most shameful licentiousness." It was on account of these accusations, accusations which he, Monsieur Dudevant's counsel, asserted to be fully justified, that George Sand was once more suing for a separation. His eloquence reached its climax in the outburst: "It is, then, your opinion, Madame, that a woman has the right, if she chooses, to squander the half of a fortune, to embitter her husband's life, and to adopt, when she feels inclined to indulge still more freely in the most unbridled excesses, the convenient and simple plan of bringing against him in the court of justice a purely fictitious accusation of revolting conduct!" It must have been hard for the proud woman to sit, the observed of all observers, listening to this besmirching of her name and fame. It cannot have afforded her much consolation that her counsel and friend, Michel de Bourges, immediately afterwards extolled her as a genius, and produced a profound impression by reading remarkably beautiful passages from her letters and recounting all the insulting words and brutal actions of which her husband had been guilty towards her. She was accustomed to see her novels reviled in the newspapers as so many shameless defences of immorality, but to hear her private life maligned in this style was a new experience. These public proceedings which terminated her married life, give us, however, as it were, a retrospective view of that life, and explain the indignation which finds its first expression in _Indiana, Valentine, Lélia_, and _Jacques_. They are books, these, which possess little literary interest for the reader of to-day: the characters are vague idealisations; the plots are improbable, as in _Indiana_, or unreal, as in _Lélia_ and _Jacques_; the harmonious sonority of her style does not save the author from the reproach of frequent lapses into magniloquence; in the letters and monologues she is often the poetical sermoniser. And yet there is a fire in these works of George Sand's youth which gives light and warmth to this day; they struck a note which will go on sounding for ages. They emit both a wail and a war-cry, and where they penetrate they carry with them germs of feelings and thoughts, the growth of which this age has succeeded in checking, but which in the future will unfold and spread with a luxuriant vigour of which we can only form a faint conception.