There the radical ideas of modern socialism were touched. The proletariat and its misery became henceforward the subject of French poetry, though they were not observed with any naturalistic love of truth, but from the romantic standpoint of contrast. Béranger, the popular singer of _chansons_, composed his _Vieux Vagabond_, the song of the old beggar who dies in the gutter; Auguste Barbier wrote his Ode to Freedom, where _la sainte canaille_ are celebrated as immortal heroes, and with the scorn of Juvenal "lashes those who drew profit from the Revolution, those _bourgeois_ in kid gloves who watched the sanguinary street fights comfortably from the window." In 1842-43 Eugène Sue published his _Mystères de Paris_, a forbidding and nonsensical book, but one which made an extraordinary sensation, just because of the disgusting openness with which it unveiled the life of the lower strata of the people. Even the great spirits of the Romantic school began to follow the social and political strife of the age with deep emotion and close sympathy. Already in the course of the thirties socialistic ideas forced their way into the Romantic school from every side. Their source was Saint Simon, whose doctrines first found a wide circulation under Louis Philippe. According to Saint Simon, the task of the new Christianity consisted in improving as quickly as possible the fate of the class which was at once the poorest and the most numerous. His pupils regarded him as the Messiah of the new era, and went forth into the world as his disciples. George Sand, the boldest feminine genius in the literature of the world, mastered these seething ideas and founded the artisan novel in her _Compagnon du Tour de France_. It is the first book with a real love of the people--the people as they actually are, those who drink and commit deeds of violence as well as those who work and make mental progress. In her periodical, _L'Éclaireur de l'Indre_, she pleads the cause both of the artisan in great towns and of the rustic labourer; in 1844 she declared herself as a Socialist, without qualification, in her great essay _Politics and Socialism_, and she brought out her celebrated _Letters to the People_ in 1848.