George Sand lived like a healthy bourgeoise to the age of seventy-two; in her later years she retired to the country, and the fires of free love died, and she wrote novels about the peasants in her neighborhood. They are very human and simple, and make standard reading for French courses in American high schools. It is interesting to compare them with the old-style handling of the peasants in French art. Gone are the fancy pictures of beautiful young shepherds and shepherdesses in silks and satins and high-heeled slippers. Now for the first time a French artist finds it worth while to go out among the working people of the fields, and observe the external details of their lives, and at least try to imagine their feelings. We note the same thing happening also in pictorial art; instead of the elegancies of Fragonard, we now have a peasant painter, Millet, peasant born and peasant reared, making real pictures full of real proletarian feeling. That much as least the revolution has accomplished! CHAPTER LXV MAIN STREET IN FRANCE “Eighteen years ago,” says Ogi, “a lanky, red-headed youth from Minnesota ran away from Yale University and showed up at Helicon Hall to stoke our furnace. We were never entirely sure about the furnace, but we could always count upon lively arguments on the literary side of our four-sided fireplace. Now this youth has grown up and added a new phrase to the American language--” “‘Main Street’ or ‘Babbitt’?” says Mrs. Ogi. “Recall the story of ‘Main Street.’ A young girl marries a doctor and lives with him in one of the desolate, cultureless villages of the Northwest. The novel is a long one, and the method that of minute detail; we learn everything about the little place and the people in it, their empty, sordid lives, the utter absence of vision. The girl is lonely and restless, she craves something beautiful and inspiring. She has luxurious tastes, and chafes at having to economize. She meets a handsome, attractive young man, and after many agonies of soul she takes him as her lover. In the end he leaves her; and after being heart-broken for a while she takes another lover. He also deserts her, and she is ill, in debt, and finally takes poison, and her husband, the doctor, dies of grief--” “Hold on,” says Mrs. Ogi, “you must have been reading a sequel to ‘Main Street.’ I don’t remember any of those things happening. Carol Kennicott thought she loved the other man, but she didn’t deceive her husband, she held herself back--”