This is perhaps the only occasion on which George Sand writes as if she owed anything to Alfred de Musset in her capacity as authoress.[4] I have already indicated the nature of his influence upon her. It was purely critical; it sharpened her aesthetic sense. His artistic method was powerless to affect her. To any direct influence upon her style George Sand was completely unreceptive. Madame Girardin's witty hit at her: "It is especially when the works of women authors are in question that we may say with Buffon, 'Le style, c'est l'homme,'" is as incorrect as it is amusing. For though it is, almost without exception, the case that each of George Sand's most important novels bears marks of the influence of a different man, yet the influence never extends to the style. Again and again she makes herself the organ of another's ideas, but never does she imitate another's style. Her talent was too independent for this, and she was moreover too little of the artist. She who was so silent, and, when she did speak, so laconic, was the improvisatrice when she wrote. She let her pen run over the paper without making preparatory studies, without thought of models, without conscious artistic aim; she never treated a given theme, or elaborated and completed a stylistic suggestion thrown out by another;--in short, she submitted to none of the conditions upon which purely technical progress in any art depends. In this she forms a marked contrast to De Musset. He was, at first, inspired by a spirit of revolt against conventions and rules in art, which was always incomprehensible to her. He intentionally spoiled the rhymes in his first poems, to make sure of annoying the Classicists. (In the first sketch of _L'Andalouse_, the Marchioness was called Amaémoni, which in French rhymes correctly with "bruni," but in the final version she received the name of Amaégui, which hardly rhymes.) When his creative capacity was on the wane, he calmly employed seven pages of Carmontelle's Proverbe, _Le Distrait_, in the manufacture of his weak little comedy, _On ne saurait penser à tout_. In his best period he was a master of the art of delicate plagiarism. I may mention, as an example, that I have found in the Prince de Ligne's works his stylistic model for the beautiful poem, "Après une lecture," quoted in a previous chapter.[5] A similar discovery in connection with George Sand would be an impossibility. She is incapable of polishing the rough diamonds of others into brilliants for the adornment of her own muse; she presents us that muse clad in simple white, with a wild flower in her hair.