The unhappy generation of the homeless and exiled, the young and yet old, the believers who were at the same time unbelievers, to which Constant belongs, has its type in Adolphe, who, blasé in thought, though a mere child in years and experience, seeks in love strong sensations, violent emotion, knowledge of life, of passion, and of the heart of woman, difficulties and dangers to overcome--in a word, mastery over woman. The young girl brought up under her mother's eye in an ordinary middle-class home does not attract him; it would not be a sufficient triumph to master her. But with the superiority of years and experience on the woman's side, the feeling and the relation change character. The passion uniting two such dissimilar beings is something less ordinary, less conventional, less happy, but more transient than the love which we know as a social power. It is no longer the prelude to a bourgeois wedding. It seems to come into existence when, under certain conditions, the paths of two beings of a certain complex type cross or intersect each other; but the result is not harmony. It is not until considerably later that this new type of woman really takes possession of French literature. Saint Simon, the Revolution of July, and George Sand had to pave the way--Saint Simon with his doctrine of the emancipation of woman, and his theory that humanity can only be perfected in man and woman together, not in man alone; the Revolution of July by destroying many of the arbitrary restrictions to which woman had been subjected; and George Sand by carrying on, almost alone, the same struggle for the liberation of woman, which for man had been begun by the great Revolution. The fact that the type, and with it the conflict of woman with society, appears in literature so long before George Sand, is to be explained by the circumstance that Eléonore is modelled from the strongest woman of the day, the woman who ventured to oppose Napoleon himself--Mme. de Staël.