George Sand, whose first novels are the expression of the same movement in France which _Lucinde_ inaugurates in Germany, says, by the mouth of the principal characters in _Jacques_ and _Lucrezia Floriani_: "Paul and Virginia were able to love each other steadily and undisturbedly; for they were children brought up by the same mother. Our surroundings have been too utterly unlike.... If two beings are to understand each other always, and to be united by an unchangeable love, their characters as children must have been formed by a similar education, they must have the same beliefs, the same turn of mind, even the same manners and habits. But we, the distressed offspring of a turbulent and corrupt society, which behaves to her disunited children like a stepmother, and is more cruel in her periods of savagery than actual savages are, how can we wonder, after such great outward divisions, at the perpetual divisions of hearts and the impossibility of inward harmony." Obviously George Sand is considerably less persuaded than Schleiermacher of the probability or possibility of the individual's meeting with that "right one," love for whom perfects. Jacques says: "I am still persuaded that marriage is one of the most barbarous institutions of society. I doubt not that it will be abolished when the human race makes further progress towards justice and reason; a more human and not less sacred tie will take its place and will ensure the well-being of the children without fettering the freedom of the parents. But as yet men are too barbarous and women too cowardly to demand a nobler law than the iron one by which they are now ruled. Beings destitute of conscience and virtue need heavy chains. The improvements of which some generous spirits dream, cannot be realised in such an age as ours; these spirits forget that they are a hundred years in advance of their contemporaries, and that before they change the law, they must change mankind." Jacques says to his bride on their wedding day: "Society is about to dictate an oath to you. You are about to swear to be faithful and obedient to me, that is to say, never to love any one but me, and to obey me in all things. One of these vows is an absurdity, the other a disgrace." The idea expressed by George Sand in all these books is, that to preserve the outward semblance of love, by caresses, &c., after it has ceased to exist, is what constitutes real immorality in love. Jacques says: "I have never forced my imagination to rekindle or reanimate a feeling in my soul which I no longer found there. I have never looked upon love as a duty, constancy as a rôle. When I have felt that love was extinguished in my soul I have said so, without being either ashamed or conscience-stricken." And _Lucrezia Floriani_ says, still more emphatically: "Not one of all the passions to which I have yielded naively and blindly, seemed to me so guilty as the one which I was endeavouring, contrary to my feeling, to make lasting."