"As soon as he catches sight of me, he begins to paw the ground and rear impatiently. I have trained him to clear a hundred fathoms a second. The sky and the ground disappear when he bears me along under those long vaults formed by the apple-trees in blossom. . . . The least sound of my voice makes him bound like a ball; the smallest bird makes him shudder and hurry along like a child with no experience. He is scarcely five years old, and he is timid and restive. His black crupper shines in the sunshine like a raven's wing." This description has all the relief of an antique figure. Another time, George Sand tells how she has seen Phoebus throw off her robe of clouds and rush along radiant into the pure sky. The following day she writes: "She was eaten by the evil spirits. The dark sprites from Erebus, riding on sombre-looking clouds, threw themselves on her, and it was in vain that she struggled." We might compare these passages with a letter of July 10, 1836, in which she tells how she throws herself, all dressed as she is, into the Indre, and then continues her course through the sunny meadows, and with what voluptuousness she revels in all the joys of primitive life, and imagines herself living in the beautiful times of ancient Greece. There are days and pages when George Sand, under the afflux of physical life, is pagan. Her genius then is that of the greenwood divinities, who, at certain times of the year, were intoxicated by the odour of the meadows and the sap of the woods. If some day we were to have her complete correspondence given to us, I should not be surprised if many people preferred it to her letters to Musset. In the first place, it is not spoiled by that preoccupation which the Venice lovers had, of writing literature. Mingled with the accents of sincere passion, we do not find extraordinary conceptions of paradoxical metaphysics. It is Nature which speaks in these letters, and for that very reason they are none the less sorrowful. They, too, tell us of a veritable martyrdom. We can easily imagine from them that Michel was coarse, despotic, faithless and jealous. We know, too, that more than once George Sand came very near losing all patience with him, so that we can sympathize with her when she wrote to Madame d'Agoult in July, 1836: "I have had, my fill of great men (excuse the expression). . . . I prefer to see them all in Plutarch, as they would not then cause me any suffering on the human side. May they all be carved in marble or cast in bronze, but may I hear no more about them!" _Amen_.