It is quite evident, whatever may be said to the contrary, that Saint-Simonism was a beneficent influence in George Sand's life. It produced tranquillity after the fit of despair which dictated _Lelia_; it gave her a faith which was never afterwards disturbed, and a cause to work and fight for. She had an observant eye for all that was going on around her; and towards the close of the Thirties it was evident that the French working classes were in a state of violent ferment. At that period the slow transformation of France from an almost exclusively agricultural country to one of the chief manufacturing countries was already an accomplished fact. It was now no longer only the poverty of the peasants which called for a remedy, but also, and even more urgently, the poverty and discontent of the ever-increasing proletariat population of the great manufacturing and commercial towns. Like almost all the other French democratic writers, George Sand turned her attention to the working people of the towns, their hard struggle for existence, their remarkable intelligence, their social and political ideas. Saint-Simonism had originally appealed to her and aroused her enthusiasm by its condemnation of the relations between the sexes upheld by the conventions of existing society; it denned as truths to be proclaimed and championed the ideas which were most precious to her--that there is no beauty or value in marriage except when it is a voluntary union; and that mayor, witnesses, and priest cannot invest it with greater sacredness than do love and conscience. Now Saint-Simonism gave a more thoughtful and more definite character to her love of the people. Among the men of the working classes she discovered more unselfishness and manliness than among those of the middle classes; it began to seem to her as if the vices of the male sex which she had condemned with such severity in her first novels were in reality more the vices of a class than of the whole sex; and her love of the working class in conjunction with the innate idealism of her nature led her to see and represent the working man from an ideal point of view. She produced a series of novels in which the old contrast between two men of the same class, one unselfish and the other a hardened egotist, was superseded by the contrast between the idealised representative of the working classes and a more or less egotistical and slavishly conventional representative of the upper or middle classes. The most interesting books of this series are the two written about 1840--_Horace_, the refusal to accept which produced a temporary disagreement between George Sand and the _Revue des deux Mondes_, and _Le Compagnon du Tour de France_, a genuine labour-question novel, which in its innocence and simple purity presents a striking contrast to the glaringly coloured stories of a socialistic and democratic tendency published a few years later by Eugène Sue.