any sleep and days without sitting down. Every one was wild and intoxicated with delight, for after going to sleep in the mire they have awakened in heaven."(39) (39) _Correspondance: _ To Ch. Poncy, March 9, 1848. She goes on dreaming thus of the stars. Everything she hears, everything she sees enchants her. The most absurd measures delight her. She either thinks they are most noble, liberal steps to have taken, or else they are very good jokes.